James C. Wilson reflects here on the intellectual arrogance of people who know nothing about education but decide they should reinvent it. The list of the arrogant would include certain foundations and philanthropists, certain legislators and other elected officials, and a long list of sheltered think tanks.
They all went to school so they think themselves qualified to redesign it. They never performed surgery, so they stay out of the operating room. But they do not hesitate to tell teachers how to teach.
He begins:
“Individuals with expertise in engineering, medicine, and business believe their achievements entitle them to think their area of knowledge extends outside their profession. The recommendations that they make in subjects outside their area of expertise are examples of misplaced intellectual arrogance. Achievement in a particular field takes numerous years of study and many years of direct professional experience in that specific field in order to develop a truly knowledgeable level of understanding. It is arrogant, even for people with great personal achievement, to honestly believe they have a significant understanding of complex issues outside of their field of education and professional experience.
“This intellectual arrogance has never been demonstrated more clearly than in recent pronouncements concerning education in America. Brilliant people in diverse fields outside of education feel perfectly comfortable making judgments and policy recommendations about education that impacts millions of students as well as educational professionals. Their audacity is appalling and their ignorance is inexcusable. Bill Gates and his wife Melinda have announced their goal to prepare 80 percent of American high school students for entrance into universities. Eli Broad, another billionaire, gives money to school districts with the clear expectation that they will implement his business-based plans…Similarly, mayors have their own ideas about how to improve student achievement, notably without any substantive research to support them. George Bush’s No Child Left Behind policy used testing to determine the success of schools, however testing in itself, has not provided solutions to educational achievement. Arne Duncan and President Obama pushed merit pay and charter schools when substantive research does not support either of these policy initiatives. Trump’s DeVos hasn’t a clue about educational research as her feeble efforts have ably demonstrated. The advocacy for these already repudiated initiatives reflects a lack of understanding of the ultimate impact on students and educational professionals.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
All true. And the billionaires, of course, are the most destructive, because they have no compunction in purchasing validation of their views. I have bought politicians as the next most destructive. Then I have bought media. It goes without saying that all bought opinions are in line with the original billionaires, as I don’t know of a single billionaire who fights Ed Reform.
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Ohio,
I have been searching for a billionaire who supports public education.
So far, the only one I have found is Charles Butt of Texas, who owns a string of small town grocery stores. He supports Raise Your Hand Texas.
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Thank you, Diane. Even knowing of one is encouraging.
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Where is Warren Buffett on this issue? Has he bought into all of his pal Gates’ anti-public school “reform”?
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Buffett gave truckloads of money to the Gates Foundation so Bill could do harm to public education that Warren hadn’t the will to do.
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Buffett plays the PR game very well.
This allows him to maintain his “Andy Griffiths” facade.
But make no mistake. He did not get where he is by being Mr. Nice guy.
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Love our own Charles Butt, what every entrepreneur should be that has never forgotten where he came form.
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I’d argue also that almost all of the prominent reformies send their own kids to private schools. The elite schools do not practice the reforminess they advocate and thus their own kids are protected from it. The hypocrisy is incredible. If it isn’t good enough for their kids, it isn’t good enough for ours either.
Make them send their own kids to public school and their ideas would quickly change.
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You have stated what is not an opinion but a simple incontrovertible fact.
Their hypocrisy is both staggering and toxic.
😒
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Yes. Time to read/re-read Lisa Delpit’s OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN.
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Monetization plays a role in all the self appointed “experts” jumping into the “education market.” With Milton Friedman’s free market ideology came tax credits that invited privateers to invest in education. It was also about the same time we were told that our nation was at “risk” and public schools were “failure factories.” Over the last thirty years or so there has been a well orchestrated plot to privatize public education. All of this has led to a disinvestment in public schools. Now we see states starving their public schools and writing laws the favor charters. Many states also believe that now that charters are accepted, we should also provide vouchers to students for schools of questionable value. Nobody is bothering to examine the results of privatization, which have shown they are not worth the price of the disruption. Privatization is about taking from the working class and giving to corporations and billionaires. It is a system of corporate welfare that places the access to public dollars above what is best for students.
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I would add one more name to your list of unqualified, untrained education gurus who think they have all the answers…Bill DiBlasio
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Mayor de Blasio doesn’t hold himself out to be an expert in education.
What an ignorant thing to say without offering a single reason why anyone should believe you. It’s a Trump-like comment “Because I said so”.
