Education Education, and Education!

Nearly 30 years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. declared that the challenge for schools is "to teach so well that family background is no longer an issue." By increasing the rewards for education, globalization has added urgency to King's argument, but globalization paradoxically creates a temptation to ignore him, too. By driving down the cost of tradable goods such as cars and DVD players, it leaves untradable ones such as education looking expensive. There's a tendency for policymakers to say that education spending is growing a bit faster than inflation -- isn't that generous enough? But inflation is low partly because globalization brings us goods from cheap foreign suppliers. The economic challenge posed by those cheap foreign suppliers is precisely the reason we should invest more in our children.