Education Has a Long Way to Go
Since the early 19th century, most mainstream liberals and conservatives have agreed on at least one thing: public education is the key to eradicating and preventing major social problems. Whether the concern is the lack of civic awareness among immigrants, poverty, AIDS, or obesity, public schools were regarded as the key agent of progressive change. Evidence of deficiencies in any of these areas was taken as proof of public education’s failures.
In the last quarter century, no theme has received more continuing attention than the purported failure of public education to stem America’s loss of competitiveness in the global marketplace and the gradual erosion of the middle class living standard. Neither the U.S., nor the state of Maine, can hope to remain competitive in global marketplaces without quality schools. Nonetheless even a casual perusal of recent news items suggests that attacks on schools too often divert the public and policymakers from attention to equally basic problems.
Public schools have long been celebrated as the means by which poor children can escape poverty. Schools, however, can have little impact on the health of the child entering school. The current dispute over extending the range of federal and state health care benefits to more lower-income children is not merely a battle over health care but also over educational opportunity. Children who enter a school with undiagnosed vision or hearing problems or with undetected lead paint poisoning are unlikely to thrive at school.
Even many of our better public schools in middle- and working-class neighborhoods do a very good job, but they still cannot assure that their best graduates will prosper under the terms of the new corporate globalization. Leading corporate executives have argued that the key to keeping and increasing the number of good jobs in this country is an educated workforce. Yet where have the best manufacturing jobs gone? As Larry Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute and Richard Rothstein, former New York Times education reporter point out in a recent issue of The American Prospect, the auto industry’s new high tech auto plants have migrated to Mexico, where workers generally have had much lower levels of education than in the Midwest.
Where manufacturing has expanded in the U.S. auto industry, it has been foreign firms operating in the U.S. south, an area that once again is not noted for excellence in its public education. The primary competitive advantage these state governments offer is longtime hostility to unions. Individual states have made short- term gains by ratcheting down corporate taxes and suppressing unions, but in the long run all workers pay a high price. Whatever the overall level of worker education, U.S. workplaces have made substantial gains in productivity, but over the last quarter century these gains have not been passed along to the workers who enabled them.
Maine and other Northeastern and Midwestern states have experienced dramatic losses in manufacturing, inflicting great hardship on middle-aged, mostly high school-educated workers. In may instances these jobs have been replaced by service sector jobs paying much lower wages. As Mishel and Rothstein point out: “There was never anything more inherently valuable in working in a factory assembly line than in changing bed linens in a hotel. What made semi-skilled manufacturing jobs desirable was that many (though not most) were protected by unions, provided pensions and health insurance, and compensated with decent wages. That today’s working class doesn’t get similar protections has nothing to do with the adequacy of its education. … Hotel jobs that pay $20 an hour, with health and pension benefits (rather than $10 an hour without benefits), typically do so because of union organizations, not because maids earned bachelor’s degrees.”
Unions are widely blamed for the loss of good working-class jobs and for prolonged economic stagnation, but it is at least as plausible to argue that their relative lack of influence in America has been a major contributor to long-term stagnation. Labor reporter David Moberg points out that more than three decades ago then United Auto Workers President Leonard Woodcock tried to persuade auto manufacturers to use their considerable political influence to lobby for an expansion of Medicare to all U.S. citizens, thereby lifting an immense cost burden from U.S. manufacturing and dramatically improving its competitiveness.
In the mid-50s, legendary UAW President Walter Reuther argued that the long-term health of the auto industry would be greatly enhanced by production of smaller and more fuel-efficient cars.
Public education, especially secondary and post-secondary education, can play an immense role in addressing these problems by encouraging broader debate on them and by fostering collaborative, problem-solving abilities among students. Productivity gains depend in large part on education, but sustaining those gains and distributing their fruit equitably require attention to equally vital issues of corporate governance. Public education, often merely because it is public, too easily becomes a scapegoat for currently untouchable arenas in our private political economy.
