As we near our upcoming event The Future of Education, we look at the need to better fund K-12 education, reprioritizing skills and tech to uplift underserved communities.

“Higher education has become a perpetual motion machine of inequality.”

This was the remark Sam Harris made in the beginning of “The Failure of Meritocracy” podcast #205 wherein he interviews Daniel Markovitz / Guido Calabresi Professor of Law at Yale Law School.

In the 1980s, the cost to attend an in-state college for four years was about $8,000 per year(1). Now, try to do it for less than $20,000 per year. If you have wealthy parents, $100,000+ is the price tag for out-of-state tuition plus room and board. College education is increasing eight times faster than wages (2).

Graphic from Average Cost of Tuition & Fees 1989-2020 — *Graphic from* *Average Cost of Tuition & Fees 1989-2020*

But before you start a pitchfork protest against colleges, think again. Lowering the college tuition costs, or providing better books and computers is not the only answer. Research by Esther Duflo, 2019 Nobel Prize-winning economist, revealed the importance of K-12 education. In fact, paying educators more money had the highest result (3).

Markovitz believes we should reprioritize our focus in early education. He suggests that we must massively increase investment in K-12 education and shrink the gap between what the rich invest in their children versus everyone else. Markovitz points out the massive inequality in the U.S. K-12 education investment.

“A poor public school in America spends $8,000-10,000 per pupil per year,” sites Markovitz. “A middle class public school spends maybe $12,000-15,000 per pupil per year. A really rich public school in a town like Scarsdale New York where the median household income is over $200,000 per year, pay $30,000 per pupil per year. And the richest and fanciest private schools in America... spend over $75,000 per pupil per year.”

“There is quite diversity in funding to each K-12 school district” explains Jason Borgen, CTO of Santa Cruz Office of Education. “For example, basic aide districts that rely solely on property tax can receive close to double of what other districts receive.creating greater inequities.” (4)

“A system of stratification and exclusion runs through the central elite systems of schools in which those institutions exclude middle and working class families and children,” Markovitz points out. “Jobs that pay the highest compensation, such as elite law firms, investment banks, management and specialist doctors, almost all require some version of prior elite education. Success, therefore, requires enormous amounts of education and financial support early in life and well into adulthood”.

Investing early in education and job skills will have the biggest benefit to our society. We see Digital NEST doing this with great success. Digital NEST is training youth for entry-level-but-career-track jobs that can be competed for and obtained without a college degree.

“We're teaching our youth to avoid ridiculous amounts of student debt,” explains Steve Bean Deputy Director, Digital NEST. “by establishing their value to an employer and leveraging that relationship into promotions and employer support for the post-secondary education and training for the positions that these employers need to fill that will be promotions for our young professionals.” Competence skills include tech tools (e.g., Google Docs, MS Office, Zoom, etc),video production, training, non-coding or data science. It includes an entire career training pathway in "soft skills" called People, Projects & Leadership. Many of these jobs are immune to pandemics(5).

Markovitz looks at the empirical question of how much spending is needed in K-12 before the quality of education flattens out. The gap in spending between poor public school district and a wealthy is $60,000 per pupil per year: 15x. He believes by spending more public money K-12 education, America could credibly close the poor middle class gap.

Now throw in a new wrench in the works: the recent necessity for online learning.

At UC Santa Cruz, Professors Su-hua Wang and Rebecca Covarrubias with graduate student Sam Basch are conducting research to address the intensified issue of education inequality, as a result of COVID-19, by studying undergraduate students’ lived experiment with online learning. Their project focuses on underserved students, including first-generation students, low-income students and students from underrepresented backgrounds. By surveying and interviewing students, they are finding out the challenges and resilience that are demonstrated in the students’ response to distance learning and changes in their purpose or goal for higher education.

Guided by the strengths-based approach to understand how students learn best with a sustained purpose of learning, Wang and colleagues are observing diverse ways in how UCSC undergraduate students adapted to online learning-- through support systems such as friends whom they may still share an apartment with, parents and family members whom they may now live with, and professors--many of them taught the course online for the first time. Evidence-based research such as this project is needed to provide crucial information from learners’ perspectives (what worked, what didn’t, and why?) and will point to actionable steps for post-pandemic education.

Wang mentioned that a key purpose of this research project is identifying ways to leverage students’ strengths for learning. Underserved students thrive in learning that is culturally relevant, which can be established through students’ interaction and collaboration with others in and out of the classroom. The support system with peers and friends creates a community where students demonstrate grit through unprecedented times. Amid COVID-19, much of this has been built through digital platforms that are not designed for such purposes. To address the issue, we must learn from students about the best ways of creating a learning community with a digital infrastructure. Wang and colleagues expect to produce actionable findings on how students learn, about best practices of teaching in difficult times and on how to improve the digital infrastructure for inclusive learning. Wang and colleagues hope to secure funding, and with a larger partnership, to implement the practices identified from this research study in subsequent courses (for example, in the summer) to apply the results across course subjects and instructors.

More so, much more effort and time must be spent educating our educators in new trends in learning theories, using interactive instructional technologies, and understanding traits of our new generations. Our educators today were prepared to teach in a 100% brick and mortar school by former educators who also worked in Brick and Mortar schools -- the paradigm of teaching and learning will not be the same for quite awhile, and more so, what we are preparing students far has changed -- educators need time to brainstorm, iterate, test, and refine (similar to engineering design processes) to increase their effectiveness. We need to start thinking of our teachers as Eduneers that are building our future workforce! This can only happen if time and increased funds to go towards teacher collaborations, site visitations, professional learning events, and planning time. The County Office of Education is working to support all these efforts through their distance learning website, online professional development (including a Global Leadership Summit focused on Distance Learning) and ongoing community communication to ensure there are foundational mindsets developed around these reform efforts.

Local ed tech company Levered Learning is actively working toward equity and access in elementary math.

“Distance learning is affecting Black and Latino populations more severely,” reveals Joshua Bradley, Co-Founder of Levered Learning. “Our work with schools moving to remote has had exactly the opposite effect as most of our schools are Title I, in low-income areas, with high percentages of English Learner students, and they are seeing far less disruption and in some cases even more learning from kids at home.”

Bean believes we have an opportunity to leapfrog into a post-industrial education model that is more equitable. “The industrial model of education was consciously designed to sort adolescents into their future workplace roles in a factory-driven economy. One promise of digital learning is the re-establishment of real learning communities driven by real tasks - something the one-room schoolhouse, which modern industrial education painted as crude and inferior, excelled at.”

Markovitz believes there are strong forces of change in place from the recent health crisis and realization of the value of essential workers and of online education, to generation protesting police violence and institutionalized racism. He believes it is not about assessing blame on any one individual. It is an argument about structures and systems.

“Individual action is not the solution here,” explains Markovitz. “The solution is coordinated public policy. In that sense, the thing to do is agitate politically for a better set of educational policies, for a fairer tax system.”

It is about change. It’s about “We Must Do Better.”

Attend our webinar The Future of Education on June 17, 2020

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