[Peace-discuss] DG in the NG

[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’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. 

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.
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.
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. 

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.




________________________________
From: C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu>
To: Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at anti-war.net>
Sent: Sun, April 17, 2011 2:00:02 PM
Subject: [Peace-discuss] DG in the NG

AWAREist David Green has an excellent piece in the News-Gazette today.

Unfortunately it's not online, as the N-G tries to recapture pre-modern 
journalism...

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.

(David: post it to this list.)
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