Over the past several weeks and months, there has been much discussion over the controversial idea of a public option for Americans without health insurance. While the merits and the flaws of such a health care plan have been tirelessly debated, we can all agree that it is time to create a public option in our education system. All Americans who cannot afford to enroll their children in a private school should have the option of sending them to a public school that meets certain minimum standards.
There was a time when we challenged ourselves and the world in the field of education. Following the Soviet Union's launching of Sputnik, President Eisenhower worked to establish the National Defense Education Act. The bill invested millions of federal dollars into all levels of public education. While only 15% of Americans attended college in 1940, over 40% Americans attended college by 1970. The President made it abundantly clear that the United States would not take a back seat amongst nations in terms of education. Instead, America planned to set the education standards for which the world met.
While we have set the world standard on how to bail out our banks and car companies, we have denied our children their constitutional right to "the pursuit of happiness." Although lawmakers deemed these large corporate conglomerates "too big to fail," there is nothing that is more important to our economy now and in the future than public education. Education is what launched the United States into its role as leader amongst nations, and at this pace it will inevitably lead to our demise.
As General Stanley McChrystal urged the president to rapidly increase American investment in Afghanistan to prevent the deterioration of the country, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan must offer the same urgency to Mr. Obama with regards to his own country. At some point, we must shift our concern from the youths of Afghanistan to the youths of America. The situation is in dire need of attention. Nowhere are we failing the next generation of Americans more than in large cities. Fourteen major cities have a graduation rate less than 50% including Detroit, Baltimore, New York, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Miami, Dallas, Denver and Houston. Before even discussing changes in the curriculum, attention needs to be given to just keeping the student population enrolled.
While graduation rates are higher outside of the larger cities, students are still not being equipped with the tools they need to compete in a 21st century economy. If we cannot stimulate the minds of our youth, no amount of economic stimulus can save the future of our economy. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States ranks 18th in education among industrialized nations. Specifically, students in the United States rank 17th in science and 24th in math worldwide. In reading, only a third of our students are scoring in the proficient category. Overall by the time American students reach 8th grade, their curriculum is already two years behind that of other top performing nations. While over 200 million Chinese learn to speak English in their public schools, the United States seems content on keeping their students monolingual with a failed language education system. If education is the currency of the future, we must keep borrowing from the Chinese.
How has the United States responded to this global challenge in education? We continue to lower our standards. While No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was a major step in education reform, it has inadvertently created a system where states continue to lower the expectations bar. In 2007, only 18% of Mississippi students scored proficient in the standardized national reading test. However, 88% scored proficient in the standardized state reading test. While Mississippi can be considered an extreme, a Department of Education report acknowledged, "state-defined proficiency standards are often far lower than proficiency standards on the NAEP." While under this system test scores have improved slightly, our student's education level has remained constant. As states are under enormous pressure to show improvements in test scores, standards are lowered. While politicians avoid future trouble, our children inherit it.
Even our once seemingly monopoly on higher education has eroded in recent years. While ranking 2nd in the world in older adults with a college diploma, the U.S. has slipped to 8th in the world in young adults with a college diploma. As other countries continue to provide numerous incentives for their students to attend universities, the United States seems content in allowing higher education to climb ever higher out of the reach of ordinary Americans. Furthermore, China and other Asian countries have created a higher education system that is far more useful in equipping its students with the needs to survive in a 21st century economy. More than 50 percent of undergraduate degrees awarded in China are in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math, compared to just 16 percent in the United States. While we are focused on creating litigators and lawyers, China and our competitors are creating the entrepreneurs and engineers of the future.
Education reform is not about a single bill, but rather a fundamental shift in our nation's mindset. Maybe instead of focusing on the probability of a team in March Madness winning the tournament, we focus on the probability of a team graduating. While parents, teachers, and students all appear appalled with the status quo, no party truly seems interested in tackling the necessary reforms. One necessary piece to the puzzle is expanding the school calendar. The 180 day school year is based on the agrarian calendar, a time when children would spend summers assisting their parents in the field. As the economy has changed in the past century, so has the need for adapting our school calendar to meeting the growing demands of a globalized world. The average European school year is 195 days, while the average East Asian school year is 208 days. It will be impossible for young Americans to create the next generation of jobs, if we are not competing on a level playing field.
Educational standards have to be raised for students, teachers and parents. While this shift in our mentality is most important in reforming a broken system, financial investment has its role to play. In too many areas across the country, school boards are making decisions based on economics and not on education. More and more schools across the country are transitioning from a five day to a four day school week. As the economy has turned sour in this recession, funds for education have dissipated. One Minnesota superintendent recently complained, "There just aren't that many places to cut anymore. We've cut the last 10, 12 years and there's no place to go, so now we'd have to cut basic programs." If we can find money for the bankers and the auto dealers, we can find money for our students. As we consider legislation on expanding health care and creating jobs, no factor can produce the former and the latter in the future more effectively than a strong system of public education.
Dan Seals: Reforming Higher Education: Key to Our Competitive Edge
The fact is the cost of higher education has increased five times faster than median incomes over the last thirty years. For all of the lip service paid to increasing access to higher education, it's become more and more difficult to afford.
