Breakout: Pioneers of the Future, Prison Guards of the Past, and the Epic Battle That Will Decide America's Fate

by Newt Gingrich

  Better-educated adults also face the imperative to learn new skills when their old jobs go away and they have to change careers. Indeed, the nature of work has been changing in fundamental ways. Peter Drucker, who began writing about this change fifty years ago, has observed that the level of education needed to rise from a low-paying job to a higher-paying one is increasing. It was clear as early as the 1960s that we needed an entirely new approach to adult learning if large numbers of workers were not to become obsolete in their thirties and forties. Yet we still have no system of lifelong learning to help workers update their skills. There is an enormous gap between the learning system we need and the expensive, obsolete, inconvenient, and inefficient system of bureaucratic education we are currently stuck with. We have to establish the principle that learning never ends, that workers need to pursue part-time learning their entire lives.

  The current education system also lets down new immigrants, whose opportunities are drastically limited if they don’t become proficient in English.

  Fortunately, pioneers like Salman Khan are preparing the breakout in learning that could smash one of the greatest barriers to a breakout from poverty. We have already seen how Khan’s approach to education can save students who have fallen far behind.13 Learning science and technology could put many poor Americans on a trajectory for success. Within a few years, every poor person in America who wants it could have access to Khan Academy and other innovative learning materials. No longer will they be prisoners of failing schools.

  The smartphone is becoming so common that we take it for granted. Even many poor Americans have an iPhone or an Android device on which they can run apps, watch videos, and communicate with people around the world. And guess what? The sophisticated adaptive learning software that Bror Saxberg describes could run on these devices.

  Smartphones can bridge the information gap and empower the poor with materials tailored for their needs and abilities. They can emphasize audio and video over print, and they can provide the short, practical building blocks of learning that Khan Academy has shown to be so effective. Apps like Duolingo already teach foreign languages on the iPad for free. We need Duolingo for English literacy.

  The information gap—previously an unbridgeable chasm—has often separated the poor from the prosperous. Now we have the ability to bridge that gap with an inexpensive device you can hold in your hand. A thousand revolutions could not yield as much progress for the poor as the iPhone might do.

  Indeed, we have not yet thought through the implications of the smartphone for public policy. The rapid spread of these sophisticated devices has the potential to solve many big problems at no cost to the government.

  A Change in Attitude

  There is no doubt that learning is essential to helping people leave poverty. But they need to learn about more than mathematics or Microsoft Excel. People need to learn the right attitudes and habits. In fact, these skills are probably more important to success than 80 percent of what students learn in school. Habituation to work and the right attitudes are one of the education system’s primary goals.

  The next great requirement for a breakout from poverty, then, is to change the destructive attitudes and habits that hold so many people back. We have seen the power of the right attitude in the story of Cedric Jennings. We will see it in chapter twelve in the story of Congresswoman Tammy Duckworth. The right attitude and habits can carry people a long way. As Marvin Olasky points out in The Tragedy of American Compassion, the principle of helping the poor learn sound habits was at the heart of every nineteenth-century reformer’s agenda.

  Last year I met one of the world’s leading poverty fighters. I was shocked when he said to me, “When people tell me they’re unemployed, I say, ‘Well, then why haven’t you created a job?’” Perhaps not everyone can be an entrepreneur, but with ninety-nine weeks of unemployment compensation, they could obtain an associate’s degree (or, with inexpensive online options, a bachelor’s or even a master’s degree). Those two years are more than enough time to start a business of your own. But how many think about long-term unemployment this way?

  We know that graduates of self-sufficiency programs that focus on job training and on skills like budgeting and saving are more likely to be employed and have higher incomes.14 The same learning technology that teaches reading and math could one day teach these important life skills as well, helping people acquire the habits and attitudes they need to leave poverty. Sebastian Thrun’s Udacity already has a free online course called “How to Build a Startup,” walking would-be entrepreneurs through questions like “How do you make your money?” and “How do you get, keep, and grow customers?”

  What if this training could be delivered in a highly personalized way through smartphone apps designed specifically to help the poor? The unemployed could learn how they might earn money, get a job, or start a business of their own. They could learn about saving money and creating a budget. In short, online programs might help the poor become self-sufficient, leaving poverty for opportunity. Such programs might even include online mentors, volunteers who have made it out of poverty themselves, like the “learning coaches” who help Khan Academy students through their lessons.

  Some people living in dependency have hours of idle time each week. We could soon ask anyone receiving public assistance to complete a training program in employment or life skills. A system of continuous learning and assessment might eventually include automated incentives to help people work their way through the programs, perhaps small amounts of cash. If someone learning to read or to get a job received a small but immediate cash reward as she completed each step, her focus on learning would improve dramatically.

