On October 30, 2010 Fareed Zakaria hosted his first GPS Special on CNN. It was an excellent program and I’m sure a promise of things to come. Four prominent CEOs were featured, former IBM chairman and CEO Lou Gerstner, Google, Inc. chairman/CEO Eric Schmidt, Coca Cola Company chairman/CEO Muhtar Kent, and Alcoa, Inc. chairman/CEO Klaus Kleinfeld. Zakaria couldn’t have asked four more successful or insightful CEOs to be on his program.
The Title for the program bespeaks its theme: Restoring the American Dream. The American Dream is a concept that holds that if one only works hard enough he or she will overcome any obstacle and achieve material success. It also holds that all citizens have equal access to the means to achieve the American Dream. Needless to say that all citizens do not have equal access to the means to achieve the Dream as those opportunities are differentially distributed. The present recession, depression for some workers, has led to a sense of despair and impotence on the part of Americans, particularly those at the lower end of the economic scale. Technology and globalization have left the American worker in the lurch. Jobs have gone off shore and those lost jobs are not coming back. Zakaria asks how we can rectify this situation and restore the American middle class.
I think we can give Henry Ford credit for creating the American middle class. As strange as this may sound, he recognized that he would not be as successful as he wanted to be in building and selling automobiles if his workers could not afford to buy them. As a consequence, he paid his workers the unheard of sum of $5.00 per day. Thus, many of them could afford to buy his autos and the middle class was born. The American middle class did not reach its zenith until after WWII when the rest of the industrialized world was in ashes and our manufacturing capacity was intact. It took a few years, but when the change over from a war time manufacturing mode to a peacetime manufacturing mode was complete there was a job for nearly everyone. All it took was a high school education (often not even that) to be able to achieve the dream of a single family home, an auto, even a fishing boat and perhaps a cottage in the country to achieve a life of contentedness.
By the 1980s things began to change, the Interstate Highway system had reshaped American cities, technology had begun to replace some workers and manufacturing corporations in search of lower costs began to migrate to the sunbelt and then to off shore. By 2000 the change-over was complete, the upper Midwest was now the “rustbelt” and corporations did not suffer any sort of tax penalty for closing factories and moving off shore. The downward spiral to our present economic situation fueled by deregulation and greed was complete by 2010 and the great American middle class was devastated.
Zakaria covers all this well in his broadcast and most especially in his book, The Post American World. Two areas that are important for America to remain competitive are innovation and research and development (R&D). We used to be number one in both areas, but now we rank behind India, China, and South Korea. Innovation used to be as American as apple pie. Now, young, brilliant college graduates are going into finance so they can devise tools that contribute nothing to the GDP instead of engineering or science. The reason is obvious; they can make millions in finance and only a starting salary of $70,000 per year in engineering. Thus we all suffer from their choice. It is also important that the federal government step up its funding for R&D by funneling more research grants to universities and that corporations devote more money to R&D and product development instead of acquisitions and mergers.
One thing the four CEOs agreed upon was the exceedingly important role education plays in keeping America competitive. There are two facets to education: the transmission of knowledge that takes place in K-12 and colleges and universities from kindergarten to the Ph.D. level and continuing education and training by corporations and companies.
The term “collapse of the education system” was thrown about and I bristle somewhat at the term. I know there are public school teachers who can be rated as poor. Who knows why? Surely they entered the teaching force eager and motivated, but over a period of time they were beaten down by incompetent administrators and a system that failed to recognize excellence and a reality that required more attention to classroom discipline and less attention to education. Whatever the reason, most of us would have mentally or physically bailed out as well. So I do not recognize the term “broken education system” or whatever. What is broken is the family value of education as a worthwhile pursuit. I also recognize is that our teachers have been, by and large, let down by a society that does not value their contribution. They are underpaid and under recognized. The rightie politicians and sympathizers have a term that brings me to the point of wanting to punch someone; dedicated teachers. This is code for “don’t pay them much.” Well, you get what you pay for, but in spite of the lack of commitment by the community in the form of adequate compensation, we still have competent and committed teachers who are there in spite of the pay. It seems that we really do believe that it’s our money and we want to keep it in our pocket rather than pay for educating our children.
Higher education has been, or is, in the process of being gutted. Between 1987 and 2009 college tuition and fees increased a staggering 326% caused by declining state revenues. This is incredible in light of the fact that a more educated populace means a more affluent and content populace. Decreased state income due to lower taxes and increased spending on such budget lines as prisons has put America’s young people in debt for years to cover college costs. Let me explain. After I was discharged from the US Air Force in 1965 I started as a freshman at Indiana State University with tuition at $9.50 per credit hour. I did not need a loan and was able to pay the cost of twelve credit hours out of my paycheck from my part-time job. By the time I graduated in August 1968 tuition had been raised to about $12.00 per credit hour, still a good deal. I entered the workforce without debt and ready to take on the world. Twelve dollars a credit hour is a very fair price for a future that would pay me more per year than I would have earned as a driver for a wholesale milk distributor (my job after the Air Force was as a relief driver) and I paid more taxes. We seem to have lost sight of the value of an affordable education for high school graduates.
