A teacher in California heard Tavis Smiley and Cornel West interview Wendy Kopp, Jonathan Kozol, and me–in separate interviews–and this was her reaction. She wrote a post called “TFA can’t connect the dots.”
Here is a link to the interview with Kopp.
A link to the interview with me.
A link to the interview with Jonathan Kozol. I am not sure if this is the right link, as it is a panel discussion on poverty, not the 2:1 conversation found in the other links.
MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry tore into New York City Mayor Bloomberg for his latest tactic: blaming teen pregnancy for causing poverty.
Harris-Perry knows that poverty is caused by the economic structure of society, by a society that allows one man–like Michael Bloomberg or Bill Gates or Eli Broad–to accumulate many billions of dollars while millions are trapped in miserable living conditions with low wages or no jobs.
Harris-Perry knows that the 1% blame the poor for their poverty.
They also blame teachers and public schools for causing poverty.
Thanks, Melissa, for nailing it.
This essay by Leon Wieseltier appeared in a recent issue of “The New Republic”:
WHEN I LOOK BACK at my education, I am struck not by how much I learned but by how much I was taught. I am the progeny of teachers; I swoon over teachers. Even what I learned on my own I owed to them, because they guided me in my sense of what is significant. The only form of knowledge that can be adequately acquired without the help of a teacher, and without the humility of a student, is information, which is the lowest form of knowledge. (And in these nightmarishly data-glutted days, the winnowing of information may also require the masterly hand of someone who knows more and better.)
Yet the prestige of teachers in America keeps sinking. In the debate about the reform of the public schools, the virulent denigration of teachers is regarded as advanced opinion. The new interest in homeschooling—the demented idea that children can be competently taught by people whose only qualifications for teaching them are love and a desire to keep them from the world—constitutes another insult to the great profession of pedagogy.
And now there is the fashion in “unschooling,” which I take from a forthcoming book by Dale J. Stephens, the gloating founder of UnCollege. His deeply unfortunate book is called Hacking Your Education: Ditch the Lectures, Save Tens of Thousands, and Learn More Than Your Peers Ever Will. It is a call for young people to reject college and become “self-directed learners.” One wonders about the preparedness of this untutored “self” for this unknown “direction.” Such pristinity! Rousseau with a MacBook!
Yet the “hackademic,” as Stephens calls his ideal, is a new sort of drop-out. His head is not in the clouds. His head is in the cloud. Instead of spending money on college, he is making money on apps. In place of an education, he has entrepreneurship. This preference often comes with the assurance that entrepreneurship is itself an education. “Here in Silicon Valley, it’s almost a badge of honor [to have dropped out],” a boy genius who left Princeton and started Undrip (beats me) told The New York Times. After all, Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg, and Dell dropped out—as if their lack of a college education was the cause of their creativity, and as if there will ever be a generation, or a nation, of Jobses, Gateses, Zuckerbergs, and Dells. Stephens’s book, and the larger Web-inebriated movement to abandon study for wealth, is another document of the unreality of Silicon Valley, of its snobbery (tell the aspiring kids in Oakland to give up on college!), of its confusion of itself with the universe.
To be sure, all learning cannot be renounced in the search for success. Technological innovation demands scientific and engineering knowledge, even if it begins in intuition: the technical must follow the visionary. So the movement against college is not a campaign against all study. It is a campaign against allegedly useless study—the latest eruption of the utilitarian temper in the American view of life. And what study is allegedly useless? The study of the humanities, of course.
THE MOST EGREGIOUS of the many errors in this repudiation of college is its economicist approach to the understanding of education. We have been here before. Not long ago Rick Santorum, if you’ll pardon the expression, delivered himself of this tirade: “I was so outraged by the president of the United States for standing up and saying every child in America should go to college. … Who are you to say that every child in America go? I, you know, there is—I have seven kids. Maybe they’ll all go to college. But if one of my kids wants to go and be an auto-mechanic, good for him. That’s a good paying job.” He was responding wildly to Barack Obama’s proposal that “every American … commit to at least one year of higher education or career training. This can be community college or a four-year school; vocational training or an apprenticeship.” Obama was not forcing Flaubert down a single blue-collared throat.
Indeed, Obama and Santorum were regarding education from the same stunted standpoint: the cash nexus, or the problem of American “competitiveness.”
A few months later, the Council on Foreign Relations published another instrumentalist analysis, equally uncomprehending about the horizons of the classroom, called “U.S. Education Reform and National Security,” which proposed, among other things, that the liberal arts curriculum be revised to give priority to “strategic” languages and “informational” texts. As Robert Alter acerbically remarked, in a devastating issue of the Forum of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers, this is “Gradgrinding American education”: “there is no place whatever in this purview for Greek and Latin, because you can’t cut a deal with a multinational in the language of Homer or Virgil.”
