From Tom Dispatch
By William Astore

Hardly a week goes by without dire headlines about the failure of the American education system. Our students don’t perform well in math and science. The high-school dropout rate is too high. Minority students are falling behind. Teachers are depicted as either overpaid drones protected by tenure or underpaid saints at the mercy of deskbound administrators and pushy parents.

Unfortunately, all such headlines collectively fail to address a fundamental question: What is education for? At so many of today’s so-called institutions of higher learning, students are offered a straightforward answer: For a better job, higher salary, more marketable skills, and more impressive credentials. All the more so in today’s collapsing job market.

Based on a decidedly non-bohemian life — 20 years’ service in the military and 10 years teaching at the college level — I’m convinced that American education, even in the worst of times, even recognizing the desperate need of most college students to land jobs, is far too utilitarian, vocational, and narrow. It’s simply not enough to prepare students for a job: We need to prepare them for life, while challenging them to think beyond the confines of their often parochial and provincial upbringings. (As a child of the working class from a provincial background, I speak from experience.)

And here’s one compelling lesson all of us, students and teachers alike, need to relearn constantly: If you view education in purely instrumental terms as a way to a higher-paying job — if it’s merely a mechanism for mass customization within a marketplace of ephemeral consumer goods — you’ve effectively given a free pass to the prevailing machinery of power and those who run it.

Read more Selling Education

From The NY Times
By Thomas L. Friedman

Speaking of financial crises and how they can expose weak companies and weak countries, Warren Buffett once famously quipped that “only when the tide goes out do you find out who is not wearing a bathing suit.” So true. But what’s really unnerving is that America appears to be one of those countries that has been swimming buck naked — in more ways than one.

Credit bubbles are like the tide. They can cover up a lot of rot. In our case, the excess consumer demand and jobs created by our credit and housing bubbles have masked not only our weaknesses in manufacturing and other economic fundamentals, but something worse: how far we have fallen behind in K-12 education and how much it is now costing us. That is the conclusion I drew from a new study by the consulting firm McKinsey, entitled “The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools.”

Just a quick review: In the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. dominated the world in K-12 education. We also dominated economically. In the 1970s and 1980s, we still had a lead, albeit smaller, in educating our population through secondary school, and America continued to lead the world economically, albeit with other big economies, like China, closing in. Today, we have fallen behind in both per capita high school graduates and their quality. Consequences to follow.

For instance, in the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment that measured the applied learning and problem-solving skills of 15-year-olds in 30 industrialized countries, the U.S. ranked 25th out of the 30 in math and 24th in science. That put our average youth on par with those from Portugal and the Slovak Republic, “rather than with students in countries that are more relevant competitors for service-sector and high-value jobs, like Canada, the Netherlands, Korea, and Australia,” McKinsey noted.

Read more Skinning Dipping

From Tom Dispatch
By Andy Kroll

A few months ago, Bobby Stapleton, a 21-year-old student at the University of Michigan, received a phone call from his younger brother. The good news came first: a senior in high school, he, too, had been accepted by the university, the fourth sibling in his family to have the opportunity to make the move to Ann Arbor from rural Hemlock, Michigan.

Then came the bad news: his brother had no intention of telling their parents, because as Bobby put it, “he knew the money just wasn’t there anymore, and that it wasn’t realistic.” The financial crisis had plunged the Stapleton family into severe debt. At this point, paying Michigan’s modest (by college standards) $11,000 tuition for another child appeared unlikely. As his younger brother told their younger sister, Bobby recalled, “Things were just going to have to be different for the two of them.”

Since that moment, Bobby and his older sisters have tirelessly searched for a way to change that fate. He has sought advice from older relatives who attended the university, met with members of its financial aid office, and explained his brother’s situation to officials at the Michigan Education Trust, a statewide tuition payment program; all this in addition to a full class schedule and a dormitory dining-hall job that often keeps him at work until one or two in the morning. Still, Bobby wasn’t about to give up. “I can truly say that being part of this university is one of the best things that’s ever happened to me.” He was, he swore, going to do everything he could to make sure that his brother and sister had that same opportunity.

Engines of Inequality

Welcome to the other crisis spreading quietly across the country: the crisis of college affordability. Talk to enough students and families on a college campus like the University of Michigan, where I’m a student, and you’ll hear plenty of stories like Bobby Stapleton’s — of families scraping by in increasingly tough times as tuition bills rise, of students working second and third jobs, of newly minted graduates staggering into an ever more jobless world under the weight of tens of thousands of dollars in student-loan debt.

Read more College Affordability

From The Washington Post
By Lois Romano

He may have tanked his tryout for the Boston Celtics, but as President Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan has hit the jackpot: an unprecedented $100 billion at his disposal to try to turn around the nation’s public schools. The 44-year-old career education administrator is juggling a lot of balls as he begins to parcel out stimulus money to the states, tackles the much-maligned No Child Left Behind reauthorization legislation, and figures out how to get rid of bad teachers — and pay the good ones more. The 6-foot-4-inch Duncan met Obama in Chicago, where the two were pickup basketball buddies, and where Duncan headed the 600-school district. He says his family has made a quicker transition to his exalted role in Washington than he expected, and yes, his own children attend public school, in Arlington. But he won’t say where he and the president play ball these days.