Education has become a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. On one hand, some higher education is packaged like designer clothes: expensive but of questionable quality. (Amazing how some of the "best and brightest" from the Ivies have bungled and are STILL bungling our economy, isn't it?) On the other, we also have a disturbingly large segment of the population that deeply distrusts ANY sort of higher education--e.g., the Teabagger--despite whatever lip service they give to the importance of education and their insistence on "home-schooling" (mostly so that they don't have to be burdened by having to learn about "evolution," any sort of revolution, or global warming!)
The irony is how both collude together neatly. Teabaggers are funded by the very sort of people--corporate Ivy greeders--that they claim to despise: so once again, the latter reap the greatest benefits.
"Made in Texas: George W. Bush & the SOUTHERN TAKEOVER of American Politics"
http://www.amazon.com/Made-Texas-Southern-Takeover-American/dp/0465041213
[...where "politics" = "power" when you win, or steal, elections, or bully the oppostion into adopting your agenda, & thereby grab the levers of government powers of taxation, lawmaking, law enforcement; rewarding your friends with billion-dollar govt. contracts & tax breaks, and PUNISHING YOUR ENEMIES, wether indirectly (denying them business) or directly, eg - the DON SIEGELMAN JUDICIAL LYNCHING...]
...discusses the ANTI-EDUCATION agenda of the Deep South based fundamentalist-Protestant, radical right-wing WASP culture....
- a hierarchical & conformist clan, tribal, or "Herrenvolk" society, INTOLERANT of others, violent & aggressive towards neighboring tribes to the point of systematically genocidal;
a culture that thrives on a hierarchical autocracy & harsh theocratic rule; with low wages & poverty for the majority
Quite simply the modern version of the antebellum landed plantation Slave owning lords who led the Confederacy in the Civil War, the modern ideological if not lineal descendents whom Lind terms "neoConfederates."
(Indeed, one chapter of Lind's book, "The NEW Confederate Century," details the POST-Civil War south!)
Thus there is a DIRECT CONNECTION between the ANTI-LITERACY laws the South wrote to PROHIBIT teaching slaves to read during the slave era; and the Southern reactionary right's STEADFAST OPPOSITION to PUBLIC EDUCATION in the 14 decades since the Civil War.
As the title to Lind's book suggest, that agenda, and ideology, has now PERVADED _ALL_ of America.
...with the "mostly Jewish NEO-CONS," like LEO STRAUSS, Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, & Irving Kristol & his wife, the NeoCons who for decades had opposed the White Protestant fundamentalist STRANGLEHOLD on the top tiers of American society for almost the entire post-Civil War "Confederate Century",
about the late 1940s the NeoCons STARTED EMBRACING the "neoConfederate agenda" and leaders...
The proof of this is simplicity itself: by the 1960s' NIXON's Ivy League educated Jewish speechwriter WILLIAM SAFIRE would be EMBRACING the RADICAL right-wing REPUBLICAN PARTY of STROM THURMOND and JESSE HELMS!!
(Nixon's so-called "Southern Strategy")
WHICH RADICAL RIGHT-WING "destroy education, LOOT the peons, keep 'em poor & impoverished & down-on-the-farm" ideology Safire maintained for his ENTIRE tenure
__as the LEAD New York Times' op-ed writer__ through the 1990s!!
Today, the Neo-Cons are THE DOMINANT partner in the Neo-Con + neoConfederate alliance
(just look at the names in the Cheney-Bush AND Obama AND Clinton White Houses: WOLFOWITZ, CHERTOFF, MUKASEY, RUBIN, SUMMERS, Greenspan, Bernanke, Bolton, Bernstein, Emanuel, etc.)
... but even the so-called "Liberal" "Democratic" Neo-Cons (Rubin, Summers, Emanuel, Schumer, Feinstein, etc.) SECRETLY SHARE that agenda to DESTROY America's egalitarian, upwardly mobile society based on PUBLIC education, easy access to HIGHER education, better wages, financial security, etc.
Shameful for a rich country such as ours!!!
More praise and attention are given to a made up Barbie (Heidi), kids from the Jersey Shore, and Kate Gosselin. They are the new valedictorians and Magna Cum-laudes of our time. They're failures and flaws are awarded with scholarships funded by our own obsession.
I fully understand the base of this article is in grade schools, but look at the ratings of public universities. Arnie-cakes has brought one of the greatest school systems in the world to it knees. Things are dire and we need action, not just happy thoughts and fuzzy kittens.
Does anyone remember the term 'on the job training'? That once a great way to receive the specialized training you needed. For example, you don't need a college education to learn and master computers, you don't need a college degree to learn and master many skilled positions, so why should a certain pay threshold only be attainable via a college degree, what happened to the promise of awarding those for being smart, honest and giving 110%?
no wonder no one is excited about education. its just another long term way to get screwed
and untill our parents appreciate education, it doesnt matter who the teachers are.
the teachers don;t make money, nor do we attract the best we could if we actually raised pay, but its not their fault