THE PRESIDENT IS RIGHT that we should “out-educate” other countries, but he is wrong that we should do so only, or mainly, to “out-compete.” Surely the primary objectives of education are the formation of the self and the formation of the citizen.
A political order based on the expression of opinion imposes an intellectual obligation upon the individual, who cannot acquit himself of his democratic duty without an ability to reason, a familiarity with argument, a historical memory. An ignorant citizen is a traitor to an open society.
The demagoguery of the media, which is covertly structural when it is not overtly ideological, demands a countervailing force of knowledgeable reflection. (There are certainly too many unemployed young people in America, but not because they have read too many books.) And the schooling of inwardness matters even more in the lives of parents and children, husbands and wives, friends and lovers, where meanings are often ambiguous and interpretations determine fates.
The equation of virtue with wealth, of enlightenment with success, is no less repulsive in a t-shirt than in a suit. How much about human existence can be inferred from a start-up? Shakespeare or Undrip: I should have thought that the choice was easy.
Entrepreneurship is not a full human education, and living is never just succeeding, and the humanities are always pertinent. In pain or in sorrow, who needs a quant? There are enormities of experience, horrors, crimes, disasters, tragedies, which revive the appetite for wisdom, and for the old sources, however imprecise, of wisdom—a massacre of schoolchildren, for example.
Something is terribly wrong when banks and other financial institutions make obscene profits by making loans to build schools.
Can’t government figure out a way to pay to build schools without enriching investors and bankrupting school districts? How do other nations do it?
Michigan was once one of the nation’ s strongest union states. But with the decimation of the automobile industry and the recent takeover of state government by extremely conservative politicians, the union movement is on the defensive.
Unions in Michigan tried and failed to pass a constitutional amendment supporting their right to bargain collectively.
Now, Governor Rick Snyder is talking openly about pushing right to work legislation.
The Michigan Chamber of Commerce supports the idea.
Tennessee passed such legislation last year, as did Indiana.
Wisconsin is considering it now.
The elimination of collective bargaining will give additional momentum to the growing income inequality in this country.
The New York Times had an article about fast-food workers in New York City who need food stamps to feed their families because their wages are so low. Sixty percent of workers in this country now are hourly workers without benefits. Some have take-home pay, if they are lucky, of $18,000 a year.
Meanwhile, as Warren Buffet wrote recently, the Forbes 400 have an average annual income of $202 million.
$202 million a year.
Maybe the union movement will be born again as most Americans slide out of the middle class and into lives of not so gentle poverty.
The Walton family has made billions of dollars as owners of Walmart. Some family members use this vast wealth to promote privatization of public education and union-busting in US schools.
The Walton family could find better uses for its wealth
This came in my email:
If you already received this, sorry. As I’ve been reading about Walmart & the Waltons in your respective blogs, I’d been thinking about this–I saw it once on the news, & nothing in our newspapers. 100 years ago–Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire–146 dead.
This is why we have unions.
———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Claiborne D., SumOfUs.org
Date: Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 6:50 PM
Subject: Walmart could have prevented this horror
To: C
112 workers died brutal deaths in a massive fire in a Bangladesh textile factory. The emergency exits were locked so they couldn’t escape. Inspectors for Walmart had designated the factory to be “high risk”, but did not enforce greater safety procedures.
Tell Walmart it must join an independent fire safety inspection program to prevent tragedies like this.
Chaya,
Last week, a fire tore through a garment factory in Bangladesh. With the emergency exits locked, hundreds of workers — mostly women — were trapped inside the nine-story factory. 112 people were killed.
And in the ashes of the fire, a local community leader discovered the burned labels of Walmart-brand clothes.
Walmart is claiming it has no responsibility for the deaths, even though it was purchasing garments made in the very factory that burned down. Worse, Walmart knew the risk to workers. Inspectors working for Walmart gave the factory “high risk” and “medium risk” safety ratings just last year, and this year’s follow-up report was never performed.
Tell Walmart it must join an independent fire safety inspection program supported by Bangladeshi and international labor unions, to prevent tragedies like this.
In the wake of this disaster, Bangladeshi garment workers are taking to the streets. They are demanding that brands take responsibility for fire safety conditions in factories. Walmart has a key role to play in meeting the workers’ demand for a safe workplace, and we can join together to demand that Walmart act.
Walmart is the largest retailer in the world, and the largest buyer in Bangladesh. If Walmart joined the fire safety inspection program already adopted by PVH (owner of Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein) and German retailer Tchibo to ensure that all its suppliers enforced basic safety regulations — and then worked with suppliers to ensure that they were followed — it could raise the standard for working conditions across Bangladesh, and, in the process, prevent the potential injury or death of thousands of workers.