  As a congressman from Georgia in 1990, 1 ran an experiment called Earning by Learning. We paid “at-risk” students two dollars for every book they read during the summer. Word got around, and each week a few more students joined the program. A fourth-grader named Stephanie Wynn read more books than any other student. The Wall Street Journal invited her to send in her story, which it published unaltered.15

  “Last summer I read 83 books,” she began. “I earned $166.00, $2 for every book.… I spent a lot of time this summer reading. If I hadn’t read the books, I would have been bored. I do like to swim and watch TV sometimes. But the reading time was fun.”

  Stephanie got some of her friends to start reading. “I recommended a book to my friend Jeremiah,” she wrote. “I let him take it home and read it. He said it was really good. He brought it back to me.”

  At the end of the summer, Stephanie’s school recognized her for reading the most books in the program. “All the kids were very happy to get their money,” she said. “With the money I earned I bought some new clothes and got a lot of Barbie stuff.”

  “The summer reading program is over. I am still reading. I am still reading because it is fun,” she concluded. “I think it is a good idea to give kids money for reading books. It showed me that reading was fun. It also helped bring my mom and I closer together. We had fun reading together.”

  At one time, groups in seventeen states had picked up Earning by Learning. Consider how easy an e-reader app might make such a program. It could even verify that the children read the books.

  The Welfare State Isn’t Working

  The Earning by Learning reading program was hard to sustain because its combination of personalization and financial incentives violated the ethos of the welfare bureaucracy. In order to achieve a breakout from poverty, we have to replace the welfare state with real opportunity.

  For the last fifty years, government poverty programs have made things worse. With the best of intentions, the paternalistic, patronizing, dependency-inducing model of welfare has produced illiteracy, unemployability, and hopelessness. It has weakened the poor.

  In the mid-twentieth century, the United States entered into a destructive social contract with the poor. If you are a mother and you kick the male out of the house, we will give you money. If you hav
e more children outside of marriage, we will give you more money. If you are a student and you do badly in school, we will subsidize you. If your body is imperfect, we will send you a disability check for the rest of your life, provided you don’t work full time. It is a soul-crushing deal. Practically everything we have done has made it harder to break out of poverty in America.

  From the Moynihan report of 1965 to Charles Murray’s Losing Ground in the 1980s to Marvin Olasky’s The Tragedy of American Compassion a decade later, the case against dependency is devastating. The sad reduction of citizens to clients is exactly the opposite of the American ideal, and the prison guards of the poor make it expensive to stop being a client.

  The Heritage Foundation estimates that over a trillion dollars are spent each year on what Peter Ferrara identifies as roughly two hundred federal programs designed to transfer resources to the poor. Taking a job can cost someone unemployment compensation or disability payments or earned income tax credit or Medicaid or public housing or food stamps or some combination of these and other subsidies.

  Instead of a glide path from poverty to prosperity, the welfare state has built a cliff that the poor have to climb to reach an income level where becoming independent makes financial sense. The available support is a spiderweb of dependency that can make it almost unthinkable to leave the government’s welfare system and become independent.

  Total welfare benefits today provide more than a minimum-wage job in thirty-four states and the District of Columbia, according to a recent study by the Cato Institute. In seven states and D.C., they provide more than a job paying twenty dollars an hour, and in five other states, welfare provides more than a job paying fifteen dollars an hour. In Hawaii, the study found, “a person leaving welfare for work would have to earn more than $60,590 a year to be better off.” It’s no wonder so many Americans choose dependency when, according to Cato, “In ten states and the District of Columbia, welfare pays more than the entry-level salary for a teacher in that state” and “in 38 states and the District of Columbia, welfare is more generous than the average starting salary for a secretary.”16

  The “Great Society” legislation was passed half a century ago, and the results speak for themselves. We waged war on poverty, and poverty won. The welfare-state bureaucracy cut off the bottom fifth of America from economic opportunity and independence. (And that bottom fifth has almost become the bottom quarter under the weight of a bad economy and an inadequate adult education system.) Rising became too difficult and sliding backward as a client of the welfare bureaucracy became too easy.

  The welfare industry, however, resists real change and denies any responsibility for the mess. Half the adults in Detroit can’t read, but don’t blame the bureaucracy that has spent trillions over the last generation. For decades, the prison guards have subsidized unemployability, and now these illiterate adults can’t get a job in the information age. If neighborhoods collapse under the dysfunction and everyone capable of moving leaves, don’t blame the unions that insist on trapping each successive generation in failing schools. The education system is so bad, the population so poor, and the city laws so burdensome that the only place to make money is in the underground economy. But don’t blame the prison guards for the city’s degeneration into crime and violence.

  We are dealing with human beings, so achievement needs to be rewarded and effort needs to be reinforced. If we took a third of the amount we’re spending on the poor and spent it on sensible incentives, we could begin the breakout from the welfare prison.

  The perpetuation of material poverty isn’t the only problem with the welfare state, however. It also wreaks havoc on marriage and the family. Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation puts it bluntly: “Welfare … converts the low-income working husband from a necessary breadwinner into a net financial handicap. It transformed marriage from a legal institution designed to protect and nurture children into an institution that financially penalizes nearly all low-income parents who enter into it.”