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We are living through history and are seeing first hand who causes the collapse of civilizations. They are the ignorant elite why buy power with their wealth, who think they know it all just because they are a member of that wealthy elite. It doesn’t matter how they reached the top of the 0.1 heap of wealth and power they represent. They got there and most if not all of them see that as a sign that they know-it-all and everyone else is a loser.
For sure, the working class, the 99-percent never started the decline of a civilization. During the decline due to suffering, the working class might have rioted and rebelled, but they did not start the decline. It has always been the ignorant power elite.
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Barbara W. Tuchman focused on this in her book “The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam”.
“Drawing on a comprehensive array of examples, from Montezuma’s senseless surrender of his empire in 1520 to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Barbara W. Tuchman defines folly as the pursuit by government of policies contrary to their own interests, despite the availability of feasible alternatives. In brilliant detail, Tuchman illuminates four decisive turning points in history that illustrate the very heights of folly: the Trojan War, the breakup of the Holy See provoked by the Renaissance popes, the loss of the American colonies by Britain’s George III, and the United States’ own persistent mistakes in Vietnam. Throughout The March of Folly, Tuchman’s incomparable talent for animating the people, places, and events of history is on spectacular display”
“A glittering narrative . . . a moral [book] on the crimes and follies of governments and the misfortunes the governed suffer in consequence.”—The New York Times Book Review
The power elite never learns from history. Their psychopathic, narcissistic egos block them from that. The wealth and the power it buys blinds them to reality, to the truth, to facts, to common sense.
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Thanks, Lloyd, for the ‘psychedelic’, longer view. Also, thanks for the Tuchman tip. I haven’t read a book by Tuchman that I didn’t feel was brilliant. I’m ordering ‘Folly’ as soon as I send this note. Tuchman certainly deserves much more than a Pullitzer.
On the same topic (in a way), try Jared Diamond’s “Collapse”. Diamond’s well-researched historical case studies link collapse to the failure of leadership to understand underlying physical boundaries and adjust their own social behavior. Through their ignorance and arrogance, they fail to truly ‘lead’ their society toward a less painful future. Incidentally, Diamond also points out that those ignorant leaders (and ‘leadership classes’) are among the first to go when it finally hits the fan. That historical ‘Arc of Justice’ only kicks in when it’s a bit too late, in most cases.
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Thanks for introducing me to “Collapse”. I’ll try to read it before Trumpism brings everything crashing down and the few that survive somewhere on Earth return to living in caves. One consolation is that most if not all of these arrognat, pampered billionaires won’t be among the ones that survive. Along with all the other corruption that has invaded their thinking like terminal cancer, they believe they are invincible.
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My cousin, who is a phenomenally successful and rich entrepreneur, has schemes to design the perfect school of the future (such scheming is an occupational hazard for successful businessmen). He seems to think raw intelligence –which he has in spades –is all. It’s not. This explains why so many of these reformers want a curriculum that “teaches” raw intelligence rather than any particular subject matter. Their dream school puts a roaring V8 engine in each kid’s head free of the deadweight of particular knowledge (we have Google to do just-in-time delivery for that). They have no patience for namby-pamby liberal arts. I don’t blame businessmen for thinking this. Unfortunately many professional educators –unwitting charlatans –agree with the businessmen and try to oblige them by offering brain-training like Common Core and NGSS rather than a full buffet of knowledge. They should know better and correct the businessmen, but they don’t. We should tell them, “It’s just a fantasy to think we can put this V8 engine in kids’ heads”. Instead we overpromise. What we can do –and this is valuable, orthodoxy notwithstanding –is teach kids well about the world. That, while it does not impart raw, all-purpose intelligence, does make kids smarter about the domains we teach.
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I am not against dreamers and visionaries. However, these people need to pilot their plans on a small scale and study the results before they roll them out to the general public. Our current method is corrupt. People like Gates or Broad come in with a wrecking ball. Because they are wealthy, they believe they have the right to impose their views on others. They bribe their way into acceptance. Students’ needs are subjugated to the will of billionaires.
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Agreed. Pilot on a small scale and see if it works, for God’s sake. But these guys want to go big fast. No patience for beta testing. The Greeks were right: hubris is part of the fabric of the human condition. Silicon Valley: have a silicon solution for hubris? Your young entrepreneurs should be able to figure it out –they can do anything they set their sharp and speedy minds to!
Isn’t it striking how widespread this education-tinkering is with the ultra-rich? Every time I turn on KQED I hear about George Lucas’s Edutopia project –“finding ‘what works’ in education”. “What works” is what fits their funder’s preconceptions of good education. Then there’s Zuckerberg/Chan and Steve Jobs’s widow’s big project, and of course Gates and Broad and Walton… This penchant for rescuing education is almost as ubiquitous as the penchant for aiding Third World countries. Oh yeah, public education IS a Third World country in their minds.
