That’s what makes ““Teaching the New Basic Skills,’’ by economists Richard Murnane and Frank Levy, such an important book. Murnane, who teaches at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, and Levy, who’s at MIT, are best known for carefully dissecting the causes of America’s slow income growth and rising inequality. Remember all those stories about the wage gap? That’s Murnane and Levy. But instead of bewailing the problem, Murnane and Levy have turned their research into a practical guide for citizens who are mystified by the information economy. If you worry whether your local schools are preparing kids for good jobs at good wages, this is the book to read.
The underlying story is familiar enough. Workers whose education ended with high school are suffering sharp drops in real wages. That fact, Murnane and Levy say, has led millions of kids to make the hugely expensive mistake of going to college. Yes, college grads earn more, but almost all of that earnings increase can be predicted from a person’s math test scores as a high-school senior. They overstate the case a bit; you can’t become a big-ticket biochemist without a B.A. But Murnane and Levy assert that there are plenty of middle-class jobs available to high-school grads who skip college–if they’ve learned the right stuff.
Like what? For Murnane and Levy, ““basic skills’’ mean far more than literacy, numeracy and knowledge of Western culture’s 100 greatest hits. After studying how a host of companies do their hiring, they conclude that memorizing spelling lists and math tables doesn’t make a young person employable. Workers need to be able to apply English and math to solve practical problems. And when it comes to succeeding on the job, initiative, flexibility and teamwork belong right up there with reading, writing and math. By pushing ““hard’’ skills alone, they say, ““Many of today’s schools continue to educate children for an economy that no longer exists.''
Murnane and Levy don’t refight the old battles over school choice and statewide performance standards. Instead, they offer a startlingly simple suggestion. Each school should evaluate itself as a business might–not with internal measures such as test scores but by looking at how its products fare in the marketplace. The key question: where are the children who graduated from this school two years ago? If they’re not succeeding in their current setting, something is seriously wrong. Drawing on examples like ProTech, a Boston program that combines apprenticeships with a tough curriculum, they show how schools can analyze their own shortcomings and use that information to enlist teachers and parents in a process of change. Schools, unlike businesses, almost never look at how customers value their products. Unless they do, Murnane and Levy argue convincing- ly, advocates of school reform are just shooting in the dark.