John Buell is a political economist who lives in Southwest Harbor. Readers may contact him at jbuell@acadia.net.
©2007 Bangor Daily News
Public high school education in America is designed to produce future fast-food cashiers and store clerks who can fill out their tax forms, and watch and believe the TV news. Quality is not a concern - mass production is.
Hoa binh
Thank You John Buell. Someone Finally Said it - succintly. And, I can tell you from Personal Experience, that this Idea of an education-based Meritocracy that we’re supposed to have here in the US of A is nothing but a stinking pile of happy Horse Shit !
Professionals with Bachelors and Masters Degrees (like me) are now being Outsourced… The Blue Collar Jobs were easy to ship overseas. Now, Friedman’s “Flat earth” Economics (Digital) are shipping the White Collar Jobs.
What’s next? Certainly, lack of education is NOT the issue here. As Buell says, it’s the rest of the Political Landscape from Union-Busting to “Free Trade” that is hollowing out My Country from Inside, and with My Tax dollars to boot.
I am Extremely “stunned” that the Professional Class here in the US has not even raised a whimper about all this. Cowards on a Salary and Pension and Medical Care paid by the Taxpayers. Yeah, I mean you Teachers, Professors, Firefighters & Police, Lawyers, Doctors, Politicians, Military, and more. They’re comin’ for you next. Karma will get you sooner than you think.
The loss of the good jobs in the U.S. has nothing to do with the unions, but with the desire of the corporate government to weaken the general population so that they would be more controllable. Education of the populace will not affect that agenda as the poor quality and expensiveness of education in the U.S. is itself intentional and is not comparable in any favorable way to that of the education delivered by poorer countries, particularly noticeable when compared to that of Cuba. To paraphrase José Martí, a people cannot be free unless they have culture.
hoa binh stated “Public high school education in America is designed to produce future fast-food cashiers and store clerks who can fill out their tax forms, and watch and believe the TV news….”
There may be some germ of truth to this statement, but I think it overstates the case. Schools must grapple with a number of problems, which present some formidable obsticles to their mission.
First, they are public, and attendance is compulsory through age 16. Therefore, the schools become ideological battlegrounds. Thus we have the spectacle of a school board requiring that education be “politically correct”; that established scientific theories be presented essentially as conjecture alongside other theories that are, in fact, conjecture; and where textbooks are vetted by faith-based focus groups who demand that all material that does not conform to their prejudices be banned from the curriculum. Want to teach history? Good luck, and watch what you say. The advent of charter schools may help to resolve this particular problem, but up until recently, instructional programs have literally been crippled by persons whose agenda was decidedly non-academic.
Second, US society has gone through tremendous changes as women have joined the work force. Schools must now take on an expanded parenting role, as well as delivering educational instruction. This creates a huge conflict whih both schools and society at large are still grappling with. Where do you draw the line regarding discipline, for example? Which parenting roles should the schools assume, and which are reserved exclusively to the parents? Is it legitimate to consume taxpayer dollars on issues that would have formerly been the exclusive perogitive of parents? Should the school day be extended to match typical parent work schedules? How should the schools deal with the emotional and behavioral problems arising from insufficient or intermittent parenting at home? These are very tough problems, and divert a substantial portion of school resources from their instructional programs.
Third, and possibly sadly, most public school systems have been forced to hire certified teachers. They do this both because of pressure from the teachers’ unions, and to protect themselves. This can mean that the teachers are not necessarily drawn from the top ranks of their college classes. Obtaining certification means devoting a substantial fraction of one’s college career to courses that are… uhh… how can I say this politely…? Let’s just say that a top-flight math or engineering major may be unable to justify sacrificing coursework in his/her major field of study to jump through those kinds of hoops. Thus many otherwise top-flight candidates — “the best and the brightest” — are excluded from the outset, and many others who do become teachers have deficient course work in their specific teaching area.
