A glance at the current issue of The American Prospect: The trouble with blaming education from The Chronicle of Higher Education:
Education can help America remain competitive in a global environment and address economic inequality, but it is hardly the silver bullet that many make it out to be, according to Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, and Richard Rothstein, a research associate there and author of Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic, and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap (Teachers College Press and the Economic Policy Institute, 2004). The EPI is a Washington think tank that promotes equity for working people and is supported in part by labor unions.
The authors trace this “education-as-panacea argument” to “A Nation at Risk,” a report requested by President Ronald Reagan in 1983, and add that the position “got a boost from New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s 2005 book, The World is Flat” (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux).
But too much focus on the education system ignores major sources of growth in productivity, the authors argue, including “the honesty of our capital markets, the accountability of our corporations, our fiscal policy and currency management, our national investment in R&D and infrastructure, and the fair-play of the trading system.” Such a “singular obsession” with education, they add, “deflects political attention from policy failures in those other realms.”
Without government intervention or changes in private-sector behavior, America’s growing income inequality and its shortcomings in global competitiveness cannot simply be laid on education’s doorstep, the authors say.
“These are not problems that can be solved by charter schools, teacher accountability, or any other school intervention. A balanced human-capital policy would involve schools, but would require tax, regulatory, and labor-market reforms as well,” the authors argue.
While the authors admit that manufacturing jobs have declined, they say those jobs have been replaced by “equally unskilled or semi-skilled jobs in service and retail sectors.”
“What made semi-skilled manufacturing jobs desirable was that many (though not most) were protected by unions, provided pensions and health insurance, and compensated with decent wages,” write the authors. “That today’s working class doesn’t get similar protections has nothing to do with the adequacy of its education. Rather, it has everything to do with policy decisions stemming from the value we place on equality.”
The article, “Schools as Scapegoats,” is available to subscribers or for purchase on the magazine’s Web site.
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