I don’t think any sane person would dispute the point that educating our young people is a good investment. But in fact, education for the past 25 years has been one of the few budgetary lines that can be and has been cut; the rest of the budget is legally designated and thus not to be cut. Sadly, the conservative revolution, begun in 1994, has had an unanticipated, but largely unrecognized, consequence. For years the state and federal governments have played a dangerous shell game and the chickens finally came home to roost. The states have been able to keep their income tax rates low and depend on federal largesse for funding of programs. The federal government kept its tax rate relatively high and then passed money back to the states. This game seemed to please everyone. However, starting in 1994 the U.S. House of Representatives went Republican and conservative and so did many states followed by others in subsequent elections. Money eventually slowed to a trickle from Washington and Republican legislatures were, and are, loath to raise taxes. Thus, earmarks are raided to pay for other areas of the budget. Usual budget areas that are discretionary for the Governor are: education, prisons, medic-aid, and state police. The rest of the budget is off limits and education suffers.
Why then has academic achievement scores of American students declined in recent years. In my experience over the 21 years I taught in higher education I came to the conclusion that our high schools are not demanding enough and, more importantly, parents are certainly not demanding enough. The majority of students did not take notes in class, too many did not read assigned material, many disputed earned grades, and nearly all expected not only passing grades, but excellent grades. I don’t know how many papers I read that were so weak and obviously under-researched or how many times I had a student come into my office and tearfully state that they needed a passing grade to continue to get student aid when they were failing. The shame is that I usually caved in.
Here’s why. I did not receive support from the Dean and Provost to take a tough stand. The line usually was that I obviously was not teaching properly. Sorry, I was a professor. I professed what I knew from research and reading, students were to listen and critically examine what I said and what they read and then we would discuss the material. But, when they did not do so and failed earn a score of more than 61 (I admit, way too low for passing) they failed the class. It did not take me long to learn that students have a hold on faculty if the administration does not support rigorous teaching standards. The dreaded student/faculty evaluations give power to students and the evaluations are wrongly used to determine whether or not a faculty member earns tenure or merit increases in pay. If a professor fails to receive good or even excellent student evaluations, then tenure and merit increases are out of the question. Young Assistant Professors soon learn that they need to knuckle under to the tyrannical eighteen year olds who don’t know a sonnet from a symphony, or in my case a prison from a jail. I, however, was a slow learner and suffered many wounds. Nevertheless, I came around and students pretended to study and I gave them a pretend grade. I must point out though that I had some excellent students who were motivated and I am still in contact with many of them. I love them and they are the ones who made my teaching years worthwhile.
I put the blame for the failure of students to value education over just getting by on parents. Most parents see education as a commodity, not as a means to improve oneself with the by-product that of getting a higher paying job. High schools fail to adequately prepare parents and students to rigorously pursue higher education and parents fail to insist on study to the point of inflicting punishment on their child for not studying or for earning poor grades. It is the university faculty that suffers when the mentally lame and unmotivated student appears in their classroom.
The second area of education that is ignored is that of in-service training by corporations and companies. This is not my area of expertise, but it seems to me that companies would come out ahead if they required continued upgrading of skills by everyone from the shop floor to the CEO. I have only minor experience in this area, but over the past twenty years I have teamed up with business and public administration faculty to develop training seminars on our own initiative in an area that we thought important. In my experience, both public and private organizations failed to take advantage of the opportunities. Granted, training is a very incestuous area and only those training companies with prominent names are able to survive, but locally, one would think that a training experience by faculty at a nearby university at a cost of $49 per attendee for a one day seminar would be thought valuable and affordable. I also helped develop a 40 hour executive training experience for executives delving into the areas of leadership, strategic planning, communication and so on for $399. We and the Chamber of Commerce also thought it a good deal.
I’ll give an example. A few years ago there were four shooting sprees in Virginia, Michigan and Georgia including the Virginia Tech episode. Two colleagues and I put together a one day seminar on workplace violence and working with the local Chamber of Commerce and another business association we advertised it at $49 per person. We did not receive one application. So much for training. If a disgruntled employee or unhappy spouse shot up an office, I can guarantee that only one lawsuit would break the company. I think $49 is a cheap investment. Likewise, up-to-date employees are happier, more productive, and more likely to contribute new ideas that improve production. So Messrs. Gerstner, Schmidt, Kent, and Kleinfeld put your money where your mouth is.
Clearly, education and training are exceedingly important if America is to reclaim the American Dream. Education also contributes to innovation. But contrary to conventional wisdom, our slump in the ratings, so to speak, is not largely the fault of teachers and professors. There is plenty of blame to go around, but I put the bulk of the blame on legislatures, Congress, parents and the American public. If we want excellence then we’ll have to pay a price.
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=rationing_college_opportunity
Ad nauseaum: The United States Congress did not extend unemployment benefits this week. What a bunch of self-righteous, disengaged, elitist slugs. Not only are they cutting off perhaps the only means of income for 1.2 million Americans, they do so just before Christmas. Will God provide? Will their neighbors step in and pay the rent? This vote just points out the hypocrisy of our elected officials. It was their failure to provide adequate regulation of banking and financial interests that more or less caused the recession that has put so many Americans out of work. Now they are compounding the problem by tossing more than a million Americans under the bus, or train, or into the shredder. The extension would have cost money we don’t have, but when distributed the recipients would be buying things. Things they need, not stocks, or buying into a hedgefund, expensive jewels, and so on. Real stuff that supports our working men and women. Shame on them.
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