Romano: Did President Obama give you some specifics that he wanted you to tackle?

Duncan: He wanted the opportunity to drive up college graduation rates.

Romano: The education budget has been doubled, to $100 billion. Where do you start?

Read more Education

From The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
By Cynthia Tucker

“Made in the USA” doesn’t have the international cachet it once had. James Bond turned in his Aston Martin for a BMW, not a Cadillac. Your beloved flat-screen TV was probably manufactured in mainland China, like your kids’ toys. Your children’s clothes? Probably made in India.

But there’s one product made in the USA that is still highly respected: a college education. While the nation’s most exclusive institutions of higher learning — Harvard, Yale, Duke, Stanford — get the attention of millionaire parents abroad, less affluent foreign students are happy to get into less prestigious American colleges. (Barack Obama’s father, a poor Kenyan, attended the University of Hawaii at Manoa.) Youngsters from Djibouti to Dubai hunger for a college degree made in the USA.

It turns out, though, that American kids are a little less enthusiastic about earning that credential. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Americans no longer lead the world in college participation leading to a bachelor’s degree. While we were first among industrialized nations 20 years ago, we are no longer in the top 10, according to the OECD.

That helps explain why this country is losing its economic hegemony. Americans cannot keep pace with the demands of the 21st century unless our citizens are well-educated. This era demands not only basic literacy but also a broad understanding of history, biology, physics and geography, not to mention the ability to engage in complex reasoning, all of which are encompassed in a good college education.

Those skills won’t insulate you from the ravages of a recession (just ask any out-of-work Wall Streeter), but they do provide a life raft to help ride out the storm.

Read more Education

From The Boston Globe
By Derrick Z. Jackson

Jane Lubchenco’s tenure at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will be a good place to gauge how much lost ground can be reclaimed for science. Her appointment by President-elect Obama to run the administration will be particularly interesting since NOAA is under the Department of Commerce, which will have many lobbyists surely fighting any environmental regulations that come from scientific assessments. It will be challenging because even though the Obama administration is science-friendly in appointments, research funding remains questionable because of the recession.

Lubchenco, a marine scientist at Oregon State, has been president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the International Council for Science and was on the Pew Oceans Commission and the National Science Board under President Clinton. In 1995, she warned that a proposed massive congressional cut in nondefense science funding “has very profound implications for the future of the country.” She told the Oregonian newspaper, “The consequences are likely to be a massive dismantling of a research system that has served us very, very well.”

In 1997, evidence of global overfishing, coastal development and pollution was so profound that a panel of marine scientists that included Lubchenco proposed that 20 percent of the world’s oceans be designated as marine preserves. Only one-quarter of one percent of ocean surface was under protection. Lubchenco, who by then was warning of “ecological tsunamis” in the oceans, said the level of existing protection was “a drop in the bucket, especially relative to the magnitude of the changes that we humans are causing.”

It was no surprise that she was a critic of a Bush administration that denied for eight years the magnitude of human impact on the planet. In 2003, when the Pew Oceans Commission said overfishing and the degraded conditions of America’s rivers and coastlines constituted a “crisis,” Lubchenco said, “We have squandered their natural bounty.” She added, “The system is broken. It’s not working for the fishermen; it’s not working for the fish.”

Read more Science

From The NY Times
By Bob Herbert

Toward the end of an important speech in Washington last month, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, said to her audience:

“Think of a teacher who is staying up past midnight to prepare her lesson plan… Think of a teacher who is paying for equipment out of his own pocket so his students can conduct science experiments that they otherwise couldn’t do… Think of a teacher who takes her students to a ‘We, the People’ debating competition over the weekend, instead of spending time with her own family.”

Ms. Weingarten was raising a cry against the demonizing of teachers and the widespread, uninformed tendency to cast wholesale blame on teachers for the myriad problems with American public schools. It reminded me of the way autoworkers have been vilified and blamed by so many for the problems plaguing the Big Three automakers.

But Ms. Weingarten’s defense of her members was not the most important part of the speech. The key point was her assertion that with schools in trouble and the economy in a state of near-collapse, she was willing to consider reforms that until now have been anathema to the union, including the way in which tenure is awarded, the manner in which teachers are assigned and merit pay.

It’s time we refocused our lens on American workers and tried to see them in a fairer, more appreciative light.