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This is a problem among almost all of the ‘successful’. For example, Linus Pauling (Nobel prize winning inorganic chemist) decided he was also an expert in biochemistry. As a result, he founded an ‘institute’ that promoted rather crazy stuff based on rather poor research. Even going from inorganic chemistry to biochemistry is a big leap that requires humility, not arrogance. The leap from business to education is many times greater.
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Actualy I have a story that tops this for “arrogance/stupidity”. In a Washington D.C. high school the administrators had a “wonderful” idea to help teachers improve. That idea was to bring all students and teachers into the school auditorium and then have students come onto the stage and use the PA system to publicly humiliate teachers by explaining to them why they are doing a bad job. So if students apparently knew more than their teachers why not just get rid of the teachers altogether?
This happened about twenty five years ago and the teacher who relayed this story to me quit shortly afterward which was about six weeks into the fall semester.
Blaming teachers is an easy scapegoat for many and very useful to the reformers.
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While I was working overseas, the school was toying with the idea of having grade school students evaluate their teachers. I don’t believe this ever went into effect because there was a administrative change.
Good grief. What horrors those with power can do to destroy.
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This is exactly what happened in China during Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1965 – 1976). The result was the end of education in China until after Mao died and after Deng Xiaoping’s faction of the CCP came to power and got rid of Mao’s faction, China had to start from scratch to rebuild the public education system that had been destroyed.
During Mao’s decade of cultural reforms, the literacy rate in China dropped dramatically.
Part of that process of rebuilding Chian’s public education system after the end of Mao’s Cultural Revolution saw teams of Chinese educators traveling to the United States, Canada, and Europe to learn what schools should be like.
Those teams of educators returned to China before NCLB and implemented the best practices and policies they discovered from America and other western countries. This started in Shanghai and the result: when Shanghai took its first PISA tests that Chinese city of more than 25-million becoming #1 in the world by a huge margin in every category tested.
China did not implement any corporate charter school ideas. They implemented what they learned in American public school before NCLB and all the other toxic corporate crap that followed.
And China might be moving in the opposite direction from what is happening in the U.S.
This report from 2014 reavels: “There’s a revolution happening in China. It’s a quiet one, but full of the intensity of parents who are upset with their schools, teachers longing to teach what students need, and children rebelling at the lockstep march towards high scores on the gaokao exam, a two-day government-administered standardized test that has been called “an SAT on steroids.” …
“Ann Qui, the translator who organized the tour, has been working to change the way children learn in her country for many years. Ann is currently creating a center in Shanghai for homeschooling families and an online database of resources for them. Recently, she responded to a New York Times piece by columnist Thomas Friedman, which extolled the virtues of the Chinese back-to-basics approach. Her analysis of his analysis is that Mr. Friedman’s critical thinking was shanghaied by the Chinese publicity machine. She points to the true cost of her country’s oppressive system: a high suicide rate among students and a steady decline in their health since China began the quest for world domination in test scores.
“The New Yorker has also reported on the interest in alternative education in China, specifically the Waldorf model. As some observers have noted, when it comes to schooling, the Chinese want to be more like us and we want to be more like them. I’m encouraged by the Chinese backlash but concerned that our lust to be the country with the highest rankings is blindsiding American policymakers to the truth behind the scores.”
http://www.next-culture.net/pretty-picture-high-stakes-testing-school-discipline-china/
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We have our own (much milder) version of China’s Cultural Revolutionaries: those teachers who would rather kids remain ignorant of Western history and civilization than risk contamination by its “oppressiveness”. As if Western Civilization is a monolith of oppressive white men. That’s such a crude caricature. I vote for teaching the true facts, the whole story as objectively as possible (though with a slight pro-reason and pro-democracy bias), not hagiographies of the oppressed and demonographies of the oppressors, or resorting to neutral skills instruction in order to avoid the pitfalls of teaching charged content. Now more than ever we need Americans who love Western Civilization’s Enlightenment and its fruit –American democracy. But how can you do this if your text is “Western Civ is evil”?
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I didn’t teach history. I taught English, but when I was a student K through grad school in college, I don’t recall ever taking a history class that focused on the evils of Western civilization. I found that information all on my own reading non-fiction books and articles.
First, America is not a democracy and never has been. I’ve read fact based articles that have pointed out that the use of the term democracy crept into discourse early in the 20th century. Before that, the U.S. was referred to as a republic.
