Left Behind

Every year, American high school test scores slip a little more in international comparisons. The top declining subjects include math, reading comprehension and science. We used to be first in everything, but austerity measures (accelerated by the Great Recession but never restored after it passed), pressure to allow religious priorities with voucher-funded charter schools (an Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos priority), and shifting priorities to favor business over individuals have taken their toll. Union pressure to favor seniority over competence didn’t help either.

We’ve slipped down generally to 17^th to 19^th in world rankings in these categories… and our global competitiveness is increasingly a casualty. Tariffs don’t fix the underlying lack of competitive training and education. Tax cuts for the rich haven’t moved the needle when it comes to preparing our youth to live and work in our complex and increasingly automated economy. Wasted gifts to the rich to engage in lucrative (for them) stock buybacks and give themselves big dividends.

Post-secondary college tuition debt is crippling young people just starting out. Billionaire DeVos’ trying to force students at bankrupt “for profit” colleges, deeply in debt without the training they paid for, to repay most of their federal loans is a disgusting effort to reverse policies created during the Obama administration. So far, the courts are fighting her as well.

A lot of assumptions seem to be dying in an obviously different technologically-driven world. You cannot have decent public education without ubiquitous access to relatively state-of-the-art computers and textbooks (which can be delivered on an iPad or equivalent). You cannot teach traditional subjects without embracing obvious changes. In Shanghai, for example, there are several schools experimenting with using math as the basic language of instruction (vs Mandarin), never allowing the class to move on to another subject until all students are fluent with the current subject matter. The results are staggeringly successful.

We don’t even know how to use teachers effectively. Classrooms are often overflowing with too many students, often operating at varying levels of competence. Public schools too often are simply warehouses, promoting kids to the next grade just to move them through the system. Inner city dropout rates in large urban school districts still hover around 50%, creating a permanent underclass that simply cannot support itself through legitimate work.

We have around 13 thousand school districts in the United States (France, for example has one), many prioritizing an unconstitutional vision of religious doctrine (e.g., creationism) over hard facts, a reality reinforced by a climate-change-denying, anti-scientific administration-in-charge in Washington. Big school districts tend to force their view of appropriate education on textbook manufacturers, and that’s the way it is. If there is an emphasis on pragmatic and necessary education, the feeble attempts to tie federal aid to federal standards has been a failure to date.

Broken homes, fathers and mothers out of the home by reason of criminal incarceration, parents without  an educational priority, parents having to work several jobs to make ends meet (creating latch-key kids by the millions), drug addiction, too many single-parent families, too many dangerous neighborhoods with substandard schools and too much endemic poverty have taken their bite out of too many children’s futures. Kids often show up for kindergarten already hopelessly behind because of where they came from.

We need money. To upgrade classrooms and fix deteriorating facilities. To reduce class size. To modernize how we teach. To train more teachers. To pay them better. There’s a catch-22: paying higher teacher wages to get better people often results in being able to hire fewer new teachers.  And, as the California experience described below suggests, to get children into basic educational mode earlier.  Howard Blume, writing for the September 18^th Los Angeles Times, explains in a tale that clearly reaches far beyond California:

“When students enter school in California, they learn at a pace on par with — if not better than — those in other states… The problem is that they arrive far behind their national peers, and they never catch up… This conclusion, from a sweeping research project aimed at charting future education policy, focuses new attention on what is often overlooked: infant and toddler care, parenting skills, preschool and early childhood education.

“The researchers argue that if California wants to improve student achievement in schools, it has to start much earlier so that children are prepared when they show up for kindergarten… Many ‘don’t have access to any care, let alone quality care,’ said Stanford University education professor Deborah Stipek, one of the lead researchers. ‘It’s not just a problem for low-income families, although affordability is a serious issue. It’s a problem for many, many families because fewer people are going into being providers for child care.’

“Those who tend to be least prepared for school are low-income Latino and black students, including recent immigrants and those in foster care, the experts said… And this is connected to another challenge facing educators in California: The achievement gap between Asian and white students and their black and Latino peers. Data show that all students are doing better but that the gap is not closing.

