In chapter 4 of Poor Economics, the authors evaluate the idea of an education poverty trap. The authors go on to show how education varies wildly across the developing world. For example, poor nations in Africa attempt to improve education by increasing the availability of schooling, yet this does not seem to improve education. This is used as a lead-in to highlight two opposing views on the education debate: supply-side and demand-side. Supply-siders would state that the issue lies on the supply of education, so governments need to provide better quality education in the form of better teachers, schools, and the availability of all these education resources. Demand-siders differ in that parents would demand better education if there was an actual incentive for better education (i.e. higher-paying jobs).
In a recent blog in the Huffington Post, Is Education the Way Out of the Poverty Trap?, Dan Haesler takes the supply-side view while discussing the education state of poverty-stricken children in Australia. The post makes use of statistics mainly as lead-ins to discuss its ideology of how to fix the problem. For example, the first meaningful statistic is used to show the level of child-poverty in Australia, at about 12% (which is 12% of Australian children who live in a house where the family income is half the median wage). It then goes on to cite external research that shows how socioeconomically deprived boys disengage from the public education system at about 7 or 8 years of age. What the article does not do, which I would like to see more of, is to attempt to give meaningful statistics related to possible implementations of what the author suggests to be remedies for the country's education problem. Specifically, the article mentions that better teachers are needed on whole who can actively engage students to make them interested and see the need in learning. The article's choice criticism of one of Australia's programs at helping educate deprived areas and the program Teach for America, falls short of being meaningful as the support for the author's criticism lies with his conjecture that most of the teachers in the program quit the program after two years.
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ReplyDeleteI found your article very interesting and applicable to the reading. I also agree with you that a more statistics based approach by the article's author would have been more affective.
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