Letter from an “Anti-School Teacher”

Samuel Mosley:

I recently read The Case Against Education and it explained so much of what I see. Like many new graduates who do not know exactly what they want to do but want to do something that helps people, I became a teacher right after college. I have spent the last year teaching math at a high school in Chicago. Observing how unlikely it was that the decisions we make increase our students human capital, I wondered how it could be of benefit to the students. Your book helped me answer that question.

I was swayed to believe that education is overfunded. I began to view every decision made by my boss with the question “is this to add to our students’ human capital or their signaling value?” Looking at the school from this framework, I have come to suspect that education is best understood as a game theory problem. Often, my bosses are faced with options where one option would be better for the students’ human capital and another would help the student send a more functional signal. The school I teach at invests time in signals (like AP Calculus) because it will enrich our students’ lives more than classes that would cultivate their human capital (like AP Statistics). Because every school can choose to signal, we arrive at a Nash Equilibrium where students at none of the schools acquire human capital and the decisions of schools’ to signal cancel each other out.

Assume schools can either set the average grade to B or C. Schools that set the average grade to C have higher standards so students from those schools graduate college at a higher rate. Assume also that college admissions officers do not have perfect information about the standards of each high school so they admit students from schools where a B is the the average grade more often than students from schools where a C is the average grade.