The move last week by Barack Obama and congressional Republicans
to increase the federal debt ceiling certainly helped both sides
avoid what has been a public relations and political nightmare. As
Washington Examiner columnist Tim Carney
declared in one of his recent columns, the administration no
longer has to deal with “embarrassing
debt-limit votes” while the Republicans get
“what they wanted” on substance.
But now, both Obama and House Speaker John Boehner
have to worry about the more immediate threats to their respective
bids for retaining political power. The first such threat: economic
malaise that that could end up as long-lasting as that which still
grips Japan for a third decade. Last week’s headline-grabbing
512-point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average — which
includes just 30 stocks — merely underlined general
dissatisfaction extending into its fifth year.
Meanwhile, unemployment persists, both as a cause and
effect of that dissatisfaction. With last Thursday’s report that
new unemployment claims remain at more than 400,000 for the 17th
consecutive week, and that only 117,000 jobs were added last month,
both Obama and congressional Republicans need to take quick action.
They need to make it appear that they are improving conditions for
companies to hire more workers and for entrepreneurs to start
businesses. So reductions in corporate income taxes, along with
cuts in federal spending after two years of failed stimulus
subsidies, will have to be
enacted.
But the biggest long-term drains on the nation’s
economic growth stem from our woeful public school systems.
Millions of high school dropouts rank among the nation’s long term
unemployed, essentially shut out of the jobs market for all but the
most menial labor. Fifteen percent of American high school dropouts
age 25 and older were unemployed on
a seasonally adjusted basis, according to the U.S. Bureau of
Labor Statistics, virtually unchanged from the same period last
year. That’s nearly double the rate for high school graduates with
some amount of college education and three times higher than that
of collegians with bachelor’s degrees.
The problem is even worse with the new generation of
dropouts — some 1.2 million leaving schools each year without a
diploma — who have even fewer prospects for employment. Nearly a
third of dropouts age 16-to-24 are out of work on a not seasonally
adjusted basis. These are young men and women who could not qualify
for high-paying blue-collar jobs in auto factories (which require
employees to have at least 60 hours of college credit), or welding.
And given their low literacy and math skills, they
are unlikely to make it into the military (once the last resort
for dropouts) or gain meaningful middle-class
employment.
The long-term unemployment problem for dropouts points
to the single-biggest threat to both the American economy and the
concept of small government. 33 percent of American third-graders
read “Below Basic Proficiency” on the National
Assessment of Educational Progress, while 27 percent of
eighth-graders are mathematically illiterate. With the
low quality of instruction among America’s
teaching corps, the
lack of high-quality school options for all but
the wealthiest parents, and English and math curricula that would
hardly match up to (often low) 19th-century standards, the nation’s
traditional public schools have become a nearly-$600 billion drain
on the nation’s economy.
Meanwhile, school districts and taxpayers are
struggling with $1.4 trillion in defined-benefit pension deficits
and unfunded retired-teacher healthcare costs. Budget-cutting
governors, facing these burdens along with Medicaid costs that are
increasing by 19 percent in the 2011-2012 fiscal year, are pushing
to pare (if not slash) the deals states and districts struck with
affiliates of the National Education Association and the American
Federation of Teachers. The array of benefits featured in these
deals — including degree- and seniority-based pay scales,
near-lifetime employment and near-free healthcare — do little to
help improve student achievement or attract talented college
graduates to teaching, and even contributes to the declining
quality of the profession.
Together with centrist Democrat and conservative
school reformers, governors and legislators on both sides of the
aisle in states such as Wisconsin and New Jersey are either
abolishing collective bargaining or forcing teachers unions to pay
more toward their healthcare costs. But
as seen last week with the Save Our Schools rally,
the nation’s two largest teachers’ unions are going to fight hard
to protect the privileges that have made teaching the
most-comfortable, lucrative and secure profession in the public
sector — even to the point of
recruiting action star Matt Damon to their
cause. Even with a long string of political
and public relations failures (including
revelations by education magazine Dropout
Nation of the American Federation of Teachers’ latest
anti-school reform strategy), the battles will only get
tougher.
The Obama administration has supported their cause,
namely with its Race to the Top initiative. This effort builds upon
the efforts of George W. Bush, who passed No Child Left Behind with
the help of then-House Education Committee Chairman John Boehner
and Ted Kennedy. The administration and congressional Republicans
are pursuing their visions of school reform in entirely the wrong
way.
Last month, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan
stepped up his campaign to get a speedy reauthorization of No Child
by announcing that he would waive (and essentially gut) No Child’s
accountability requirements — which have helped reveal the depths
of the nation’s education crisis — instead of waiting on Congress
to finally get around to the matter. This led Republican House
Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline (who also
wants to gut the law) to accuse the administration of overreach.
The
unwillingness of Kline to move on reauthorization, along with
general opposition to Duncan’s move by House and Senate Democrats,
and the end of stimulus funds used to fund Race to the Top, has the
administration sputtering at the worst possible
moment.
Kline has managed
to pass some of his own measures, including a bill that, in
theory, would give states more flexibility to spend federal
education dollars with less accountability as during No Child’s
passage a decade ago. But the addition of 12 new Republicans to his
committee (many of whom more concerned with overturning Obama’s
healthcare reform plan than with education policy) means he’s
getting little done. The fact that he is getting opposition from
Republican governors (who used his law to advance their own reform
measures), possibly getting pushback from House Speaker Boehner
(who has bigger fish to fry), and can’t get
anything past Senate Democrats (who themselves are not doing
much on reauthorizing No Child) means that nothing will happen
soon.
The bad news? Neither Obama nor congressional
Republicans are actually doing much to address the single-biggest
long-term drain on the economy. But with the states moving forward
on their own — and teachers unions losing influence in education
— this may end up turning out for the best.