  Predictably, these terrible incentives contributed to a breakdown in the American family. As Peter Ferrara notes, only 7 percent of children were born to unmarried parents at the outset of the War on Poverty. The figure today is many times that: nearly two in five children nationwide are born to parents who are not married to each other. The numbers are starkest among African Americans, who are disproportionately poor. When the War on Poverty began, well over half of African American children were born into two-parent families. Sadly, as the welfare programs that penalized marriage began to take effect, the rate plummeted. The portion of African American children born out of wedlock rose from 28 percent in 1965 to 49 percent in 1975. By 1990 it was 65 percent. Today it is about 70 percent. White families, too, have collapsed. In 1965 the portion of Caucasian children born out of wedlock was just one in twenty-five. Today, it is one in four. Among white Americans without a high school degree, it is one-half of their children.

  This is a disaster for the poor, for it feeds the cycle of poverty. We know, says Ferrara, that poverty and having children out of wedlock are strongly linked. The poverty rate in 2010 for married couples with children was 8.8 percent, compared with 40.7 percent for unmarried mothers.17 Among African Americans, the poverty rate is 12 percent for two-parent homes. Among homes led by unwed mothers, it is nearly 50 percent.

  Children in one-parent homes are virtually sentenced to poverty. They are seven times more likely to become welfare recipients as adults, says Ferrara.

  The New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow acknowledges the perverse incentives of the welfare state: “For the poorest Americans, there are marriage penalties built into many of our welfare programs,” he writes. “As the Heritage Foundation has pointed out: ‘Marriage penalties occur in many means-tested programs, such as food stamps, public housing, Medicaid, day care and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. The welfare system should be overhauled to reduce such counterproductive incentives.’” When liberal columnists are quoting the Heritage Foundation favorably in the New York Times, you know the time has come to rethink our entire approach to helping poor Americans.18

  Corrections Reform

  Mass incarceration is decimating the poor. Blow identifies it as one of the destructive public policies that have undermined marriage and opportunity: “In the two decades preceding the Great Recession, the American prison population nearly tripled, according to the Pew Center on the States. And make no mistake: mass incarceration rips at the fabric of families and whole communities.”19

  We need a profound rethinking of our corrections system in general and our prisons in particular. Chuck Colson’s courageous founding of Prison Fellowship marked a resurgence of serious conservative thought about prison reform, and I have been working for years with his successor, Pat Nolan, on rethinking incarceration. It is critical to the future of a large part of our population, and of the African American community in particular, that we correct policies that turn first-time offenders into hardened criminals. We can do better. We owe it to America to do better.

  One out of every thirty-one Americans is under correctional supervision.20 This is the highest rate of any developed country. One-quarter of the world’s prisoners are incarcerated in the United States. The link to poverty is obvious.

  There is a striking correlation between the collapse of education for the poor and incarceration. Seventy percent of prisoners rank in the lowest two levels of reading ability, according to the National Institute for Literacy.21 The Annie E. Casey Foundation found that “ten to fifteen percent of children with serious reading problems will drop out of high school, and about half of youth with criminal records or with a history of substance abuse have reading problems.”22 Many studies have shown that prisoners who obtain a GED while incarcerated are substantially less likely to return to prison than those who do not.23

  The picture that emerges is of a terrible nexus—poverty, dependency, a failing education system, a destructive culture in which most children a
re born to unwed mothers, crime, and finally, prison—each malady reinforcing the others.

  The current system is a human, social, and financial disaster. We lock up far too many nonviolent people. Our prisons are holding facilities often controlled by the criminals. Too many first-time prisoners learn how to be a criminal rather than how to read. Our recidivism rate (people going back to jail) is tragically high, over 60 percent.24 The corrections system is not correcting.

  Breakthroughs in technology suggest three innovative ways of dealing with offenders. The first step is obvious: Every prisoner in America should spend several hours a day working through Khan Academy or another free online learning system that measures his progress. When he has finished his secondary education, he should move on to programs like Udacity and Kaplan and start working on college courses for free. He should simultaneously take online classes that teach him how to return to society—and stay there—as a productive citizen. All privileges in prison and evaluations for parole should be tied to cooperation and achievement in such a system.

  Even a decade ago, providing this level of education to prisoners would have been prohibitively expensive, but today it is free. Taxpayers should not pay for people to sit in prison and do nothing when we know that if they learn something, they will be less likely to return. An online education will reassure potential employers that someone improved in prison. If we can make convicts pick up trash on the side of the highway, we can make them complete every lesson on Khan Academy.

  Second, we should replace prison with fines and electronically monitored parole for many nonviolent offenders so they can continue to work, keep their families together, and avoid learning from hardened criminals. We can track people precisely with GPS and establish where they are permitted to go, and even (with video) what they are permitted to do. For many nonviolent offenders, this would be a more productive, humane, and cost-effective form of correction than prison. For those who do go to jail, we should use similar electronic controls to take the prisons back from the intractable convicts who dominate them.