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God Rest Ye Merry Bureaucrats The Heedless People Who Didn't Care About Michael Oher

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Yet Another Report on the Education Crisis

by Christopher Chantrill
December 25, 2006 at 10:14 pm

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IT IS NEARLY a quarter century now since the National Commission on Excellence in Education issued its somber warning about the nation’s education system: “A Nation at Risk.”

Luckily it was at that moment in 1983 that the US economy struggled out of the 1980-82 recession on the back of Reaganomics and never looked back. So it turned out that the nation wasn’t at risk, at least not then.

Yet the education system has, if anything, got worse in the years since. Reforms come and go—your Goals 2000, your No Child Left Behind—yet nothing seems to change. For instance, despite all the reform, our kids still need remedial courses before they can start college.

Though higher education is now a near-universal aspiration, researchers suggest that close to half the students who enter college need remedial courses.

The shortfalls persist despite high-profile efforts by public universities to crack down on ill-prepared students.

That’s what The New York Times reported back in September. Yet do we see educators taking responsibility for this, pledging their lives, their fortunes, their sacred honor, to right a terrible injustice—in emulation of an earlier generation of American leaders? We do not.

What we do have is another blue-ribbon report. “Tough Choices or Tough Times” is a product of the New Commission on The Skills of the American Workforce. The commission worries the usual worries about globalization and outsourcing. “While our relative position in the world’s education league tables has continued its long, slow decline... a swiftly rising number of American workers at every skill level are in direct competition with workers in every corner of the globe.” Since the “best employers the world over will be looking for the most competent, most creative, and most innovative people on the face of the earth...” and so on. How can we hope to compete in the global economy, the commission worries, when, educationally:

  1. Teachers are recruited “from among the less able.”
  2. We tolerate “enormous amount of waste.”
  3. The system is getting “more inefficient over time.”
  4. “Growing inequality in family incomes’ contributes to “growing disparities in student achievement.”
  5. “We have failed to motivate” children to “take tough courses.”
  6. Teacher compensation doesn’t reward the best teachers.
  7. The testing system rewards students “good at routine work.”
  8. “People who have responsibility do not have power” and vice versa.
  9. It’s already too late for most of the workforce.
  10. It is hard for adults to get the continuing education and training they need.

Maybe it’s because... But you know the script. After identifying these ten problems, the commission proposes a Ten Step remedial program, all of which is long on government spending, bureaucratic reorganization, and new subsidies like tax-free accounts. And you will be glad to know that the remedy includes a big increase in teacher salaries, even though teachers are already paid about 50 percent more than equivalent workers in the private sector.

But before we sign on the dotted line we should ask some tough questions. Why is it that the United States with its nation-at-risk education system continues to lead the world economically?

In his 2004 book The Power of Productivity William W. Lewis provides an answer to this question. Based on his research on the economies of 13 different countries, he concludes: “The importance of the education of the workforce has been taken way too far.” You can train most people on the job, whatever their education.

And the key to wealth and productivity is a level playing field, an absence, in other words, of blue-ribbon commissions proposing new programs, privileges, and subsidies.

If the importance of education “has been taken way too far,” how important is it? Obviously the politicians and educators on the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce have their agenda, and public choice theory can give us a glimmer of what that agenda might be. But what about us? What do the Education Moms want?

At the Cato Institute Andrew J. Coulson, author of Market Education: The Unknown History, has just published the first “Cato Education Market Index.” It is designed to show how each state allows education “producers and consumers to voluntarily associate with one another” and “encourage families to be diligent consumers and educators to innovate, control costs, and expand their services.” In other words, he is measuring just easy it is for Education Moms to shop for the education that their children need.

Today, alas, the index is pretty low. In the United States, education producers and consumers are not allowed to voluntarily associate with one another. In consequence, families do not act like diligent consumers and educators do not innovate and control costs.

Here’s an idea. If education isn’t all that important to our national income then why not just let American parents go shopping for education at the mall just like we do for our food, our cars, and our clothes?

Then we can appoint blue-ribbon commissions to worry about pseudo problems like educational obesity, sports utility schools, and cheap education imports.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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