“Other states have made more progress. Ten years ago, eight states had a larger achievement gap than California when comparing white and Latino students in eighth-grade reading. Now, only four have larger gaps… ‘We’re moving backward in that respect,’ said Christopher Edley Jr., president of the Opportunity Institute, a nonprofit organization that took part in the research…

“The idea of providing needed support from birth onward — as part of an education plan — is not new. It’s embodied in such smaller-scale projects as the Harlem Children’s Zone, where generous private funding helps children from birth to college. Many see the Harlem project as a model, but an expensive one and therefore hard to replicate.

“Stipek said one reason California children are unprepared for school is a lack of quality child care and preschool… More than half of the people who provide child care qualify for federal or state welfare or other forms of public assistance, Stipek said… ‘That tells you something about the salaries that are paid,’ she said… Compared with other states, California also has lower standards for child-care providers and preschool teachers. But tightening standards alone would only exacerbate the shortage of workers, Stipek said.

“The research released Monday [9/17] comprises 36 studies and involved more than 100 experts who examined a broad range of topics. They looked at new and recent data and did some of their own number-crunching. A similar effort 10 years ago became the launch pad for the education reforms of Gov. Jerry Brown.

“One goal was to evaluate the Brown-era measures, which directed a substantial infusion of new money to help the neediest students — English learners, students in foster care and those from low-income families — as they moved through grade school. But the new research suggests this extra help needs to start sooner… The extra money provided through Brown’s reforms did have an effect. The researchers found a correlation between increased money and higher graduation rates…” Upward mobility used to be a fact of the American Dream. It is all but gone now, buried in a maze of unkeepable political promises and a system that is heavily tilted in favor of the rich and big business at the expense of everything else. It needs to come back.

I’m Peter Dekom, and we need to upgrade and invest in ourselves, perhaps exempting public school teachers (not administrators) from federal income tax… as a starter.

Ignoring America

 “Eat your food. Many children are starving in America.”

A line from the recent and highly successful film, Crazy Rich Asians

As the United States cancels its treaty obligations, withdraws from multinational accords, insists on policies that attempt to force other countries to kowtow to American unilateral demands that only benefit the United States and significantly negatively impact those other nations, the rest of the world is slowly drifting away from constructive dialog with the United States. America has not been this isolated in over a century.

On September 26^th, Trump’s braggadocio before the United Nations General Assembly drew derisive laughter from the gathered body of seasoned diplomats. His, “not the reaction I was expecting, but that’s okay” response, to Trump observers, suggested that he was enraged inside. These experts noted that typically his use of the words, “that’s okay,” are an indication of his extreme anger while attempting to maintain his cool. Trump’s constituents saw the U.N. response as derisive laughter at the United States (not Trump), ramping up their own anger against “globalism” and bolstering their commitment to stand behind the President. But the reality: Outside the United States, Trump and his policies have been, are and will remain somewhere between a sad reality and a bad joke. He has become America’s “clown prince”; his base’s rally adoration of his rhetoric does not play outside the United States.

The Trump administration’s basic international diplomatic tools, vestiges of failed 19^th century strategies, are bullying, intimidation, threats, trade barriers, rejection of multinational agreements of every kind and insistence on a complex web of bilateral diplomatic and trade agreements. These proclivities ignore the existence of multinational agreements that embrace so many of the nations with which Trump wishes to force into bilateral negotiations. The world is too interrelated, too interconnected to believe that a web of bilateral agreements can replace multinational accords. Trump’s policies are anchored in the belief that the United States is so powerful that the rest of the world must bend to our demands.

Simply put, many of these nations cannot even entertain that bilateral agreement Trump is demanding unless they too withdraw from their own multinational commitments. And should they follow that path, they will dramatically alienate all those other countries who are part of those existing multinational agreements. To many countries, it’s a choice between sidling up to Trump’s America or being part of the “rest of the world.” Smaller nations might have to walk a tightrope where they rely in significant part on the United States; larger powerful nations can simply resist and use Trump’s ability to alienate nations around the world as a stepping stone for those other powers – particularly Russia and China – to replace the United States within those alienated countries.