They may also have little or no other work experience, having had to prepare for teaching before they entered the work force. This creates a certain disconnect between the school environment and the outside working world that students are very quick to pick up on. Thus the teacher’s answer to the perennial question “why do we need to know this stuff, anyway?” is frequently unconvincing. And in some cases, the students may be right to ask the question.
Forth, parents in the US have traditionally been a bit stingy when it comes to school funding. Teacher salaries are therefore abysmally low in many areas, and support and resources are lacking. Teachers therefore find themselves having to fall back on “chalk-talk”, or have to kick in some fraction of their meager salaries to bridge the resource gaps. Many leave the field because their salaries are insufficient to support a family. In my view, this is totally unacceptable.
And finally, the problems inherent in our society come into the classroom with the students. Racial bigotry, for example, might start at home or in the community, but it comes to school along with the kids. And studying civics might seem a bit ludicrous when the cops just jacked up your older brother for the crime of being Black. Or Hispanic. Or Native American.
And then there’s the Board of Education! I won’t even go there because this post is already too long. Besides, I get irrational when I start thinking about it. Let’s just say that the lack of resources at the front lines isn’t due solely to parental stinginess.
So I guess hoa binh’s comment does contain a grain of truth. But I don’t think it’s due to some nefarious conspiracy so much as to the school environment being a reflection of the society that we live in.
If it’s a sad picture, maybe we need to look at ourselves first.
The very society you live in is the result of an orchestrated conspiracy, or haven’t you figured that part out yet? And there is only one place to look.
Helix - I certainly agree with all you add to the discussion. Our public high schools are given an impossible task and I in no way blame the teachers. Our country has a dysfunctional society and our public educational system reflects that. But the fact remains that education is the only thing that will lead us out of the mess we are in today.
Hoa binh
What, is that a fatalistic joke?
“Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. Enable them
to see that it is their interest to preserve peace and order, and
they will preserve them. And it requires no very high degree of
education to convince them of this. They are the only sure
reliance for the preservation of our liberty.” –Thomas Jefferson
to James Madison, 1787.
“Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with
their own government.” –Thomas Jefferson to Richard Price, 1789.
“A system of general instruction, which shall reach every
description of our citizens from the richest to the poorest, as
it was the earliest, so will it be the latest of all the public
concerns in which I shall permit myself to take an interest.”
–Thomas Jefferson to Joseph C. Cabell, 1818.
“It becomes expedient for promoting the public happiness that
those persons, whom nature has endowed with genius and virtue,
should be rendered by liberal education worthy to receive, and
able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of
their fellow citizens; and that they should be called to that
charge without regard to wealth, birth or other accidental
condition or circumstance.” –Thomas Jefferson: Diffusion of
Knowledge Bill, 1779.
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of
civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”
–Thomas Jefferson to Charles Yancey, 1816.
“No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of
freedom and happiness… Preach a crusade against ignorance;
establish and improve the law for educating the common people.
Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us
against the evils [of misgovernment].” –Thomas Jefferson to
George Wythe, 1786.
Enough said!
since1492, right you are again. Like other aspects of child-rearing, a key to quality is attention. I recall a primary education that did not require me to engage in the least, and let me slip by with minimal effort, understanding, or expectation. My real education began the day after high school ended - I assume the same for most in this country. We don’t take education seriously here. Terrible how that’s the cliche that it is. There’s a pride in ignorance that’s very powerful in America. Critical thought is unheard of to most. Directly connected, the arts are a joke much of the time (or something to be considered with such shallowness as to be offensive). If we were able to fix our education system, I feel a lot of our other troubles would just about fix themselves.
Rarely is the question asked, is our President learning?
Thanks for, finally, an article that calls into question the platitudes about public education that are repeated by pundits in the business press whose only qualification is that they attended a school at some point in their lives. When the Commander and Chief doesn’t bother to read and goes with his “gut feeling” and there are unemployed or underemployed persons with plenty of education, it’s time we quit kicking educators in the rear at the tail end of articles about America’s flagging “competitiveness”. Besides, it’s time for America to learn to cooperate instead of competing so much. If we don’t learn, we’ll all be “voted off this island” (aka this planet).
