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A high-profile commission warned Thursday that U.S. workers will lose more jobs overseas and will see their standard of living drop unless dramatic steps are taken to improve how kids are educated.

In a report, the panel called U.S. schools outdated and said they were failing to prepare students to compete in a global economy.

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The new group wants to end high school in 10th grade for many students -- a point at which students would be able to take exams and go to a community college or, in some cases, stay in school and study for more advanced exams that could earn them a place at a four-year college. Somewhat similar systems are in place in other countries.

The report states that by not spending today's resources on 11th- and 12th-graders and by making other reforms, the government could save an estimated $60 billion that could be spent on improvements to the nation's school system.

Those include creating widespread pre-kindergarten programs and boosting teacher salaries.

The commission recommends paying beginning teachers about $45,000 per year, currently the median amount paid to teachers. To help finance the pay boost, the commission recommends moving away from traditional, defined benefit pensions to somewhat less generous retirement plans more commonly found in the private sector.

Another major shift would be to have independent contractors operate schools, though the schools would remain public. States would oversee the funding.

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Originally posted by Lyrhawn:

The new group wants to end high school in 10th grade for many students -- a point at which students would be able to take exams and go to a community college or, in some cases, stay in school and study for more advanced exams that could earn them a place at a four-year college. Somewhat similar systems are in place in other countries.

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This is basically the system in Australia. That particular aspect of our education system seems to work. Often students who leave school after Year 10 go into apprenticeships or study at state run tertiary education centres.
 

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Posted by Euripides (Member # 9315) on :
 
(but I don't know what effect this would have in the US)
 

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Posted by blacwolve (Member # 2972) on :
 
I don't know about other countries, but I'm pretty sure a tracking system implemented in US schools would end up tracking almost exclusively on a socio-economic basis. Maybe other countries don't have the class problems we have here, or don't see them as problems, I don't know.
 

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Posted by Will B (Member # 7931) on :
 
Other countries have much more severe class problems than we do.

The fact that this starts by warning us we'll lose "more jobs overseas" -- at a time when we have full employment despite some 11M illegal immigrants and even more legal ones! shows that the reasoning is going to be seriously flawed.

Not to say that starting "college" at age 16 wouldn't be an improvement. These community colleges would have to teach classes that are currently taught by high schools, but college (not being compulsory, and allowing competition) does a better job.

I don't think they start far enough back, though. Improvements in education shouldn't start in the 11th grade! They should start earlier. Let these new "colleges" compete for students earlier, and we'll see improvements earlier.

It won't save money, of course -- unless the 11th- and 12th-graders booted out of the high school don't get their "college" paid for by government. Which won't happen.
 

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Posted by Dan_raven (Member # 3383) on :
 
Note the committee who sponsored this? Workforce Skills.

This is a prescription to make more plumbers, welders, blue collar workers and such, not doctors, lawyers, or white collar executives.

The schools they are suggesting would not be for Algebra and Calculus. They would be tech schools for the most part, creating a economic divide that could be easilly tracked by the type of degree you carry.
 

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Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
 
Well, most economists think we're a little ways from full employment . The general consensus is that our employment isn't as good as we'd like compared to our own recent history. Compared to the rest of the world, though, our employment knocks nearly everybody's socks off (I think Australia has pretty good employment, and a few of the smaller states).
 

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Posted by Belle (Member # 2314) on :
 

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This is a prescription to make more plumbers, welders, blue collar workers and such, not doctors, lawyers, or white collar executives.

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They would be tech schools for the most part, creating a economic divide that could be easilly tracked by the type of degree you carry.

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Since he started his company eight years ago, we've always turned away more work than we took because of the sheer numbers of jobs needing to be done and not enough qualified people to do them.

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Since he started his company eight years ago, we've always turned away more work than we took because of the sheer numbers of jobs needing to be done and not enough qualified people to do them.
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Then you need to raise your rates.

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Is that really your knee-jerk reaction?

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Do you really intend to have a discussion?

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I don't care enough.

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I'd like to know how you lack something nice to say about the general concept that the level of morality people should aspire to is higher than the level of morality we should punish people for not achieving.

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It's because using the force of law is not about morality, it's about practicality,

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I think that conflating the two depreciates how we conceive of morality

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Originally posted by Will B:

Other countries have much more severe class problems than we do.

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Talk about generalisations.
 

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Posted by Will B (Member # 7931) on :
 
Are all generalizations bad?
 

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Posted by Euripides (Member # 9315) on :
 
That one is, because it's blatantly incorrect.
 

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Posted by Will B (Member # 7931) on :
 

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Originally posted by fugu13:
Well, most economists think we're a little ways from full employment .

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Economists define "full employment" as unemployment under 5%, which it is (and it's dropping, at least for now).
 

