Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize winning economist who writes a column for the Néw York Times, demolishes the “reformers'” claim that bad education is at the root of inequality and economic issues.
He flunks the talking heads and pundits (and by implication, the Néw York Times editorial board, which employs the arguments he debunks) for asserting that schools and teachers are to blame for inequality.
Among other things, he critiques laments about the “skills gap.” If employers want certain skills, they would pay higher wages for those skills.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Today’s NY Times show the differences between its editorial board (led by business side) and their columnists. Paul Krugman has hit upon a theme I have been writing about over the past week about power and more importantly who wields it in the USA.
Our newest elite class, regardless of party, only see the world in the way they were raised and grazed as the “Excellent Sheep” they are. They all speak of the same issues the same way so much so that today’s Democrats sound like Reaganites of the 1980’s.
Krugman points out the fantasy world in which they live that is harming all of us, most of all those who really most on public education.
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To David Green—-I assume you meant to end with “most of all those who really rely most on public education.” Or maybe “…who rely most on public edu.” This is the question Thomas Frank’s book “What’s the matter w Kansas” answers = why do people vote against their best interests? Garth Bishop
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Garth,
There is a piece in the March 2014 issue of National Geographic Magazine that helps explains why people end up voting against their own interests.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2015/03/science-doubters/achenbach-text
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Thanks so much for pointing out this piece. If “more education” can’t be the answer to all of our problems, then it also can’t be the problem/topic/social area that must be solved/reformed constantly.
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I’m a big Krugman fan – but not happy about his ignoring of education issues for so long. While taking this on, he plays politics by placing the blame on the Republicans and lets Obama, Duncan, Cuomo, and most Democrats who support the ed deform agenda. He is selling a false message here – that by default there is salvation with the Dems. Thus I have to rate this essay a C.
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Krugman is being partisan, that is true, but this is an important start. With more time and investigation, he can likely figure out that while this sounds like a libertarian Republican view of meritocracy there is a sizable booster contingent in the Democratic party as well.
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Krugman appears to be applying for a job in a future Clinton administration.
To that end, he is in the process of making his peace with Obama and the Democrats.
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Good call.
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I was going to make a very similar comment. Thanks.
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Education is the be-all and end-all and cure-all for everything that ails the US of A economically and political and socially and security-wise? Solve the “education problem” and everything else will be hunky dory?
¿Huh? 😳
From the LATIMES, 2-22-2014, an extensive excerpt from an article by Michael Hiltzik entitled “A loophole in immigration law is costing thousands of American jobs”:
[start quote]
Imagine getting a layoff notice, then being ordered to train your replacement.
That’s what has happened to hundreds of information technology employees at Southern California Edison. Since last summer, Edison, which serves nearly 14 million customers, has been firing its domestic IT workers and replacing them with outsourced employees from India.
In doing so, the utility is exploiting a gaping loophole in immigration law, which Congress has failed to close despite years of warnings that it’s costing thousands of American jobs.
The Indian workers are brought in on H-1B visas, which are temporary work permits for “specialty occupations” — those requiring “highly specialized knowledge” and a bachelor’s degree.
The purpose is to allow employers to fill slots for which adequately trained Americans aren’t available, not to replace existing workers with cheap foreign labor. That’s why employers such as Google and Microsoft, which say they’re short of highly trained software engineers, have lobbied hard to expand the program beyond the 65,000 visas available annually. These high-tech companies say they can’t meet their needs from the pool of U.S. graduates in STEM specialties — science, technology, engineering and math.
But Edison is using the program for a different purpose — to cut its wage costs, possibly by as much as 40%, according to data compiled by Ron Hira, a public policy expert at Howard University.
The pay for Edison’s domestic IT specialists is about $80,000 to $160,000 not including benefits, with the average at about $120,000 for experienced personnel, according to records Edison submitted to the state Public Utilities Commission.The two Indian outsourcing firms providing workers to Edison, Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys, pay their recruits an average of about $65,000 to $71,000, according to their federal filings.
“They told us they could replace one of us with three, four, or five Indian personnel and still save money,” one laid-off Edison worker told me, recounting a group meeting with supervisors last year. “They said, ‘We can get four Indian guys for cheaper than the price of you.’ You could hear a pin drop in the room.”
This worker and the half-dozen others I interviewed asked to remain anonymous because their severance packages forbid them to speak disparagingly about the company.
These employees perform the crucial work of installing, maintaining and managing Edison’s computer hardware and software for functions as varied as payroll and billing, dispatching and electrical load management across Edison’s vast power generating and electric transmission network. The workers I interviewed are in their 50s or 60s and have spent decades serving as loyal Edison employees.