I think Thomas Jefferson was the last time we had someone intelligent in the highest office of the land who understood that an educated citizenry was the best protection against tyranny and oppresion. That’s why I added the quotes.
Dubya should be voted off the island dmgreenaz.
Nice quotes they are, dcbeltway.
jmacneil stated “The very society you live in is the result of an orchestrated conspiracy,…”
Good point.
jmacneil, in a moment of evident frustration, went on to quip “… or haven’t you figured that part out yet?”
Well… uhhh… yeah, I figured out that part about 5 seconds after Kennedy was shot, which was, what? — 44 years ago. Well, OK, maybe I wasn’t sure until about 5 seconds after the Warren Commission report came out, so it was really only 43 years ago.
But I don’t blame that on the schools. They are as much victim as co-conspirator.
Agree with most here.
The American educational system is a reflection of the political economy of the country. With the past few decades of a retreating “welfare” state, and a belief that the private sector can provide goods and services better than the public sector, educational funding has been strangled to prove that point.
I think the change began during the Reagan era, but was preceded by the consequences of the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 50s-60s. As an educated person/population is more likely to be politically involved, the neocon strategy of starving public education not only “proves” an economic point, but serves to ensure that dissent is minimized because people are not really that educated, despite their degree(s).
The aim is to create docility.
By not funding public education to the extent needed, the neocon’s are able to have the politically disinterested (and economically subservient) workforce it wants. By not funding liberal arts (see the Gonsalves article from yesterday), they are able to ensure that the citizenry is not as creative (i.e. free thinking, independent, etc.) as they were when that type of curriculum was offered (the creativity of the civil rights/anti-war movements — and the comparable lack of interest from today’s college-age generation — may be related to the quality and diversity of their liberal arts education).
And because of the simultaneous push for globalization, the lack of creative talent in America does not affect productivity! The creative individual will be outsourced — it’s the best way to ensure that any counter-culture dissent fostered by their creative minds remains where the neocon wants it: in another country, preferably one with oil.
Public schools are a reflection of society as a whole. Many poiticians and business leaders rant about the problems in our education system; most have as their expertise their experience with the very system in which they were educated.
“Throwing money at the problem is not the answer” is a frequent complaint. Yet, without adequate funding, schools are supposed to deliver the “world-class” education that will enable our students to “compete in the global marketplace.”
If we are serious about that objective, then why do most schools not teach world languages until high school, and then only require two years of study? Language acquisition takes time, and is best when started at a young age. A child’s language development is 90% complete by the time they are 10 years old. We should “start them young, and keep them long.” In other words, begin other language education early in elementary school, and continue it throughout their twelve years of public education. If we did that, we would have students who are truly fluent and bilingual in at least one other language besides English. Competing in a global marketplace is greatly enhanced when you are fluent in the language of your target market.
Many schools offer Spanish, French, and German. That would be fine if this was a post-WWII world. To deal with the present and future, we should be teaching Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, Russian, Japanese and other world languages.
Look at the funding and budgets of your local school district; that will tell you a lot about their priorities, and if they “put their money where their mouth is.” Do they “walk the talk” or just pay lip service with prevailing sound bites? The federal government on average provides only between 5-8% of public education funding. Much of the funding of schools is at the state, and increasingly, the local level. This inherently leads to disparity in funds, hence disparity in the opportunities they are able to offer.
Blame the teachers? Most teachers have little to no say in how money is collected, allocated and distributed. Their hands are tied, and many spend hundreds of dollars per year out of their own meager paychecks to make up for that lack of sufficient funding. And sadly, the further away from the classroom you get, the higher your salary is likely to be.
Many students come to school with poor academic skills and are reading several grade levels below what should be a standard. This deficit gets only worse as they progress through the system.