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Posted by Will B (Member # 7931) on :
 
No, of course it's not blatantly incorrect. Class got left behind in Europe (except in the South, where it got smashed in the 1860's). We do have income level, of course, as a substitute.
 

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Posted by Elizabeth (Member # 5218) on :
 
"They would be tech schools for the most part, creating a economic divide that could be easilly tracked by the type of degree you carry."

I don't buy this logic, which assumes that we don't already divide ourselves along various lines. We always have, we do, and we always will, because we are a competition-based society pretending to be cooperative.

What I see after years of working in alternative education is a large group of very intelligent young students who were not academic, had no desire to achieve a higher academic status, and just wanted to go to work, or to go to a school which would help them get a better job.

By the time they squeak through high school, or drop out(usually in tenth or eleventh grade), their sense of worth is severely diminished.

There is a stigma already.
 

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Posted by Katarain (Member # 6659) on :
 
To many of us Americans are underemployed. I know I sure as heck am. I don't think that can count as full employment, no matter what the economists define it as.
 

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Posted by Katarain (Member # 6659) on :
 
Maybe if students didn't have to drag through 4 years of high-school classes they find uninteresting to get a chance to major in something they love in college, they'd be more likely to go on and get those fancy degrees.
 

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Posted by Euripides (Member # 9315) on :
 
Will,

What do you define as class?

If you don't consider socio-economic strata to constitute class, then you've ignored a very large proportion of the rest of the world.

Ever been to Australia? The only notion of 'class' which remains here would be along the lines of income and education (which would apply for any country). If you take social stigma and racism into consideration, the Aborigines can still be considered oppressed, but the situation is not dissimilar to that of Native Americans. Overall, Australia's and the US' economic demographics are remarkably similar. And in fact, if you calculate the Gini coefficient (a measure of income inequality) for the world, the US doesn't rate as well as many Scandinavian or central European countries, and even Japan (a surprise for me).

Now if you said that America was the first nation founded on the principle that class should not exist, I would heartily agree.
 

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Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
 
*points at post about economists not thinking we're at full employment, and in fact thinking we're a bit worse than we should be in comparison to our recent history*

Will: no, economists define full employment as the amount of unemployment that results from the natural friction of people leaving and finding jobs. The number used to be considered around five percent, but economists revised it significantly lower after it became evident that it was from actual statistics.
 

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Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
 
Euripides: Australia is an exception to many cases .

The classism he's talking about is the least part income-related.

I think the extreme stratification of muslim immigrants in many scandinavian countries, for instance, speaks directly to the classism Will is talking about. Then we could begin to talk about how immigrants (particularly Asian ones), or Ainu, or the Japanese sub-class are treated in Japan, which is even worse.

So as you see, the sorts of classism he's talking about have nothing to do with income equality. Moreover, in many of the countries with higher gini indexes, our average income is so much higher that its almost a silly comparison -- take a look at the gini indexes in Africa; this also applies to most of central europe. They're more equal at being poor; our poor people might be a lot poorer than our rich people, but they're still at least as well off (and often more well off) than the poor people in central europe and africa.

Even considering places of comparable overall income the gini index doesn't mean much, because people all throughout our economy have become better off, but we've sustained a lot more immigration (than, say, Canada). Additionally, we have a significantly higher percentage of high earners.

These factors combine to make gini a very poor measure for anything beyond the statistics it collates -- it means very little to say that Egypt is signficantly 'more equal' than, say, England, when I can guarantee you that most of those people in Egypt would far rather have their economy be like the English economy than the Egyptian economy, income inequality be darned (and cross-stitched).
 

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Posted by Euripides (Member # 9315) on :
 
Australia is one of many exceptions to Will's generalisation.

Are you saying that America doesn't have its own parallels to the Scandinavian stigma against Muslims or Japanese treatment of Asian immigrants or Ainu?

We aren't talking about poverty per se, but class along socio economic lines. In that respect, the gini index is a fairly good indicator, and the average standard of living doesn't tell us much of anything (about the level of classism). In fact, many small countries with extreme poverty gaps would show fairly generous 'average' standards of living.
 

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Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
 
No, America doesn't have anything that significantly parallels Scandinavian stigma against Muslims or Japanese treatment of Asian immigrants or Ainu. While there are definite class issues (which are growing worse in some ways), you would be hard pressed to find any coherent category group of people in the US excluded from the majority's social norms with frightening consistency, whereas that is the case with those examples.

The gini index is a horrible measure of class issues. We're not talking about class as an outcome of inequality, we're talking more about class as inequal social treatment regardless of income equality or inequality. To a large extent, we're talking about racism, something that's a far worse problem in most of the world than it is in the US, sadly. It measures the separation of society along income, but that says almost nothing about class situations -- for instance, Japan's stellar gini index doesn't reveal a thing about the absolutely appalling treatment of the ainu or burakumin.
 

