[Peace-discuss] Commentary submitted to N-G

[David Green]

Misguided critics of public schools ignore fundamental economic realities
David Green
It is conventional wisdom that good schools are essential to a healthy economy. 
It is true that schools are responsible for the basic literacy, skills, and 
educability of those entering the workforce. It does not follow, however, that 
schools are to blame for the dismal economic outlook for many Americans. 

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 three decades. Their criticism is not 
only profoundly misguided, but part of the problem. They are in denial regarding 
the class-stratified nature of an American economy that has victimized working 
people and their children in a systematic and structural manner.
The facts are clear, and their implications easily discerned. These facts 
address the long-term relationship between worker productivity and wages; the 
transition from a manufacturing to a service economy; and the sources of 
recessions and high rates of unemployment. Given the basic existence of 
universal and functional public schooling, none of these trends has been 
determined by the relative merits of schools, teachers, students, or parents, 
whatever their specific achievements. These trends have been completely 
determined by the corporate, financial, political, and ideological powers that 
be.
The Pew Charitable Trusts’  “Economic Mobility Project,” available online, 
clarifies the evolving relationship between productivity and wages. Since 1945, 
the American worker has increased productivity by at least 2% per year, 
consistently throughout. This means that efficiency—output per person-hour in 
the production and provision of goods and services—has doubled twice during this 
65-year period, both before and after the advent of computers and a 
high-tech-based economy.
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. About no sector 
of the workforce can it be said that its employees, from “top” to “bottom,” have 
not significantly contributed to these increases by the quality of their minds 
or the sweat of their brows. Similarly, it is inconceivable that the quality of 
our schools has been an impediment rather than an asset to these increases, 
ongoing, which are typical for all countries in the industrialized world.
From 1945 to the mid-1970s, the median (adjusted for inflation) 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, 
and worsens. 

All of these facts clearly indicate that while the country gets richer, the 
median, “middle class” worker becomes stagnant or gets poorer; all of the 
increases in wealth that are generated by the labor of all workers accrue to the 
benefit of the upper quintile of the population; the largest share going to the 
upper 1%. 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.
This well-documented appropriation of wealth has nothing 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 (that is, those not protected by their credentials 
from foreign competition) 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.
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” (referred to 
locally as “capitalism and limited government”) ideology and practice among 
those who rule our country for their own benefit—especially those in financial, 
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 cynical attacks on the social safety net.
In this light, it is perverse for public school critics to focus on the 
“accountability” of teachers and the “personal responsibility” of students. Many 
parents and children are rightly aware of the dire nature of their economic 
circumstances and future prospects—whatever their efforts and skills—in an 
economy with high unemployment and the most extreme inequality among the 
developed nations. In relation to the poorest among us, such criticism borders 
on cruelty on the part of the comfortable.


      
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