Or Walmart could brush this off as nothing more than a minor PR disaster. The company — which said it ended its relationship with this supplier over the tragedy — could simply move on to the next rock-bottom supplier, and the next, leaving more tragedy in its wake.
But Walmart is nothing without its customers and potential customers. That’s why it is up to us, using our power as citizen-consumers, to pressure Walmart to change and force improvements in Bangladesh.
Click here to add your name to our petition to Walmart to sign onto the fire safety inspection program that other international brands have already signed.
Just over 100 years ago, a nearly identical story played out in New York City, at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. A fire broke out, and in the chaos, the workers found all the exits to be locked. 146 people, mostly immigrant women, died that day.
In the wake of that tragedy, citizens rallied together and forced factory owners to adopt important safety guidelines to protect workers. Let’s band together now to make sure real change comes out of last week’s disaster, by pressing Walmart to protect workers throughout its supply chain.
– Claiborne, Kaytee, Paul and the rest of us
P.S. We know we’ve been beating the drum about Walmart a lot lately, but the truth is it is the largest company in the world, and it can afford to treat its workers fairly across the entire supply chain. But Walmart won’t listen unless we make it — so join us in calling for Walmart to ensure its suppliers protect workers’ safety in all the factories in its supply chain.
*******************
Further information:
Salon: Walmart’s connection to firetrap Bangladesh factory, 26 November, 2012
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Pease read Paul Krugman on the Fake Skills Shortage.
Every time you hear Arne Duncan or someone from the US Chamber of Commerce or the Business Roundtable complain that they can’t find skilled workers, think of this article and remember. The big corporations outsource jobs to where the wages are lowest. They send the jobs to countries where workers get half or less than American workers. They don’t send them to other countries because skills elsewhere are higher and more plentiful, but because wages are less. It’s all about cost-cutting and profit.
A reader offers his observations of where we are today:
Others and I have posted quite a bit about this issue in other threads of the blog. In fact, I wrote at some length of the convergence of the Democrats and Republicans (or as a friend calls the two parties, the “Republocrats”; I like “Demonicans” myself). Rather than copy that post, I’ll lay out my view briefly:
1. The baby boomer Democrats became country club Republicans in all but name. (Remember when Jerry Rubin became an investment banker?) I find a lot of truth in E.J. Dionne’s discussion of this shift in his book “Why Americans Hate Politics”: He points out that the the internal dynamics of the Democratic party changed greatly when the baby boomers won major primary reforms in the early ’70s during the McGovern campaign. The rule changes greatly favored the power of the middle- and upper middle-class, college educated voters and began to dilute the more traditional blue collar powers. Thus, the Democrats started moving away for the left on economic issues and became more liberal on social issues, setting up the great defection of the blue collar voters to Reagan in 1980.
2. Union jobs became passe. Michael Moore explained in his movie “Capitalism: A Love Story” how the new middle class of the 1950s created a generation that had good schools, went to college, and abandoned the sorts of jobs that are traditionally unionized. Instead, the children of the auto workers and other blue collar parents became interested in white collar careers that traditionally were a bastion of GOP support. Families left the cities for the suburbs, owing houses, and taking up the lifestyles traditionally found among GOP supporters. We move to a “culture of contentment”, as J.K. Galbraith put it, which favors policies that protect individual wealth.
3. The intellectual left died in in the McCarthy witch hunts. As Chris Hedges points out in his book “The Death of the Liberal Class”, the 1950s took a huge toll on academics who sided with leftist views, leaving colleges and universities increasingly dominated by conservative thinkers like Milton Friedman’s Chicago Boys. By the late 1960s, as Christopher Lasch points out in “The Age of Narcissism”, the left in America had become moribund.
I think history bears these observations out quite well. By the end of the Carter administration, the country had largely abandoned support for labor and social activism, and had become extremely focused on material wealth. The culture became dominated by a libertarian idea that we would all get along just fine if left to our own devices. The great stock market bubbles of the ’80s and ’90s, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, seemed to prove that we could all get rich off of our investment portfolios and had no need for government outside of defense. During that time, the rise of Clinton and Gore and the new DLC cemented the changes that started in the ’70s. Obama carries that torch today, acting like a more like a progressive in the mold of Walter Lippmann than a New Deal reformer like FDR.
Slowly, people are realizing that we have lost our middle class and risk falling into a pit of crony capitalist corporatism. But we have not seen a real leader to show us the way back–yet. I can’t support the Demonicans; I’m voting Green this year to help support a move back from the brink.
