quote: 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In a report, the panel called U.S. schools outdated and said they were failing to prepare students to compete in a global economy.
The suggestions to fix the system are going to seem radical to a lot of people.
quote: 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.
This report was compiled by two dozen ex-Secretaries of Education, leadership from both parties, business executives, and education workers (teachers, administrators).
I think we need to give this report serious attention. I wanted to read it before posting a thread on it, but unlike other commission reports, it isn't available online in pdf format yet, you have to buy it, and I don't have the money to do that.
I think a lot of teachers, especially new ones, will be okay with giving up pension deals if it means more money now. Personally, I'd rather make 10K more in my first year than pension benefits in 40 years. I can spent the next 40 years putting that higher pay into a high yield investment, which will pay off BIG time.
Our education system is a throwback to the 50's, and a global economy demands a globally minded education system. We aren't just shortchanging our kids, we're setting the foundation for the ruination of our economy, and therefore our society, as a whole.
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I'm happy to see the suggestions, but I'm doubtful of some of their doom and gloom.
As noted, our employment is doing fine. We're regaining and more any jobs 'lost' overseas, which isn't surprising, since employment is not and never has been a zero sum game. In fact, we have better employment than almost every country on earth, first world through third world (though its hard to know for certain due to differences in measurement and reporting), including China, India, and most of Europe.
Also, everyone's real wages and standards of living have been going up. The median real wage hasn' t been moving much, but this is because of the rapid inflood of immigrants (who have been adding to the overall economy even when illegal) -- their wages and standard of living, though higher than when in Mexico or other countries, are lower than the median here, offsetting the gains of the existing population in many of the aggreggate statistics (which is why aggreggate statistics are less important in a population with significant inflows or outflows).
I'm particularly worried that we'll take those aspects of our educational system that make us more competitive than other states. The flexibility in learning we value so much, even as we increase our testing, allows for a flexibility of life, employment, and entrepeneurship (along with our relatively simple legal regimes that enable job switching and business creation). Many educational systems are significantly more tracked and regimented within tracks, increasing test scores but reducing flexibility of students.
But as I said, suggestions for improvement are good, and at first glance I agree with many of them. However, trying to farm out schools to independent contractors and at the same time mandating teacher pay increases is a recipe for perverse incentives and corruption. Let the independent contractors set rates and give them flexible budgets so they can pay more as the situation merits if you're going to have independent contractors.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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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quote:This is a prescription to make more plumbers, welders, blue collar workers and such, not doctors, lawyers, or white collar executives.
Please no! I LIKE there not being enough plumbers - it means my husband, with his master's plumbing license, can command a whole lot more money. The shortage of qualified plumbers has been very, very good to us.
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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quote: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.
Nice thinking, Dan. I didn't see how getting one of these technical degrees in school can preclude you from getting one of the more highly esteemed degrees. Human Resource departments all over this wide land are poised to misuse this system.
Generally, I don't like throwing out a good idea merely because of it's potential for misuse. There is something small about betting on the ignorance of others, but you do bring up a good point. I wonder if we worried about students not being prepared for the job market, or rather, are we worried about students not be prepared to be unleashed upon civilization.
The former issue clearly leads to poverty, but the latter issue results in poor marriages, poorly raised children, poor eating habits, poor citizenship which affects our foreign policy and the quality of our public works, and I'm not willing to ignore the latter class of ills in order to teach a kid to properly reassemble a car engine or program in C++.
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I changed my mind and decided I AM going to buy this report when it comes out in a week. It's $15 on Amazon.
But I don't think we have a good enough picture of what the goals or plans are in this report from just that article.
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Actually, given that so many universities have to teach remedial classes to entering freshman, ending HS at 10th grade might be a good idea... HS is doing a lousy job at preparing kids for college anyway.
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quote: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.
Then you need to raise your rates.
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I don't think that ending school in 10th grade is necessarily bad idea, either, but only if we really think about what goes into those years.
quote:quote: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Then you need to raise your rates.
Is that really your knee-jerk reaction?
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If so, first please identify why you think that reaction was "knee-jerk."
If, on the other hand, your intent is to toss off one-sentence insults about another area where I have expertise and then ignore the detailed philosophical response which I write in response, please let me know before I waste time responding to you again.
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It just seemed like something you tossed-off, which is fine, but some people think that a fair rate for running water is a fair rate for running water, regardless of the demand, else it becomes a matter of who has the most disposable income, and that seems a poor way to decide on who gets flush their toilet. I was also a bit interested in your use of the word "need," but hey, the chances of us agreeing on this are so slim that it really doesn't matter.
If you are in the mood, write the long response, no doubt that I and the peanut gallery will be edified, but don't do it purely on my account because I don't care enough.
Then do me the courtesy not addressing me at all. You took some pretty cheap and ignorant shots at a profession which I have made enormous sacrifices to join, then didn't have the courtesy of responding to me.
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Every now and then I abide by the saying, "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all."
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Hide behind that if you want. Most people here aren't fooled. You're sitting in your little tower freely dispensing your judgment on the rest of us and desperately trying to keep out the facts that are contrary to your view of the world.
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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quote: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.
It's because using the force of law is not about morality, it's about practicality, which is fine, but I'd rather not confuse one for the other because I think that conflating the two depreciates how we conceive of morality. It's like how confusing administrators with actual teachers depreciates the work of teachers.
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quote:It's because using the force of law is not about morality, it's about practicality,
Which is not true.
Edit: more accurately, it's about both things as well as host of others.
quote:I think that conflating the two depreciates how we conceive of morality
The one conflating the two is you. For people who appreciate the difference, it's very easy to say "X is illegal by immoral." It's people like you who conflate the two by pretending that a statement that something is legal is a statement that it is moral - ironically, usually by accusing someone like me of conflating the two.
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Irami, last I heard, you were a middleman selling wireless Internet access to cafes. How can you possibly lecture someone providing more useful services on the prices they choose to charge for those services?
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quote:Originally posted by fugu13: Well, most economists think we're a little ways from full employment .
Economists define "full employment" as unemployment under 5%, which it is (and it's dropping, at least for now).
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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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"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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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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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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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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*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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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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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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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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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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fugu, can you tell me something about Japanese mistreatment of Ainu? I'm not familiar with that.
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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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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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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.
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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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quote: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.
You don't get a little queasy about the idea of tracking twelve year olds? Especially since we are using suspect measurements? What if we get it wrong? Or the kids get inspired by something or someone? Or just as likely, the kids on top start resting on their laurels.
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I thought the suggestion was at the tenth grade level? Also, just because you take one track in high school wouldn't mean you could never change your mind.
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"You don't get a little queasy about the idea of tracking twelve year olds?"
Yes, but not fifteen year-olds.
"Especially since we are using suspect measurements?" You mean, academic ones?
"What if we get it wrong? Or the kids get inspired by something or someone?"
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.
"Or just as likely, the kids on top start resting on their laurels."
Why is this just as likely?
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Tenth grade is different. It seems to be a workable solution, as long as everyone gets the same education until tenth grade.
quote:Also, just because you take one track in high school wouldn't mean you could never change your mind.
In my experience, switching tracks isn't the simplest ordeal. It's an ugly process that takes an incredibly strong-willed and knowledgable parent or a kid with a problem with authority, because teachers heartily resent being second-guessed in this matter and administrators don't like changing the rolls.
quote: 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.
Yeah, I think I have a few problems with this sentiment.
quote:"Or just as likely, the kids on top start resting on their laurels."
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. 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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