Economic growth and student achievement

New research by Dean T. Jamison, Eliot A. Jamison, Ludger Woessman and Eric Hanushek demonstrates a relationship between economic growth and student achievement. The researchers examined student test scores across 12 international tests for 50 countries since 1964. They found that improving the cognitive skills of students has a robust impact on growing a nation’s economy.

Interestingly, the research found no relationship between economic growth and the amount of time a student spends in school. The reason is simple. Spending additional years in a school system where students are not achieving to begin with will not produce results. This is why pre-K and kindergarten programs are doomed to fail. (Health and Human Services already released a report showing the pre-K Head Start program has done virtually nothing to improve student achievement in the long run.)

The research also noted that a high-quality public education has the biggest effects on open economies. This is one reason why the United States has remained a global economic powerhouse, despite having one of the worst systems of public education among developed countries.

But what would have happened had the United States become a top education performer in math and science, as promised by the Governors Association in 1989? The researchers found that the U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) would have grown by an additional 4.5 percent. By 2015 the GDP growth would have been large enough to pay for all K-12 expenditures across the nation. Meaning: Public education would finally produce the student achievement necessary to pay for itself.



By 2064, U.S. GDP would grow another 40 percent beyond its current projections. Of course, this assumes the United States retains a relatively free economy — another, more recent, sore spot for our country.