Do you remember when teachers and principals brought the economy down in the fall of 2008? Remember how they caused the stock market to collapse?
You don’t? Neither do I.
No matter. States are busily figuring out how to take away teachers’ pensions to right the economy, and reformers are blaming “bad” teachers for the outsourcing of jobs to China and India. The reformers say that the jobs are being outsourced because Americans aren’t skilled enough to do the work, but it seems more plausible to believe that they are being outsourced because educated workers are cheaper in China and India than in the U.S. Know any engineers willing to work for 1/3 (or less) their current salary? Know any workers willing to sleep in a dormitory at the plant and be available 24/7 to assemble Smartphones for $17 a day?
A reader comments on the great pension robbery:
The raids on pension systems across the land are accompanied by the exact same kind of noise machine that accompanies the movement to privatize our public school system. You will never hear a peep against any of it from the President. I don’t know what these union presidents talk about when they’re on the bus with Arne Duncan, but they certainly haven’t been persuasive in getting him to acknowledge that one of the greatest robberies of all time is taking place in fast motion. Our states have run up a credit card debt with these underfunded pension systems, and now they’re walking away from that debt, and somehow we keep talking on and on and on about teacher evaluation.
The Economic Policy Institute has published its annual report on the state of working America.
There are some deeply worrisome trends. Here are some of the findings:
*America’s vast middle class has suffered a “lost decade” and faces the threat of another. The wages of typical Americans, including college graduates, are lower today than they have been in over a decade. Because hourly wages and compensation failed to grow after the 2001 recession, household incomes had declined even before the Great Recession. Furthermore, forecasts of high unemployment for many years ahead suggest that another lost decade for typical American workers and their families, as measured by wages and income, has already begun.
*Income and wage inequality have risen sharply over the last 30 years. Income inequality has grown sharply since 1979, a fact that is universally recognized by researchers. The trends that have driven this growing inequality in overall incomes are growing concentration of both capital income (the returns to financial assets) and labor income (wages and benefits), as well as a shift from labor income toward capital income.
*Rising inequality is the major cause of wage stagnation for workers and of the failure of low- and middle-income families to appropriately benefit from growth. The typical worker has not benefited from productivity growth since 1979, though there has been sufficient economic growth to provide a substantial across-the-board increase in living standards. Instead, higher earners have reaped a disproportionate share of wage income, and the top one percent of households have received a disproportionate share of all income growth. Aside from the period of strong growth in the late-1990s, wages for low-and middle-wage workers were stagnant from 1979 to 2007, and incomes for lower- and middle-class households grew slowly.
*Economic policies caused increased inequality of wages and incomes. Inequality between the very top wage earners and all others grew from 1979 to 2011 except during stock declines, driven by growing executive compensation and an expanded and increasingly highly-paid financial sector. Inequality between the top wage earners and middle-wage earners also grew from 1979 to 2011. A number of policies played a role in this growth, including those that: (1) targeted rates of unemployment too high to provide reliably tight labor markets for low- and middle-wage workers; (2) hastened global integration of the U.S. economy without protecting U.S. workers; (3) failed to manage destructive international trade imbalances; (4) allowed employer practices hostile to unions to flourish; (5) privatized and deregulated industry, including the financial sector; and (6) eroded labor standards. Inequality between middle-wage earners and the lowest wage earners grew only in the 1980s, fueled by the erosion of the purchasing power of the minimum wage and, again, the targeting of rates of unemployment that were too high. Tax and budget policies have compounded the inequalities that have been generated in market-based, pre-tax incomes.
*Claims that growing inequality has not hurt middle-income families are flawed. Some recent studies have suggested that measures of comprehensive income since 1979 show that middle-income families have seen adequate income growth. Rather, incomes for the middle class have not grown as fast as average incomes, and middle-income growth was much slower between 1979 and 2007 than it was between 1947 and 1979. Furthermore, more than half of the income growth between 1979 and 2007 was made up of government transfers, which reflects the strength of programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, not the strength of the labor market. In fact, higher household labor earnings can be traced to increasing work hours, not higher wages. Finally, the data on comprehensive incomes are technically flawed because they count rapidly rising health expenditures made on behalf of households by employers and the government as income, without taking excessive health care inflation into account.
*Growing income inequality has not been offset by increased mobility. There is no evidence that mobility—changes in economic status from one generation to the next—has increased to offset rising inequality, and some research shows a decline.
Inequalities persist by race and gender. Key economic measures, including unemployment, wealth, and poverty (particularly child poverty), continue to show staggering disparities by race and ethnicity. Gender disparities also persist, and while gaps in labor market outcomes have closed in recent decades, a number have done so because men lost ground, not because women gained it.
Diane Ravitch's blog 