Few issues today are more important in the United States than improving education. In Education in the Twenty-first Century (Hoover Institution Press, 2002), editor and Hoover fellow Edward P. Lazear brings together a range of Hoover scholars to address this crucial issue.
“What matters most to our society is this simple maxim: the child comes first; use what works and throw out what fails the child,” writes Hoover distinguished fellow George P. Shultz in his foreword to the volume. “This simple maxim presents a compelling measure of the need for change, for to follow it would amount to a revolution!”
Nine fellows, some of the most respected experts in the field of education reform, contribute their expertise, evidence, and insights. Scholars such as Lazear, Shultz, Thomas Sowell, and Shelby Steele discuss a range of areas that include such widely debated topics as national exams, accountability, performance, and school funding.
Race-relations expert Shelby Steele contributes a chapter on educating black students. “The problems surrounding the education of America’s black youth are presumed to follow from either racism or poverty or both,” he writes. “But I believe that something very different from these two familiar difficulties is undermining [their] academic development.”
Paul Romer reveals why vouchers have not been politically successful despite most economists’ belief that they are an efficient way to fund schooling. Thomas Sowell shows how the political and public school establishments have ignored the evidence on the education of minority children with increasingly negative consequences. Jennifer Roback Morse explains how schools undermine the parent-child relationship, and outlines the policy changes that could reverse this trend.
Throughout the book, the contributors detail the importance of education to both the individual and society as a whole, shedding light on what education does, on various ways to structure education, on lessons that can be learned from the past, and on how much can be accomplished in the future.
About the Authors
Editor Edward P. Lazear, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution since 1985, is also the Jack Steele Parker Professor of Human Resources, Management and Economics at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. Lazear has published five books and over one hundred papers, and is the current and founding editor of the Journal of Labor Economics. His research is currently supported by the National Science Foundation.
Contributors Robert J. Barro, Gary S. Becker, Robert E. Hall, Jennifer Roback Morse, Paul M. Romer, George P. Shultz, Thomas Sowell, and Shelby Steele are fellows at the Hoover Institution.
The Hoover Institution, founded at Stanford University in 1919 by Herbert Hoover, who went on to become the 31st president of the United States, is an interdisciplinary research center for advanced study on domestic public policy and international affairs.