They’re not the sort of uniquely creative engineering aces that high-tech companies say they need H-1B visas to hire from abroad, or foreign students with master’s degrees or doctorates from U.S. universities who also can be employed under the H-1B program. They’re experienced systems analysts and technicians for whom these jobs have been stairways from the working class to five- or six-figure middle-class incomes. Many got their training at technical institutes or from Edison itself.
Some laid-off Edison employees say the transition is not going well.
Some report that Tata was unable to recruit enough workers in time to replace — or get training from — the domestic workers ushered out the door. Edison delayed some layoffs scheduled for November and December until as late as March. Sources say the utility may now even be considering recalling some laid-off employees to fill the gaps.
Meanwhile, important IT projects have been delayed and complaints from Edison offices about poor tech support are rising, according to some workers and sources at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, which represents thousands of Edison employees (though not the laid-off IT workers).
Edison acknowledges that the transition “has not been seamless but it is also not complete.” …
Edison has been less than forthright about the outsourcing, which it says will cost the jobs of 500 IT employees — 400 laid off and an additional 100 “leaving voluntarily.”
[end quote]
Link: http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-20150222-column.html#page=1
This is not a diatribe against workers from India or the USA or anywhere else—it simply makes the point that, for example, just having enough STEM-trained folks doesn’t solve poverty or anything else—if a lot of other things don’t happen too, like changes in laws and compensation and retention and priorities.
And notice that the anonymously-quoted employees must keep quiet about what is actually happening at their workplaces—like teachers that are ordered not to tell parents and other concerned citizens about opting-out and charters.
Please excuse the long excerpt.
😎
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Don’t we all know the protocol that we must make nice for the two to three months we are still employed once our jobs are terminated? We are all sold on acting professionally when the treatment we are receiving is anything but professional.. Even our colleagues will object to any show of emotion or bitterness over the treatment one of us receives upon termination. If you want a favorable recommendation, you must play the game.
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OMG, Thank you, thank you very much to KTA for lifting the burden off my heart and mind. You spell out the absolute truth.
My Mother, my Zen Master and some His Holiness Dalai Lama’s Assistants keep reminding me that there are a lot of sharks disguise as whale and dolphin to eat innocent people alive.
I was forbidden to voice my idea, not opinion for fear to be harmed accidentally by sharks’ helpers. Today, I am old and handicapped so the fear of being harmed is no longer in my heart and mind.
In my ESL class that I volunteer to teach for one year, here is what my students from all walks of life who told me their stories without disclosing their races or religion background.
1) A man sponsors his many wives and children as one wife and his sisters-in-law and nieces, nephews to abuse of free support in:
a) welfare and children’s subsidy
b) housing, transportation, education, and medical
2) Foreigner “LAWYER” businessman arranges FAKE marriage to bring their people in with payment of hundreds of thousands US dollars.
3) Foreigner businessman operates CONTRACT WORK like mail post office, taxi in the airport, interstates or international trucking, IT support, airport security, airport labor…
TRUE WHITE people have very pure heart and mind in compassion of GIVING SPIRIT that sharks love to abuse with delight.
MIXED RACE people, first generation IMMIGRANTS, and NARROW MINDED WHITE people are cowardice, slavery for a crumb of fame, convenient material lifestyle, and lusty enjoyment of gossip from Hugh Hefner and his bunny girls or playboy.
If all rich families from upper middle income to upper high class are destroyed by communists or fascists, then their own greed is the real cause.
If all below middle and middle income families are eliminated by corporate, then their own BLIND TRUST or EASY PERSUASION with corrupted UNION is the real cause.
If government becomes corrupted, then educators in higher education are the real cause that they DO NOT instill or nurture properly DIGNITY and PRIDE of being a civilized people as the priority before the major in STEM is completed or graduated. May.
I am sorry for a long reply :))
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Is Krugman the same height as Bob Reich? In any event, folks like Krugman will get used as policy populists to get Clinton elected, but policy will continue to be shaped by the Larry Summers crew once she is elected. As usual, Goldman Sachs, CitiBank (sh….Bank) and BOA will cover all bets with their hedge fund buddies and assert their control of economic policy the day after the election. It is encouraging, never-the-less, that Krugman finally mentions education. Many of us (thousands) have been prodding him for three or four years.
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Here’s the comment I left:
Here’s what is happening right now, Dr. Krugman.
The investors have created a “crisis in education” and simultaneously introduced a solution: markets! You see if the monopolistic public schools are expensive, inefficient, and ineffective the solution is to subject public schools to the free market where they will become less costly to taxpayers, far more efficient in the delivery of services, and, yes, miraculously egalitarian. The folks who offer this as the solution to closing the gap between students in affluent districts and students in high-poverty districts conveniently overlook the fact that the “market” has not provided residents in the Bronx with the same array of choices in shopping as the residents in Scarsdale…. But no matter! Even if the market fails to provide equal opportunity for all at least the “wasteful spending” on education will no longer go to those greedy teachers… it will go to the shareholders of the privatized companies who operate the deregulated for-profit charters. As your article implies, those who have the power are not seriously interested in addressing inequality; they are more interested in keeping the power structure just the way it is.