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Posted by Will B (Member # 7931) on :
 
The US (and Oz, and Canada, and some others -- immigrant nations) don't have class per se. The fact that we confuse income level with class shows how foreign the concept of "class" is to us.
 

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Posted by Will B (Member # 7931) on :
 
fugu, can you tell me something about Japanese mistreatment of Ainu? I'm not familiar with that.
 

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Posted by Euripides (Member # 9315) on :
 
I didn't say the gini index was an indicator of classism. I said it was an fairly good indicator of classism "along socio economic lines".

I would disagree on your point about discrimination in the US. Your Japanese and Scandinavian examples are social prejudices, not legal ones (not to belittle the problem), and the US has its fair share. Muslims, Native Americans, gay people, even African Americans still encounter racism and exclusion from "social norms" in a consistent way, depending upon where in the States they are (it's a big country).

If you still disagree, I'll go back to the example of Australia. I concede that the Native American movement is a step ahead of the Aboriginal rights movement, but otherwise the class issues here are similar or less severe than those in the States.
 

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Posted by blacwolve (Member # 2972) on :
 
I don't know what you all were talking about, I was talking about socio-economic class. Which is closely tied to race, but isn't the same thing.

Maybe in countries that have tracking they don't care that it significantly hampers a person's chance to change socio-economic classes. America was built on the dream of every child doing better than their parents. Tracking would largely destroy that dream. If that's ok with you, fine, but I think it should be acknowledged as a consequence.
 

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Posted by Euripides (Member # 9315) on :
 
Will, most of Europe's class systems were built along economic and hereditary rather than racial or ethnic lines. The two main differences between classes then and now are that the divisions are less severe, and that movement between classes is possible. The definition of class is openly debatable; if you want to provide a working definition, we can debate which countries fit the criteria.

Some background information on discrimination against the Ainu.
 

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Posted by scholar (Member # 9232) on :
 
Why would tracking destroy the dream anymore than the current system? You are being tracked based on your interest and performance. Right now, those with low performance and interest still don't go to college and move up. Tracking atleast they'll get some career training. Also, my high school had trade school diplomas as an option and I knew many people who would get a cosmotoloy degree and then cut hair to pay for college.
 

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Posted by Irami Osei-Frimpong (Member # 2229) on :
 

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Tracking at least they'll get some career training. Also, my high school had trade school diplomas as an option and I knew many people who would get a cosmotoloy degree and then cut hair to pay for college.

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Also, just because you take one track in high school wouldn't mean you could never change your mind.

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Then those kids get off their butts and show they are capable of the effort that teachers put forth, and move on accordingly, or they go on to make a ton more money than the academically-tracked students.

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"Or just as likely, the kids on top start resting on their laurels."

Why is this just as likely?

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Australia is one of many exceptions to Will's generalisation.

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Originally posted by Dagonee:

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Australia is one of many exceptions to Will's generalisation.

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Do you deny that other countries have worse class issues than the U.S.?

He didn't say "all others." He said others.

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Originally posted by fugu13:

Excluded from social norms in a consistent way? As far as I can tell that's not so in the US, in every place I've been in the US for any moderate length of time I've seen group of friends that crossed racial, religious, and sexual orientation boundaries.

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It is also essential to recognize that discrimination is not a problem only in Japan, but one that plagues all nations in various forms. When we in our movement meet people abroad, some of them tell us triumphantly about "the discrimination you have in Japan against Koreans and Burakumin." They need to be asked what they are doing about discrimination in their own countries. In the United States, for example, there is discrimination against blacks, Latinos, and people of Arab descent. I want to ask Americans what they are doing as individuals to deal with this problem. If they aren't doing anything, we have no common ground for discussion. If, on the other hand, they are doing something, then we can see how our efforts differ, and discuss them. For journalists and others to speak about discrimination against Koreans in Japan and blacks in America only to show off their knowledge does nothing to solve the problem.

As for Japan's relations with the countries whose people that have been the object of discrimination, things were fine between Japan and South Korea as long as Japan was considered "groovy" in South Korea during the " Korea wave" here and the " Japan boom" there. But as soon as South Korea mentions the Yasukuni problem, trouble starts. Similarly, relations with China were fine as long as people there were talking about marvelous Toyotas and economic cooperation between the two nations. But as soon as Beijing mentions the history of aggression, anti-Chinese sentiment spreads in Japan. Something similar happens in America when the Palestinian issue is raised. Such tendencies must be resisted wherever in the world they occur.

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No, I don't deny that. But when someone says "Other countries have much more severe class problems than we do" without any qualifying statement or caveat, I assume it means 'all others'.

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Wouldn't Will have said "I meant 'most' other countries" as soon as I started arguing about it and providing counter-examples if that was not the case?

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