by David Safier
If you haven't worked in education for decades like I have, you may not have noticed, but it's as predictable as the sunrise. Whenever there's an economic downturn, bad schools are blamed as the culprit and education reform becomes a huge issue. It's no coincidence that the problems with education are making headlines and educational reformers are coming out of the woodwork right now when our economy is in the toilet.
At most, our current economic disaster is about 10% education related. At most. And the huge and ever increasing gap between the earnings of the rich and everyone else has absolutely nothing to do with our schools. But don't expect corporations and the rich to say, "Yeah, we screwed up. We're the reason our competitiveness is lagging. We're the ones who created the investment engines that made us billions and crippled the economy. Even though our profits are up, we're still not hiring. Oh, and meanwhile, we're increasing the bonuses we're paying ourselves. It's all about us."
Nope. What we hear from the rich and powerful, is, "Workers are making less because they lack skills. Corporations are shipping jobs elsewhere because other countries' workers are better educated. It's the fault of the schools, and since workers have lousy educations, it's their fault too. Don't blame us. When we fix the schools, all our problems will be solved."
Remember back when Japan was cleaning our clock economically, how we heard so much about their wonderful education system? Today, Japan is still trying to pull out of decades of economic stagflation. When was the last time you heard about their schools? And yet, the schools haven't changed, only the economic miracle the education system was supposed to have a significant role in. These days, you're hearing about the high test scores in India, China and Korea. Why? Because they're turning into economic powerhouses. It's a false equation, schools and ascending economies, but we fall for it over and over.
Do we lack the education and genius to create new businesses or to innovate? Of course not. Our top K-12 schools, colleges and universities are turning out well educated, capable, world class adults who can go head to head with their peers in any other country, anywhere. True, our worst schools are abysmal, but if you think about it, that has more to do with our country's social problems and lack of economic mobility than it does with the overall health and competitiveness of the nation's economy. We desperately need to improve those schools, but mainly for internal, not external reasons.
Where have lots of our best and brightest, including some of our top mathematicians, gone in the past decade or two? They went into the investment business, where they created ways to make money, and nothing else. They were basically unproductive leeches on our economy, passing money back and forth to one another, making microsecond-long stock trades and cutting mortgages into itty bitty pieces then selling the pieces to one another. If these people were putting their considerable talents to productive use, think of how much genuine economic progress we could have made.
A combination of factors too complex for me to understand came together to create our current economic disaster. But the failings of our educational system, real though they are, play such a minor role, they don't even deserve serious consideration as a factor in our economic woes.