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So awful. Thanks.
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I think the greatest myth in America is the desire for equality. The elite in power are not interested in equality, just the appearance of it. They mouth platitudes about equality and efforts to achieve this but this is just another myth of the American ideology. Whatever keeps them in power and gives them an advantage, is what the supposedly ‘free’ markets supports. The narrative of the deform education movement stretches and bends their argument to make it appear they want equality but they know their efforts will have the opposite effect, make education segregated and more unequal.
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When the intern placements at the Harvard Kennedy School, named after JFK, are with DFER and the Heritage Foundation, not with DFPE, it’s clear the Democratic legacy is oligarchy.
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In 2014, two out of three, mayor intern placements, from the Harvard Kennedy School, were with
Michelle Rhee’s husband, Kevin Johnson, and with Rahm, in Chicago.
The third mayor, selected for an internship, dismissed his impact on public education because of limited funding discretion.
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I don’t think you can get hired in DC unless you’re a member of The Movement.
Is there anyone they hire who doesn’t spout this stuff? I can’t think of one high-profile person who has deviated in any way from this mantra.
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Yes, the chanting is a characteristic of a cult, along with “preoccupation with making money, ends justifying means, leaders not accountable to authorities, claims of exalted status, perception as elite, discouragement of dissent, excessively zealous, unquestioning commitment.” from book titled, ….Recovering from a Cult…..
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Interesting. It’s clear that the corporate education reformers supported by the likes of Bill Gates, the Walton family, President Obama, Arne Duncan, etc. all worship at the alter of another Nobel Prize winning economist, Milton Friedman, but here is another noble prize winning economist who says they are all wrong.
What if it was possible to prove that Milton Friedman’s economic theory that won him a Nobel Prize in economics was wrong long before he was born?
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Diane and all my favorite people at this blog,
I am not sure are where to post this but today I had an idea. I have been teaching in a MD public high school for many years. I have been a loyal reader of this blog for two years but never commented before. Today at an excruciating, propaganda filled faculty meeting at my school, we were informed of how for three weeks in March our school would stop functioning as a school and instead become a branch of Pearson Education as we administer the PARCC. Seriously, no normal instruction for weeks. Next when someone had the gumption to ask about the OPT OUT movement, we were told that it was against MD state law to opt out and if asked, tell parents and students exactly that.
Thus, my idea. Why not start a nationwide movement of civil disobedience. For all multiple choice questions, students could simply bubble ‘A’. That one simple act performed over and over by hundreds of thousands nationwide would represent a powerful statement.
I know that this may be more doable for middle and high school students who are in tune with social movements and who do not have to pass a test to be promoted to the next grade. But seriously, why not. Let’s call it the BUBBLE ‘A’ movement. it will render all tests invalid and show that this idea of using students and teachers for nefarious, profit making schemes is unacceptable and immoral. It must stop. Now!
Anybody?
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My 16 year old son, forced to take a practice test for CC (he’s opted out from the actual tests), wrote the entire essay on why standardized testing is wrong.
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Mine wrote the practice test in German. It was good practice since he will be visiting his Grandmother in Munich this summer. They couldn’t call him insubordinate.
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I agree that education is not the cause of inequality. I took a sociology class last semester and we debated the phrase “poverty produces poverty.” It is the lack of resources that cause inequality and I think education is the biggest resource we have to fight inequality.
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Abby, the best way to fight poverty is with jobs
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Adding- the best way to create jobs, is to excise trickle down tax policy from U.S. vocabulary and action. It is too absurd (and disproved) a notion to be in the same sentence with the word, economics.
“Job creators” are the middle class and poor, spending their money to create demand for goods and services.
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Yes, jobs that pay a liveable wage.
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You beat me to it. 🙂
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Let’s add more: a livable wage that leads to a livable retirement with health care. I don’t think the oligarchs ever retire because they are having so much fun wrecking the world while they are waiting on hand and foot and get whatever they want whenever they want it because they can buy anything they want—-even people.
But the other 99.9% who have to work to eat and have shelter actually get old and wear out. I think the oligarchs want us all to die off as soon as we are of no use to them anymore.
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As a practical matter, as long as 6 Walmart heirs have wealth equivalent to 40 million Americans (Politifact) and, the concentration continues to increase, there will not be enough jobs for Americans, regardless of any trends in education.
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