OPINION: Educating a quality workforce begins at home

Michael Hicks, Ph.D., director Bureau of Business Research, Ball State University

One thing that virtually every bit of serious research on education has revealed is that parents play the biggest role in educational outcomes.  My own work in this area found that more than 90 percent of the differences in regional educational attainment can be attributed solely to the educational history of parents.  Families play a far bigger role in educational success than any differences that occur across schools.  So, what then does this mean for public policy?  

Last week I described the fate of ten Indiana high school students.  Whether this was viewed as good or bad news depends wholly upon what levels of economic self-sufficiency are appropriate in a mature, free and prosperous society.  As a reminder, I revealed that more than a third of our current high school kids won't be economically self sufficient throughout their life (and by this I don't mean childhood or old age, I mean throughout a life).  The rest of us support them in a big alphabet soup of programs and myriad private sector initiatives.  Low educational attainment causes economic dependency.  How is it that we spend over $100,000 on each kid to get a high school degree, and it only pays off for a little more than half the kids?    

Government cannot fix families.  It can hold schools accountable for high teaching standards, end social promotion and force an effective curriculum.  But, it isn't clear that this will help the kids with families that don't care and the cost to the rest of us might be too high.  The best solutions are also some of the toughest.    

About half our kids go to college.  Despite all the rhetoric about skyrocketing college costs, a world class education can be had anywhere in America for about the price of cell phone service and cable TV each year.  Further, when viewed as the investment it is, college education pays at almost any price.  There are plenty policy options to be aimed at higher education, but fixing what is already best in the world is only a policy priority for those trying to buy upper middle class votes.   

There is precious little that state and federal policy can do to end high school drop-outs.  We cannot fix the drug and pregnancy epidemics with legislation.  The remedies for these problems happen in homes, sports fields and churches, not the general assembly.