Learning Curve

What do you say when nations that charge about a quarter or less of the U.S. pay rates are getting more education that their American counterparts? In an interview with Obama’s new 44-year-old education secretary, Arne Duncan, reported in the April 1^st Washington Post: “I fundamentally think our children are at a competitive disadvantage. The children in India and China who they are competing [with] for jobs are going to school 25, 30 percent more than we are.” The emphasis on math and science, skills upon which future industries and invention are based, vastly exceed that in the American public educational system.

Although the federal government pledged to pump another $100 billion into local educational system from recent stimulus legislation, time is of the essence. Many school districts, funded through dwindling state and local taxes, are preparing for massive cuts and teacher layoffs even as they anticipate additional federal help. Summer approaches, and school districts are locking down their budgets for the next school year. Some have run the numbers, and even with new federal cash, the reduction in available state and local funding will generally reduce the number of teachers, cut out valuable programs, increase class size and may actually result in a slightly curtailed school year.

What’s worse, some states – including Nevada, South Carolina and Louisiana – are talking about refusing the federal funds because of the strings that are attached, claiming local benefits will still have to be maintained long after the federal money dissipates. Some of the schools in these regions are clearly well below the national average; they desperately need the money, but doctrinaire politicians are willing to sacrifice their children’s futures to make a point.

Unlike most advanced nations, the U.S. has long-since practiced parsing out public primary and secondary educations though fairly autonomous local school districts – with elected officials catering to voters instead of their children’s futures. “Creationism” (also known as “intelligent design”) versus “Darwinism” has consumed the attention of school boards (most recently in Texas), literally forcing textbook publishers to accommodate the “lowest common denominator” among larger school districts (they don’t print multiple versions of their texts), at the expense of more relevant qualitative analysis. This reliance on local (versus national) school districts, a sacred cow to most communities, has added massive additional layers of duplicative bureaucracies. Effectively, the excess cost of those bureaucracies is deducted from the education values needed to teach children.

Funding for state colleges and universities faces the same shortfalls that public primary and secondary education is addressing, endowments for private institutions are eroded by the collapse of the stock market where such funds were invested, and private donations are severely curtailed as individual giving is often sacrificed to fund basic survival in a sea of layoffs, economic contraction and the destruction of private net worth. President Obama’s dream of increased college education, even with the availability of more government-backed student loans, is evaporating in the intense heat of economic realities. Colleges and universities openly admit that they favor admitted students who can pay the full freight and do not have to rely on scholarships and other forms of financial aid.

The March 31^st NY Times: “‘There’s going to be a cascading of talented lower-income kids down the social hierarchy of American higher education, and some cascading up of affluent kids,’ said Morton Owen Schapiro , the president of Williams College and an economist who studies higher education.

“And colleges acknowledge that giving more seats to higher-paying students often means trading off their goals to be more socioeconomically diverse.

“Some admissions officers and college advisers say richer parents are taking note of the climate, calculating that if they do not apply for aid, their children stand a better chance of getting in.”

Let’s be selfish, totally concerned for “us” and our future. With more older folks staying in their jobs longer – because retirement savings are gone or reduced – with a huge national debt looming, which will sap a significant portion of our future, we really need to figure out exactly what training we are going to create to give our children a future in an employment -impaired world (we need new inventions to create new industries for new jobs), and what new values we need to create to provide globally perceived value-added products and services for the future.

We cannot afford to let the rest of the world be prepared and trained, while our children languish in bureaucratically overloaded, second-rate schools, denied higher education opportunities, and to divert resources to battle whether religious doctrines trump science. We most certainly do not want the United States slowly to evolve into a mass of inner city slums like downtown Detroit. We created this debt; we owe ourselves, particularly our children, a better future. As talk of bailing out financial institutions and carmakers grabs the headlines, it is easy to forget about our long term survival.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.