The tenth anniversary of Nine/Eleven is little more than a month away. Although the Great Recession has vied for our national attention during the past three years, the War on Terror has remained a (if not to say 'the') focal point of national concern. But, as the tenth anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Center approaches, troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan are gradually declining. The War on Terror is shifting to a new plateau... one characterized by law enforcement at home and covert activities abroad, all at a reduced cost to our empty treasury.
Slowly, too, we are clawing our way out of the Great Recession. However, the wild card here is the tenacious 9+ % precedent jobless rate. I have seen it said that some 2.5 million jobs --- 6% of all pre-recession positions --- are gone for good. This raises a crucial question:
Is the current jobless rate simply another cyclical phenomenon, as in times past, or is some or all of it structural? That is to say, has a sea change occurred? If so, then we in America may be facing a permanent downsizing not only of our workforce, but of our standard of living.
For many years, the solution to what journalist Thomas Friedman famously labeled the flat-earth phenomenon has been education. Ironically, the solution to state budget deficits being pursued by a number of new governors is the financial starvation of our public education systems at both the K-12 and college levels. We are, I fear, willy-nilly dismantling the greatest educational edifice the earth has ever seen... wounding, perhaps critically, the one industry in which the US remains the world beater.
Not to worry, say those who are on the attack... we'll privatize education. How well, we may fairly wonder, has this worked. Consider the for-profit universities, about which I have frequently posted on this Blog. The majority of them could not survive, absent federally funded student loans. How is this free enterprise? The same people who scream over their tea cups about big government and public health care are silent when it comes to for-profit colleges surviving on this government dole.
The government itself has wised up. The US Department of Education has issued new "Gainful Employment" regs, which threaten to tear from the Lady Liberty's teat those schools which do not produce graduates capable of gainful employment. Wisely, the DOE proposes to measure success and failure on the basis of loan repayment rates... which in the for-profit sector of higher education, are markedly dismal to date.
Meanwhile, several for-profit universities repeatedly pay significant penalties for illegally rewarding their head-hunting admissions officers by the body. These fines and judgments have become for some just a cost of doing business.
And what of K-12? Here the baby is being thrown out with the bath water. By this I mean, there is not question about the need to break the vicious cycle that has developed in a number of states, involving the state legislatures, the public employee unions, and the workers these unions represent. Here's how it works: The unions persuade their members to vote for the legislators. The lawmakers approve collective bargaining agreements that disproportionately reward the workers, who remain loyal union adherents. Everybody wins... that is, until the cupboards are bare. A combination of inordinately generous retirement packages --- such as 75 or 80% of salary and free health care after 30 years of service --- and lackluster appropriations to fund these benefits, like any Ponzi Scheme, eventually brings the whole house of cards crashing down. This unsustainable cycle had to be broken, and I applaud the governors who have tackled the task.
But in their dogmatic zeal, they also have moved to legislatively withdraw collective bargaining rights and, whenever possible, to gut the unions. They also have laid off teachers and attacked tenure. These are not only doctrinaire, but also lazy, solutions. Collective bargaining s hard work. So is managing tenured faculty to maximize productivity and to remove the hopelessly incompetent. All managers, who must deal with unions, dream of becoming little dictators. But collective bargaining is essential to a healthy democracy. (Just look at what ha happened to CEO pay v. rank-and-file benefits in the for-profit arena concurrent with the 40-year erosion of private sector labor unions. Just look at where the high-paying manufacturing jobs have emigrated.) Ands tenure is a necessary shield for teachers, yes, including (perhaps especially) the best teachers, against helicopter parents and nut-cases with their causes.
I agree wholeheartedly with those on the right and the left that education is crucial to our nation's future. So let's start putting our money and our sweat equity where our mouths are. Let's make education and job-creation the hallmarks of the new decade. Let's recognize that education is enhanced when educators have the academic freedom that tenure protects, and that they have the right to bargain with their systems collectively. But let's also recognize that costs must be controlled and incompetent teachers must go.
Most of all, let's understand that we have built over two centuries and longer the greatest educational system in the world. It is an asset to be husbanded and improved with the greatest care. Only fools would starve it, attack it, eviscerate... and then blithely counter that the for-profit sector will make up the loss.
Are we to trust to the for-profit sector our educational edifice, when the for-profit sector has given us the Great Recession... the jobless recovery... and a Wall Street system of financial management that is obsessed with multi-million dollar bonuses, irrespective or performance? Are we to trust for-profit universities, which consider fines and judgments for illegal headhunting a mere cost of doing business and federal loans their principal cash cow?
So called free-enterprise is a pleasant myth: AIG and other financial giants raped the system they were entrusted with for the sake of easy money, then raped Uncle Sam, paying outrageous bonuses with taxpayers' dollars. Free enterprise? Are you joking?
And, so, we come to the debt-ceiling deal of the past week. What deal? The super-rich, who have grown richer and richer through the War on Terror and the Great Recession, put up not one dime. They managed to wound Obama, while failing to craft a solution for the long term.
The markets recognized the farce. They saw behind the Wizard's curtain. And they adjusted dramatically downward accordingly. (But you can be sure the Masters of the Universe will not experience diminished bonus... wanna bet?)
The new decade shouldn't be about foreign adventures. It should not be obsessed with gay marriage or Casey Anthony or Charlie Sheen or what Marshall McLuhan once famously called Americans' fascination with "Bonanza Land," that mythical past of rugged individualism in the Wild, Wild West.
The time has come to rediscover real patriotism... the patriotism that means pulling together: Big Business, Big Labor, Big Government (none of which is going away any time soon, friends)... and all the millions of little folks, such as me and you... to educate and employ the world's most diverse and promising people --- the American people.
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