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<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt" class=MsoNormal><STRONG>Misguided critics of public schools ignore fundamental economic realities</STRONG></P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt" class=MsoNormal>David Green</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt" class=MsoNormal>It is conventional wisdom that good schools are essential to a healthy economy. It’s true that schools are responsible for the basic literacy, skills, and educability of those entering the workforce. But it does not follow that schools are in any significant way to blame for the dismal economic outlook for most Americans. </P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt" class=MsoNormal>Misguided perspectives on the relationship between economy and education lead critics to focus on daily activities and outcomes of teachers, parents, and students. These critics avoid the fundamental nature of growing economic inequality and its evolution over the past 35 years. This inequality has absolutely nothing to do with the incremental successes and failures of teachers and students, individually or collectively.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt" class=MsoNormal>The Pew Charitable Trusts’ “Economic Mobility Project,” available online, clarifies the evolving historical relationship between productivity and wages. Since 1945, the American worker has increased productivity by at least 2% per year, relatively consistently throughout. This means that efficiency—output per person-hour in the production and provision of goods and services—has approximately doubled twice (quadrupled) during this 65-year period, both before and after the advent of computers and a high-tech-based economy.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt" class=MsoNormal>This historical and structural increase in productivity—and hence both national and per capita wealth—has depended on innovation, skill, and effort by scientists, technicians, managers, business owners, and workers, both in manufacturing and service sectors, public and private. About no sector of the workforce can it be fairly said that its employees, from “top” to “bottom,” have not significantly contributed to these increases by both the quality of their minds and the sweat of their brows. </P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt" class=MsoNormal>From 1945 to the mid-1970s, the median real wage for the American worker increased commensurate with productivity—that is, doubling during that period. Between 1974 and 2004, while productivity increased by 80%, the median wage increased by 20%. From 2000 to 2005, productivity increased by 15%, while the median wage fell 2%; obviously that trend continues to this day. This trend has been completely determined by national politics and policies, and by neoliberal "free market" economic ideology--not at all by schools.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt" class=MsoNormal>Almost all of the increases in wealth that are generated by the labor of all workers have accrued to the benefit of the upper 20% of the population. Again, none of this, in any critic’s wildest imagination, can be attributed to the failures of schools to educate our children, whatever the debatable extent of such alleged failures.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt" class=MsoNormal>This well-documented appropriation of wealth has little fundamentally to do with computer technology per se, but with policies promoted by elites during the transition from a manufacturing to a service economy. These policies determined that private-sector unions would be effectively destroyed, and that non-professional workers would be placed into competition with low-wage foreign (and immigrant) workers. These efforts, most identified with the Reagan era but supported by all administrations since Carter, were well under way before the digital transformation, although they have subsequently been abetted by this phenomenon, as well as by the depredations of financial and bubble capitalism.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt" class=MsoNormal>While American workers have adapted to technological change, their organizational and political capacities to materially benefit from their labor have not adapted to the onslaught of neoliberal, “free market” ideology and practice among those who rule our country, especially those in the financial and speculative sectors. This leaves workers vulnerable not only to the chronic appropriation of their wealth, but to the acute misery caused by speculative bubbles generated by financiers that result in the massive disappearance of housing wealth, increased unemployment, Wall Street bailouts and profits, huge federal deficits, and attacks on public employees and on the social safety net.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt" class=MsoNormal>Again, it is misguided for public school critics, including educators themselves, to focus on the “accountability” of teachers and the “personal responsibility” of students. Many parents and children are acutely aware of the dire nature of their economic circumstances and future prospects—whatever their educational efforts and achievements—in an economy with high unemployment and the most extreme inequality among the developed nations. In relation to the poorest among us, such criticism is accurately described as "blaming the victim." Such criticism, whether from educators, university administrators, or pontificating pundits, is ignorant and reprehensible.</P><BR></DIV>
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<B><SPAN style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">From:</SPAN></B> C. G. Estabrook <galliher@illinois.edu><BR><B><SPAN style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">To:</SPAN></B> Peace-discuss <peace-discuss@anti-war.net><BR><B><SPAN style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">Sent:</SPAN></B> Sun, April 17, 2011 2:00:02 PM<BR><B><SPAN style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">Subject:</SPAN></B> [Peace-discuss] DG in the NG<BR></FONT><BR>AWAREist David Green has an excellent piece in the News-Gazette today.<BR><BR>Unfortunately it's not online, as the N-G tries to recapture pre-modern journalism...<BR><BR>But our moles at the NG have cleverly managed to get David's piece into the space normally reserved for the bloviations of the publisher - and it's paired with an excellent editorial cartoon. Don't miss them.<BR><BR>(David: post it to this list.)<BR>_______________________________________________<BR>Peace-discuss mailing list<BR><A href="mailto:Peace-discuss@lists.chambana.net"
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