Not that Donald Trump has failed to identify some issues that truly need to be addressed. China’s tendency to steal trade secrets, operational technology inventions and fail to enforce the patents and copyrights of companies from other countries continues to be infuriating. That said, his choice of tariff barriers as his weapon of choice against China, mired in the firm belief that China cannot tolerate our tariffs, that they are so dependent on U.S. that they will cave to our demands, is perhaps the least effective tool he could have chosen.

Of course, China will ultimately come to the negotiating table, but to expect the level of concessions Trump is demanding is inane. When that negotiation takes place, Trump will do what he always does: take the minor but inevitable two-way agreement that results and tout the results as a major triumph for his brilliant policies. Those concessions were available before the tariffs were imposed. Because trade is so complex, most Americans lack the knowledge to evaluate the resulting accord on its face, so they generally will accept the labels that the politician in charge uses to describe the negotiated result. But if China’s President Xi Jinping were to fold his hand in trade negotiations with the U.S., he would be cutting his own political throat. His power and stature in the People’s Republic would plummet.

For those Americans who have actually travelled to major cities inside China, from Beijing, Shenzhen, Shanghai, etc., they understand how advanced that country has become. In terms of economic and political power, it is second only to the United States. Those urban areas are rich, modern and technologically advanced – new cities that make the aging infrastructure and historical architecture of older American cities seem like yesterday’s news. We’re still the most powerful country on earth with the strongest economy… but we are doing very little to continue to invest in ourselves (education, research, infrastructure, healthcare) to maintain that status. Trump believes that the right path is to take the rest of the world down rather than to invest in growing us into sustainable primacy. Tax cuts cannot substitute for investment in “us.”

One of the most visible signs of negative reactions, including what were purportedly America’s closest allies, to American policies surrounding Trump’s withdrawal from the U.N.-sponsored, six-party Iran nuclear accord. Trump went out of his way, in his recent U.N appearance, to excoriate Iran and then accuse China of interference with our upcoming mid-term elections. As the Trump administration has escalated new economic sanctions on Iran, it threatened any country or company that chooses to ignore those new pressures with a boycott. It seems as if these threats are increasingly falling on deaf or unwilling ears

Speaking at an anti-Iran conference on September 25^th, “US National Security Adviser John Bolton has warned Iran's rulers that there will be ‘hell to pay’ if they harm the US, its citizens or allies… His comments came hours after President Donald Trump accused Iran of sowing ‘chaos, death and destruction’ across the Middle East…

“The accord, negotiated by former President Barack Obama, saw Iran limit its nuclear activities in exchange for sanctions relief… The remaining signatories are standing by the deal. The UK, China, France, Germany and Russia say they will set up a new payment system to maintain business with Iran and bypass US sanctions.

“US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo condemned the plan as ‘one of the most counterproductive measures imaginable.’… Mr Bolton said the ‘murderous regime’ of ‘mullahs in Tehran’ would face significant consequences if they continued to ‘lie, cheat and deceive.’” BBC.com, September 26^th.

Despite some nice meetings, North Korea has not agreed to take down its nuclear arsenal. Russia has built new ties with the Assad regime in Syria, promising to upgrade Syrian air defenses to the highest and most technologically advanced systems available. China now completely dominates the South China Sea and the nations in the entire region. The U.K, one of our few allies (but Trump is now really unpopular among their electorate as his recent visit illustrates), is teetering in its Trump-like populist withdrawal from the European Union. All of the above have been at the expense of U.S. demands and policies.

By moving its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, cutting all U.N. humanitarian aid to Gaza and clearly siding with the globally-unpopular Netanyahu regime, the United States as lost its power to mediate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Russia’s links to Syria and Iran have grown stronger, Putin’s undermining Turkey’s commitment to NATO, have rendered U.S. influence in the Middle East to the lowest point in modern history.

In short, Trump has used powerful words to explain his unprecedented “accomplishments” in the realm of foreign policy, and while his opening the door to direct discussions with North Korea is indeed a good first step, the balance of Trump’s international efforts is a story of failure, mockery, isolation and plunging credibility and influence around the world. Trump has hardly been held accountable for his legacy of failure and disruption.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the willingness of too many Americans to allow self-aggrandizement to substitute for genuine positive results is deeply disturbing.