In my district at one of the high schools, there was a reading program funded by a three-year federal grant. There were noted gains in reading levels among those students. After those three years, when the grant ran out, the program was abandoned and disbanded. Students are taking all sorts of other courses, and many are now having difficulties beacuse they do not have the reading skills needed to be successful. Imagine a district deciding not to teach reading! Yet, there is plenty of money for football. A local hospital paid one million dollars for naming rights to the stadium. Pepsi paid one million dollars for an exclusive five-year contract with the district. Do you think any of that money made its way to the students or teachers in the classroom? No!
I could go on and on, but hopefully this sheds a little light on part of the problem. Education costs money, and until politicians and those who cry foul with the system do what is needed, we will continue to have students who cannot read and write well enough to graduate from high school and be successful in college and the workplace.
No wonder we are getting our butts kicked academically by many other countries in the world. This should be a wake-up call; but a wake-up call doesn’t do any good if you keep hitting the snooze button!
Public education made me the person I am today.
Bohica
Other culture’s education systems will outperform those in the west because they learn our languages from a very young age, while we couldn’t be bothered.
The US Trade balance suffers as a result. When a US business wants to trade overseas, it will have more expenses (transaction costs) than the foreigner who oftentimes have even studied in the US (or UK).
Education is over blown. The problem is the lack of protection for workers in the U.S. In this global race to the bottom, any country that offers to do a job for less, will ultimately get the investment… regardless of their educated masses. Universal health care would definitely help, but so would a substantial increase in the minimum wage, protectionism, more unions and a shift away from the military and medical industrial complexes.
Finally affordable post secondary education (i.e. Canada, Europe or any other developed part of the world) would go a long way to solve any intellectual deficiency we are suffering from.
Education is a fine thing but will not do much good if the young people are not motivated to work hard and have a goal to shoot for. Funding is also important, but had better be used for more than larger stadiums and gyms, swimming pools, computers for every kid, exhorbitant salaries for administration and more teachers aides than kids. Young people are not all stupid, if they see their elders trying to do as little as possible for as much as they can get, they will do likewise. A good work ethic taught to children probably does more for them than all of the fancy bells and whistles that are thought necessary and mainly serve to break the taxpayers.
As far as languages go, most English speakers in the western hemisphere should be taught Spanish because that is the language of half a billion people in the emerging area which is Latin America. After being intentionally distressed for so long by the wars and divisional politics imposed by the U.S., the western hemisphere’s southern region is beginning to recover and is going to be the next regional power of significance in the world.
Everything we have today came from the creative people educated under the GI Bill after WWII—investing in “the common man’s” education and it still pays the best return there is, $14 for every $1 put in. The trouble is, education generates PROGRESS and that of course is the enemy of Capitalism….
JACK37 - Yes, an excellent point “education generates PROGRESS and that of course is the enemy”, but we might as well change the last word to “FASCISM”, as Capitalism no longer really applies, right?
Namaste
__ __ __ __ We must be the change
__ __ __ __ we wish to see in the world __ Gandhi
Educated people are harder to control. The goal of any oppressive system is to control the masses and that’s best done by making education available only to the minority elite.
Thomas J. Comer
TComer: “Educated people are harder to control. The goal of any oppressive system is to control the masses and that’s best done by making education available only to the minority elite. ”
I’m not so sure of that. A lot of the most educated people I know are completely passive about what’s going on in the US. They can afford the distractions, the gadgets, junk, billion-$ trash cinema, restaurants, etc. Why give that up? Sure, there’s plenty of discussion …but REALLY rocking the boat can only threaten personal security, and keep us from our TVs.
What might be more true, is that people will only tear themselves from their vices when things get bad enough to interrupt those vices (educated and not). Most of us are still warm in our cocoons, and we’ll stay that way as long as possible.
Helix,
Thanx for great post.
Sadly, edubiz has displaced labor as the main constituency for what remains of our progressive leadership.