Yes, the U.S. is a Constitutional Republic and all one has to do is look at the oath of office for both Houses of Congress, the President and for military officers to see that they do not take an oath to obey the majority of voters but to defend the U.S. Constitution from all enemies domestic and foreign.
“Upon taking office, senators-elect must swear or affirm that they will “support and defend the Constitution.” The president of the Senate or a surrogate administers the oath to newly elected or re-elected senators. The oath is required by the Constitution; the wording is prescribed by law.” – This quote is not from the lying media or the Alt Right hate machine.
https://www.senate.gov/reference/reference_index_subjects/Oath_vrd.htm
The next oath is found at history.house.gov:
The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”
— U.S. Constitution, Article VI, clause 3
The Presidential Oath of Office
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.
— The Constitution of the United States, Article II, Section 1
http://ourwhitehouse.org/the-presidential-oath-of-office/
Trump has been trampling his oath of office like a true traitor starting on the day he swore that oath and continuing to violate it almost daily by mouth or Twitter.
Oath of Commissioned Officers:
“I, _____, having been appointed an officer in the Army of the United States, as indicated above in the grade of _____ do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservations or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office upon which I am about to enter; So help me God.” (DA Form 71, 1 August 1959, for officers.)”
On Democracy Versus Liberty from the CATO Institute
“Most people, including most Americans, would be surprised to learn that the word “democracy” does not appear in the Declaration of Independence (1776) or the Constitution of the United States of America (1789). They would also be shocked to learn the reason for the absence of the word democracy in the founding documents of the U.S.A. Contrary to what propaganda has led the public to believe, America’s Founding Fathers were skeptical and anxious about democracy. They were aware of the evils that accompany a tyranny of the majority. The Framers of the Constitution went to great lengths to ensure that the federal government was not based on the will of the majority and was not, therefore, democratic.”
https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/democracy-versus-liberty
Trump plays to the tyranny of the mob while he tramples the U.S. Constitution that he swore an oath to (lying with every word he mumbled) on a daily basis.
NOTE: There is both good and evil to teach about U.S. History and both should be taught side by side. Unfortunately, the evil is a ponderous weight for those who have read enough of U.S. History to know about it, and they didn’t have to learn this in a K-12 history class.
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We are a constitutional republic also referred to as a representative democracy. No, we are not a simple democracy in which each person has a vote in every action we take. What a nightmare that would be! I am not sure what your point is.
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Re: Mao. I’m sure you’ve seen ‘The Killing Fields’, Lloyd. Same story, different country.
And, not only China, but Finland understood that the very best research concerning education was being done in the United States. So, those countries picked our brains, however we ignored them. Teachers (and the people who teach them) are considered dumber than a used car salesman in the US.
A prophet is without honor in his own land.
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Some of it is just so dumb and faddish. The “skills gap” is a good example. There’s a group of economists who say there’s a skills gap. There’s another group of economists who say the skills gap is nonsense. The skills gap is debatable. It isn’t “true” in the sense of a fact.
Ed reform likes the “skills gap” because it fits in neatly to an ed reform narrative so they swallowed it whole- they all recite “the skills gap”. But that’s not rigorous! Just accepting these slogans as truth isn’t rigorous at all.
Ed tech fever is another example. If someone is feeding you nonsense like announcing kids are different because they are “digital natives” you should question that! Don’t all just repeat it.
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Well-put. One of the things I understand better with age is how often people take refuge in cliches. You’re safe if you utter “I teach critical thinking skills” even if you don’t really know if you’re truly doing this, or if it’s even possible. It’s a safe cliche. My most important takeaway from reading Plato is Socrates’ trying to convey this very point: most people don’t really know what they say the “know”. Part of the human condition.
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You gotta love economists decrying a skills gap.
The only skill most of them seem to have is BS’ing.
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Still we need to listen to the voices of “ignorant” citizens. The dangerous part is when the power of money elevates some voices over others and mandates what those closest to the action must do.
Sent from my iPhone
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We all are “ignorant citizens” about some things. Some people seem to understand this much earlier, but it is really as I get older that I understand how much I don’t know. It takes incredible hubris to think that money cures ignorance or that money buys authority.
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“War is too important to be left to the generals” = Clemenceau
Similarly, Education is too important to be left to government bureaucrats. I am an engineer, not an educator. But, as long as my taxes are going to education, the educators will get my input, as well. I will vote for school board, even though I have no children (of my own) in the public schools.