Read more Racing

From TruthDig
By Chris Hedges

The multiple failures that beset the country, from our mismanaged economy to our shredded constitutional rights to our lack of universal health care to our imperial debacles in the Middle East, can be laid at the feet of our elite universities. Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford, along with most other elite schools, do a poor job educating students to think. They focus instead, through the filter of standardized tests, enrichment activities, advanced placement classes, high-priced tutors, swanky private schools and blind deference to all authority, on creating hordes of competent systems managers. The collapse of the country runs in a direct line from the manicured quadrangles and halls in places like Cambridge, Princeton and New Haven to the financial and political centers of power.

The nation’s elite universities disdain honest intellectual inquiry, which is by its nature distrustful of authority, fiercely independent and often subversive. They organize learning around minutely specialized disciplines, narrow answers and rigid structures that are designed to produce certain answers. The established corporate hierarchies these institutions service—economic, political and social—come with clear parameters, such as the primacy of an unfettered free market, and with a highly specialized vocabulary. This vocabulary, a sign of the “specialist” and of course the elitist, thwarts universal understanding. It keeps the uninitiated from asking unpleasant questions. It destroys the search for the common good. It dices disciplines, faculty, students and finally experts into tiny, specialized fragments. It allows students and faculty to retreat into these self-imposed fiefdoms and neglect the most pressing moral, political and cultural questions. Those who defy the system—people like Ralph Nader—are branded as irrational and irrelevant. These elite universities have banished self-criticism. They refuse to question a self-justifying system. Organization, technology, self-advancement and information systems are the only things that matter.

“Political silence, total silence,” said Chris Hebdon, a Berkeley undergraduate. He went on to describe how various student groups gather at Sproul Plaza, the center of student activity at the University of California, Berkeley. These groups set up tables to recruit and inform other students, a practice know as “tabling.”

Read more Best and Brightest

From The Boston Globe
By Derrick Z. Jackson

More spectacular than finally seeing GM, Ford, and Chrysler grovel before Congress would be watching the nation’s college presidents on bended knee. Shaming auto execs out of corporate jets and into hybrids should be a mere prelude to defanging the campus gargoyles, ripping down the ivy, and cutting through the fog of pomp, circumstance, and omnipotence. As Congress scurries to save Detroit, college CEOs are overseeing the tragic diminution of the American Dream.

This week, the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, the nonpartisan think tank on state and national education issues, released a scathing report that found that college tuition and fees have skyrocketed in the last quarter century 439 percent, three times the rise in median family income in the same time period.

The rise of college costs surpassed even the 251 percent hike in medical care costs. In the 1999-2000 school year, the cost of four-year public college represented 18 percent of median family income for the middle quintile, 23 percent for the lower-middle quintile, and 39 percent for the lowest income quintile. Those respective figures are now 25 percent, 33 percent, and 55 percent. They account for grants and scholarships.

We’ve long been told not to spend more than 30 percent of income on housing. Yet college has become another house in our house of cards. The supposed vehicle of class uplift is now quicksand as total student debt has more than doubled in the last decade from $41 billion to $85 billion. The politically correct sloganeering about race and class diversity is a lie. Universities actually give more aid to the richest families. A student from a family making $100,000 or more receives an average grant of $6,200. A student from a family making between $40,000 and $59,999 receives an average grant of $5,500. A student coming out of poverty (under $20,000 parent income) receives only $4,700.

Read more College Presidents

From The Nation
By Katrina Vanden Heuvel

In 2007, over 37 million Americans, or 12.5 percent of the US population, lived below the federal poverty line–$21,200 for a family of four (well below the income truly required to make ends meet in our economy.) And now, as we head into this deepening recession, we’re looking at a jump in the number of people living in poverty.

According to a new report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), based on Goldman Sachs’ projection of a 9 percent unemployment rate by the end of 2009, the number of Americans living in poverty will increase from 7.5 to 10.3 million people, of which 3.3 million total will be poor children, with 1.5 to 2 million more children living in families with incomes below half of the poverty line, or what is called “deep poverty”. (CBPP’s numbers are consistent with the rise in poverty relative to the increase in unemployment over the last three recessions.)

What’s even more ominous about the current recession as compared to those of the past, the CBPP report warns, is the truly depleted state of the safety net: “Because this recession is likely to be deep and the government safety net for very poor families who lack jobs has weakened significantly in recent years, increases in deep poverty in this recession are likely to be severe.”

CBPP points to some early indicators that “poverty is now climbing rapidly.” Food stamp caseloads rose by 2.6 million people between August 2007 and August 2008. In 25 states, at least one in five children is now receiving food stamps. According to the USDA’s annual report on food security, nearly one in eight Americans struggled with hunger in 2007 — which means “36.2 million adults and children… didn’t have the money or assistance to get enough food to maintain active, healthy lives.” 691,000 children “suffered a substantial disruption in the amount of food they typically eat” — a more than 50 percent increase from 2006 and the highest number since 1998. James Weill, president of the Food Research Action Committee, said that the current economic downturn isn’t reflected in the USDA report on hunger and 2008 numbers “almost certainly will be far worse.”

Read more Bread