Mmm . . . Socialism

I’m a bit surprised to learn that Education Secretary Margaret Spellings was ringing the alarm bells about the state of American schools by saying that we’re “behind Denmark and Finland” in terms of the percent of younger working-age adults with post-secondary degrees.

Countries like Denmark and Finland are basically poster children for the interrelatedness of social policy concerns, something conservatives are usually keen to deny preferring instead to believe that if we just squeezed teachers harder the schools would be great. But the child poverty rate in Denmark is 2.4 percent and in Finland it’s 2.8 percent. In the United States it’s 21.9 percent. And of course poor children do substantially worse in school than do non-poor children. If we saw a 90 percent drop in the child poverty rate, our educational attainment figures would skyrocket even absent any changes whatsoever in the educational system.

That’s not all there is to know about education in Denmark or Finland, nor is it to say that there’s nothing we can do to improve educational outcomes by reforming the school system, but I do think it’s almost certainly the case that if we ultimately want outcomes as good as they see in Denmark and Finland — and Secretary Spellings seems to think we should want that — that we would need to go far beyond changing the schools and build something more like a Northern European social democracy.