I have to live in the society that is populated by the output of the public (and private) schools. I have to pay to incarcerate the individuals, who were not educated properly, and wound up in prison.
Turn it around. If a chemical company wanted to locate a chemical waste dump, in your neighborhood, you would be putting your input into the decision, even though you are not a chemist.
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Charles,
With Scott Pruitt in charge of EPA, we can expect a chemical waste dump in every neighborhood, upincluding yours.
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Charles, I think that you ignorantly wrote: “I have to pay to incarcerate the individuals, who were not educated properly, and wound up in prison.”
Who did not educate the incarcerated properly – teachers, parents, or guardians?
Have you no clue that poverty and the war on drugs declared by Nixon in 1971 have more to do with the prison population than any other factor?
The drugs that Nixon declared war on were brought into this country by profiteers, and many of those families are the blue-blood billionaires of fortunes built in the 19th and 20th centuries. In addition, it was Bayer Asprin that introduced Heron to America as a drug to help Cocaine addicts become free of the addiction to cocaine. The Vietnam War also didn’t help, because that illegal and immoral war was the reason drugs poured into the U.S. from Southeast Asia.
Prior to Nixon’s war on drug (and anyone convicted of being linked to those drugs as a user or seller), the U.S. prison population has stayed fairly constant for decades at around a few hundred thousand.
After Nixon declared that war, the prison population exploded and the United States now had the largest prison population on the planet for several decades. The country with the 2nd largest prison population is China.
The U.S. has more than 2.145 million of its citizens locked up. China has only 1.649 million. To be clear, in the US, there are about 666-prison inmates for every 100,000 people vs China at 118 per 100k, because China has more than 1.3 billion people to America’s 320 million.
Parents, guardians, and the schools had little or nothing to do with the growth of that prison population. That credit goes to Presidents Nixon and then Reagan. Take note that they were both Republican presidents.
“In June 1971, President Nixon declared a “war on drugs.” He dramatically increased the size and presence of federal drug control agencies, and pushed through measures such as mandatory sentencing and no-knock warrants.” …
“The presidency of Ronald Reagan marked the start of a long period of skyrocketing rates of incarceration, largely thanks to his unprecedented expansion of the drug war. The number of people behind bars for nonviolent drug law offenses increased from 50,000 in 1980 to over 400,000 by 1997.”
http://www.drugpolicy.org/facts/new-solutions-drug-policy/brief-history-drug-war-0
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As to why there are so many uneducated persons in prisons, I am sure that there is enough blame to go around, for all of the aforementioned groups.
The point I was trying to make, and I am sure that most reasonable people agree with is, is that education is cost-effective. It is much more economical to spend a reasonable amount on education, and assist young people in becoming productive adults, than to fail in educating them, and have them turn to crime.
I am in agreement, that the war on drugs is lost. Nixon started the fiasco. He resigned in 1974, and our nation has had decades to run up the white flag of surrender, but we have chosen not to.
Our nation spends billions, and the drugs flow into our nation in cascades. We also lost the war on poverty. In spite of the trillions spent, there are more people in poverty now, than when LBJ declared the war, back in the mid-60s.
The lesson to be learned in the losses of the war on drugs, the war on poverty, and the war in Vietnam, the on-going disaster of the opioid epidemic, is that government can’t do everything right. In spite of the best intentions.
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There are only two countries that I’ve read about that actually reduced poverty successfully: China and France.
France launched a national early childhood education program more than 30 years ago. From what I’ve read, the program required teachers to learn a masters degrees in early childhood education and the program was kept in the traditional public schools and was not farmed out to the private sector so crooks like Trump could profit off public dollars. Poverty in France thirty years later was less than half of what it was when the program was launched.
China’s story is different, but what they did ended up reducing so much poverty that it added up to 90-percent of the total global reduction in poverty just from China. China has a robust private sector but also a back up public sector that hires workers when the private sector has financial crashes and people start to lose their jobs. Yes, China subsidizes through a social safety net employment so people are kept busy and still earn enough to survive but in China, as a collective culture, the focus is on the family, the group and not the individual.
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Don’t forget Bill Clinton
The Federal and state prison populations increased more under Clinton than under any other dministration (more than under Reagan and Bush combined, in fact)
http://articles.latimes.com/2001/feb/19/news/mn-27373
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Considering what I think of the LA Times, I turned to Fact Check.org and Pew Research to see if they agreed.
