Arizona children getting the education they used to need

by David Safier

Pat Kossan of the Republic wrote a very perceptive article about why states have the quality of education they do. Basically, it's about the minimum education it used to take to get a job.

The amount of attention and money a state dedicates to schools depends largely on how much education its residents need to get a good job, experts say.

In Arizona, that often hasn't been much.

Massachusetts became a leader in student achievement because its competitive job market requires candidates to be trained in research, academia, technology and medicine to be successful.

In Arizona, many residents have needed only a rapidly growing population and skills they have learned on the job to make a good living. High-school graduates, even dropouts, built successful businesses in construction, real estate, sales, retail and the trades.

"Those folks grew up in an environment of 'people magnetism,' which is the way I describe it," said Arizona State University economics professor Dennis Hoffman. "With this huge influx of people, there are plenty of ways to make a reasonably good living serving a growing population."

Now, the population wave has slowed or reversed. Arizona's construction and consumer spending has tanked.

Generals fight the last war. Arizona schools are educating barely educating people for a bygone job market. The best K-12 schools graduate college-ready students (though they could be readier than they are), cranking out just as many educated professionals as we used to need when we didn't need many educated professionals. For the rest of the children in other schools, low educational attainment and high drop out rates are fine — or they used to be fine — since Arizona had lots of jobs that didn't require advanced education.

The irony is, if we keep under-educating our children, we won't attract businesses needing educated professionals, so we'll just keep on under-educating our children. After all, why do we need all those highly educated people if we don't have jobs for them?

Around and around and around we go . . .