Schools as Scapegoats

[Joanne98]

Schools as Scapegoats

Our increasing inequality and our competitiveness problems are huge -- but they can't be laid at the door of our education system.

Lawrence Mishel and Richard Rothstein | October 12, 2007
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=schools_as_scapegoats

Education is the answer. but, what's the question? Simple: What's the cure for any adverse economic condition?

Is your pay stagnant or declining? Quick, get more education.

Are workers failing to share in economic growth? Too bad, they should have gained more skills.

Are you worried about jobs offshored to low-wage countries? Blame schools for workers' lack of creativity.

Is the nation failing to compete globally? Raise education standards across the board.

Education as the cure-all is everywhere around us. But this contention exaggerates the role of schools in the economy, and it conflates two issues: First, how can American firms increase productivity to improve their ability to compete in the world? And second, how have the fruits of U.S. productivity growth been distributed, and what explains rising inequality?

Education can help in the first area, although it is far from a silver bullet. As to the second, education deficits have had very little to do with the changes in the distribution of wages. Fortunately, after more than two decades, the education-as-panacea argument is being overwhelmed by contradictory evidence. Perhaps we may now be able to face more clearly the separate challenges of enhancing competitiveness and reconnecting the link between productivity growth and pay.

The modern obsession with schools as the cause and cure of our economic problems began with President Ronald Reagan's 1983 report, A Nation at Risk. Increased market shares for Japanese automobiles, German machine tools, and Korean steel, the report charged, reflected the superior education of workers in those nations: "Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world … The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation …"

In 1990, a group of prominent Democrats and Republicans, calling themselves the National Center on Education and the Economy, followed with another report, America's Choice: High Skills or Low Wages. It saw skills development as virtually the only policy lever for shaping the economy. It charged that inadequate skills attained at flawed schools had caused industrial productivity to "slow to a crawl" and would, without radical school reform, lead to permanently low wages for the bottom 70 percent of all Americans.

Leading public intellectuals, such as Prospect co-founder Robert Reich, focused attention on human capital solutions in a laissez-faire global system. In his book, The Work of Nations, Reich argued that international competition would be won by nations with the most (and best) "symbolic analysts," not "routine" workers. Lester Thurow's book, Head to Head, forecast that Western Europe would come to dominate the United States and Japan because European schools were superior. Many mainstream economists, both liberal and conservative, agreed that rising-wage and income inequality were caused by an acceleration of "skill-biased technological change," meaning that computerization and other advanced technologies were bidding up the relative value of education, leaving the less-skilled worse off.

Yet the response of American manufacturers to these analyses was curious. Automakers moved plants to Mexico, where worker education levels are considerably lower than those in the American Midwest. Japanese manufacturers pressed their advantage by setting up non-union plants in places like Kentucky and Alabama, states not known for having the best-educated workers. But high school graduates in those locations apparently had no difficulty working in teams and adapting to Japanese just-in-time manufacturing methods.

The ink was barely dry on the America's Choice report when Americans' ability to master technological change generated an extraordinary decade-long acceleration of productivity in the mid-1990s, exceeding that of other advanced countries. It was accomplished by the very same workforce that the experts claimed imperiled our future. Productivity advances created new wealth to support a steady increase in Americans' standard of living.

And for a brief period, standards of living did increase because the fruits of productivity growth were broadly shared. As the "Returns to Education" chart below shows, the late 1990s saw increasing wages for both high school and college graduates. Even wages of high school dropouts climbed. But no presidential commissions or distinguished experts were praising American education for producing widely shared prosperity. Instead, denunciations of public schools increased in intensity, often tied to calls for their privatization with vouchers.

Then, the collapse of the stock bubble in 2000, the recession
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=schools_as_scapegoats

[Demeter]

1. It Is the GOP, Who Have Systematically Defunded Education, Blaming Schools

and the students, their parents, the teachers, anybody but themselves as the policy-makers.

Ditto for the destruction of the American economy by their buddies in Enron, WorldCom, Countryside, Blackwater, etc ad nauseum.

It's never the policy-makers' fault, unless they are Democrats!

[Joanne98]

2. True! Also, moving 70% of manufacturing jobs out of the country

Has left a vacume in employment that young people use to fill. They've created a jobless class of people and they wonder why crime is so bad. People don't starve to death peacefully!

[flashl]

3. As funds are withdrawn from education they increase spending in corrections

Last weekend, Barrons's online stock report urges its investors to add for-profit prisons to their portfolios. The profitability of the McPrisons on the stock exchange is based on U.S. Census data.

U.S. retirement systems are bankrupted, Enron's role in purging money from most retirement systems have gone unreported. The defunct retirement systems were passed on to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), it is now bankrupt. We have Regan to thank for this when he removed corporate responsibility to protect retirement systems.

Now, seniors who normally would be going into retirement must work until they die. This creates a bottleneck in the job market where there are more graduates from high schools and colleges each year than there are new jobs created.

The policy makers plan? Build prisons based on U.S. Census data.

[Eric J in MN]

4. Lou Dobbs doesn't buy it when a guest says that jobs...

...are going overseas because US workers lack skills.

He says the people being laid off have the skills for those jobs, it's just that the other workers are cheaper.