“The trend toward increased incarceration began in the early 1970s, and quadrupled in the ensuing four decades. A two-year study by the National Research Council concluded that the increase was historically unprecedented, that the U.S. far outpaced the incarceration rates elsewhere in the world, and that high incarceration rates have disproportionately affected Hispanic and black communities. The report cited policies enacted by officials at all levels that expanded the use of incarceration, largely in response to decades of rising crime. …
“Indeed, this trend continued with tough-on-crime policies through the 1990s as well, but to lay the blame for the incarceration trend entirely, or even mostly, at the feet of the 1994 crime bill ignores the historical trend.”
http://www.factcheck.org/2016/04/bill-clinton-and-the-1994-crime-bill/
How Presidencies compare on prisoners from Pew Research.org – the percentage of change in sentenced federal inmates, by administration.
Obama – went down 5% from where it was when he became president.
G. W. Bush – Increase 32% from where it was when he became president.
Clinton – increased 56% from where it was when he became president.
1st Bush – increased 39 percent from where it as when he became president
Reagan – increased 78% from where it was when he became president
Carter – decreased by 34 percent from where it was when he became president.
“During the eight years of Ronald Reagan’s tenure, for example, the number of sentenced inmates in federal custody rose 78% (or 16,539 prisoners), the largest percentage increase for any administration on record.”
Under G. W. Bush another 36,784 prisoners were added to the total.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/01/05/federal-prison-population-fell-during-obamas-term-reversing-recent-trend/
The piece in the LA Times was not only misleading, it was full of BS! This is an example of why you fact check because it is so easy to only use numbers that make someone look bad without showing the whole story.
During Bill Clinton’s 8-years as president, the number of prisoners increased by 38,769 (only 1,985 more than what was added when G. W. Bush was president) and right before BC took the oath of office, there were already: “The number of prisoners under the jurisdiction of Federal or State correctional authorities at year end 1992 reached a record high of 883,593.”
Click to access p92.pdf
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CORRECTION:
Bill Clinton’s increase was 56-percent not 565, or to put it in perspective, an increase that was less than 2,000 more than the increase under G. W. Bush.
Ratios can be so misleading. That’s why I looked at the actual raw numbers.
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Lloyd
I agree that the percentage increases don’t mean anything.
But…
The claim of “more than Reagan and Bush combined” was actually for Reagan and Bush the elder. That LA times article was from 2001 and you were referring to Presidents before Clinton
And that claim is actually true.
It is also true that the prison polulatikn increased more under Clinton than under any other administration (including that of Bush the younger, though that actually occurred AFTer that article)
I am not claiming the pattern of increase did not begin earlier with the war on drugs.
Or even that the Clinton Crime Bill was the most important factor.
But the policies of Bill Clinton clearly had a major impact, specifically on the federal prison population.
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In 1993, the year Bill Clinton took office, there was a total of 1,364,686 inmates in custody in federal and state prisons. (from the chart on page 2)
Click to access Pi94.pdf
In 2001, when Clinton left and G.W. B moved into the White House, the federal and state prison population had reached l,406,031 (Table 3, page 3). – That’s an increase of 41,345 since 1993.
Click to access p01.pdf
In 2008, when G.W.B left, the federal and state prison population was up to 1,518,559 (Table 9, page 8) – That is an increase of 112,528.
Click to access p01.pdf
I’m just reporting the numbers I see from the actual source. Did I look at the right numbers? The total for all prisons and jail is much higher, but I’m trying to stick with just federal and state prisons. Bill Clinton’s Crime Bill was passed in 1994.
Out of curiosity, I looked up the number of prisoners in 1981 when Reagan became president. That number was 369,009 (Table 1, page 2)
Click to access p81.pdf
When Reagan left in 1989, the number of inmates in state and federal prisons was 710,054. (Table 1, page 1) – that was an increase of 341,045.
Click to access p89.pdf
I think someone at the LA times was manipulating a lot of ratios and numbers to mislead people about Bill Clinton.
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I can value experience, as much as anyone. But we need to remember, that the captain of the Titanic, had more experience that any other ship captain in the entire White Star Line. His bones are resting on the bottom of the Atlantic.
Ferdinand DeLesseps, was not an engineer. Nevertheless, he assembled a team, which dug the Suez Canal, and brought it in, on time, and under budget.
He then attempted to build a canal in Panama. It was a disaster.
“Experience is the jockey, Education is the horse” – Clark Gable, Actor/philosopher.
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Be sure to fly with a rookie pilot who never got his license, Charles.
Not I. I prefer experience.
Remember Captain Sully Sullenberger, who safely landed a passenger jet on the Hudson River when the plane was disabled. He was experienced.
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I read this in the article: Q Truthfully, America doesn’t need any more college graduates. This is the wrong goal for American education. END Q
I could not believe anyone would write such a thing. Here in metro WashDC, there are some companies who cannot find applicants for some of their jobs. Most open jobs here , require some type of higher education.
Some of the high-tech firms, have to go overseas, to find qualified workers, and get them into the USA on H1B visas.
Am I missing something?
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Yes, you are missing something. The U.S. currently has about 3 college grads for every job that required a college education, but that doesn’t mean every college grad will be willing to work anywhere just to have a job that requires a college education.
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Where did you come up with the figure, 3 college grads for every job? Believe me, there are jobs here in WashDC area, which cannot find qualified applicants.
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What you are missing is that many of those companies don’t “have to” go overseas to find qualified workers.
They do it by choice– because they can pay the foreign nationals less, fire them without cause and hold their temporary H1b status over the head to make them do things they might not otherwise do and put up with crap they might not otherwise put up with.
Disney replaced its entire IT group with foreign nationals to save money. They actually made the Americans train their foreign replacements.
Many of these companies play games in order to claim that they can find no qualified American for a position. For example, they advertise a position and ignore inquiries of Americans who reply. I actually had this happen to me for a software engineering position for which I possessed all the qualifications but never got so much as a reply to my multiple inquiries. The company was lobbying Congress at the time for an increase in H1bs. And they had the ear of Senator Ted Kennedy, who was constantly pushing for more H1bs. Maybe his family probably had a vested interest in one or more tech firms that stood to benefit.
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From The Atlantic in support of SomeDAM poet
The Myth of the Science and Engineering Shortage
American students need to improve in math and science—but not because there’s a surplus of jobs in those fields.
“The truth is that there is little credible evidence of the claimed widespread shortages in the U.S. science and engineering workforce. How can the conventional wisdom be so different from the empirical evidence?”
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/03/the-myth-of-the-science-and-engineering-shortage/284359/
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Incidentally,i applied to that particular company back in the late 90’s. The company was looking for software engineers with machine vision knowledge and experience, which I had ( having single handedly developed from scratch all the custom control, measurement , analysis and Windows user interface software for a machine vision based threaded bolt inspection system). I KNOw that I was qualified for the position they were advertising. So company officials were just lying in saying that they could not find qualified American applicants. Who knows, They may even have perjured themselves if they testified as much to Congress.
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ARROGANCE to the MAX = DEFORMERS. It’s only about their pocketbooks and egos.
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Great article! Glad Wilson told his readers about your work, Diane! 👌
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America today is suffering from an epidemic of “The Billionaires’ Disease,” and this disease has brought paralysis to our government, decline to our industries, and ruin to our schools. Most billionaires are delusional. They have accumulated great wealth and all the things that go with it, such as being surrounded by sycophants who assure them that they are geniuses at everything. In fact, most billionaires not only believe themselves to be geniuses at everything, but believe that they alone are responsible for the wealth they have accumulated; they rationalize away the key and essential roles played by others in the success of their businesses. In their delusion they also think that their self-identified genius can be applied to other areas, such as government and public education, regardless of the fact that they have no experience or expertise in these areas. So what we have today are billionaires with no governmental experience who think they know best who our elected officials should be and what government should or shouldn’t do, and of course they say that what the government shouldn’t do is make corporations pay a fair share of taxes. And there are billionaires who never taught a classroom full of children but who think they know exactly what “reforms” are needed in public education. And, of course, what’s needed is the charter school business model that bleeds tax money from genuine public schools and puts public taxpayer money into the pockets of private charter school operators who don’t file the same reports that true public schools file to tell taxpayers just where their tax money is actually going. And of course there are plenty of simpering sycophants who tell the billionaires how insightful they are because these sycophants see an opportunity to cash in on unregulated charter schools to bleed tax money away from children and into their own pockets. If only there was a cure for The Billionaires’ Disease, perhaps the billionaires could turn their resources to combating the true root causes of problems not only in schools but throughout our society: Poverty and racial discrimination.
Support for Trump and the enabling of such a person to achieve the Presidency comes from a relatively small cadre of intelligent people who have made billions of dollars — and who want more because, while intelligent, they have fragile egos that require constant bolstering by accruing ever more money and power. These ego weaklings, many of whom are revered CEOs, overcompensate for their weak egos by striving for constantly for more money and power — especially political power over the masses. They use their fortunes buy politicians, and they use their media ownership to recruit those many millions who are downtrodden by economic changes beyond their control and beyond their understanding and those whose hearts have been hardened by hate.
Such billionaires fit the classic psychological profile of a bully, no matter how refined an image any billionaire tries to project. The aggressiveness and toughness of a bully is in actuality an overcompensation for an inferiority complex. In the billionaire this is overcompensation behavior is described in the business media as “hard driving” and “fiercely competitive.” Sounds better than “tough and aggressive.” But this billionaire behavior is done to silence the whimpering of a weak ego that’s buried deep in the billionaire’s subconscious.
What the billionaire bullies don’t expect is unrelenting resistance and unrelenting counterattack. Their targets usually cave in under heavy and prolonged onslaught. When confronted with vigorous, unrelenting, untiring counterattack, bullies typically move on to other targets. In the political world of gangs of billionaire bullies, unrelenting counterattack can prevail because eventually the bullies begin to attack each other as being the cause of the failure of their efforts. Therefore, attack-attack-attack, vigorously and without ceasing. In the current battle, the vigorous and unrelenting attack against the billionaire bullies has as its goal the 2018 winning back of many congressional House seats and the winning of enough Senate seats to gain a majority, as well as winning back seats in state legislative bodies and governorships.
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I agree with what you say about billionaires.
That’s why I advocate a legal annual purge day to get rid of as many of those billionaires as possible.
All I’m asking for is a 24-hour period once a year where 99-percent of the people that are not rich are free to apply for a cost-free hunting license to go after the billionaires like so many of them pay huge fees to hunt lions, elephants, and rhinos. But I refuse to have any billionaire game I shoot, after I get my legal hunting license, to be stuffed and hung on my walls. Imagine how disgusting it would look to dinner guests or a date to walk in my house and see the head of one of the Koch brothers mounted above the fireplace.
Maybe as an incentive to billionaires to stay out of politics, we exempt those from the purge, who do not donate any money to any political issues or candidates running for office. Donations to real charities that do not influence elections and legislation would be okay too.
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Ms. Ravitch,
Your points are strong in the beginning of the blog. Far too often, people outside of education view teachers as not being able to do their jobs. How do they determine whether we are doing our jobs? By performance-based testing that measures how well a student can memorize information, not by how well a teacher can help a student grow cognitively and independently. Teachers are fired if their students do not score high enough, even if they are ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) or Special Education teachers. What are the responses by businesses and politicians? Let’s build more charter schools! Even though they are not statistically proven better than public schools and often, discriminate against students.
While politicians and business leaders have been playing a role in education for a long time now, it really did not become a major problem until the Reagan administration’s A Nation at Risk. Apparently, American schools were performing worse than everybody else was and our economy was going to tank, all because of poor schooling. This essentialist view of education and economy going hand-in-hand led to more business leaders becoming involved in schools and a change to the importance of career and performance testing. I am a scholar of education, not business, so I would never tell them how to do their job!
Bill Gates wants to have at least 80% of American high school students go to college. While this sounds great, I fear that he has personal reasons for wanting this. First, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funds to the creation and running of charter schools, so does he want more students to go through charter schools to get to college? Does he want more students to become used to Windows products so that they continue to be life-long users? Does he want the economy to be flooded with more college graduates so that he can pay less to future employees?
Recently, Chris Christie decided to create a tax fairness plan where every school in New Jersey would receive similar funding. His idea was that this would cut down property taxes for people in New Jersey and that districts performing low on testing (Trenton, Camden, Newark, etc.) would receive less money than they are currently getting. His idea was that they are wasting all this money on schools that are not performing well; however, most of these schools have students with low socioeconomic status and high numbers of Special Education and ESOL students. This would essentially cause these schools to perform worse and would most likely signal more charter schools or businesses taking over schools to advertise and create focus groups.
Do not even get me started on the policies of presidents since George W. Bush. No Child Left Behind (NCLB) had unrealistic expectations and put stress on schools to reach these goals based on standardized performance tests. While I thought President Obama would take us away from performance testing, he added another layer to it with Race to the Top by creating teacher and state merit pay for high scores and more charter schools. I was really hoping that the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) would change things because it does sound a bit more progressive than other policies, but the Trump Administration and Betsy DeVos will do whatever they can to change this policy. DeVos is already giving schools and districts another year extension before they must include per-pupil spending data. This means that now we will wait even longer to see what disparities occur between per-pupil spending for schools that have low socioeconomic students and high levels of Special Education and ESOL students. I hope that schools will eventually be forced to provide this information on report cards so that we can see this dilemma of misrepresentation of resources. Politicians, especially those without knowledge of education policy (cough cough DeVos), should stick to politics and let us worry about education.
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