Did the Public Schools Kill Mickey Mouse?

IF YOU WORK in the public schools you’ve heard these lines a thousand times. America’s schools are failing. We’re not preparing kids to compete in a global economy.

The nation’s young are doomed.

Well—doomed if we don’t jam Common Core down their throats—doomed if we don’t get Teach for America “game-changers” into classrooms across the land—and doomed, doomed, doomed, if we don’t let Big Corporations break the public school monopoly and start schools and run them according to healthy business principles. That is: piling up profits for Big Corporations.

I’m increasingly having my doubts. According to multiple sources the U.S. economy is not on the verge of collapse. Housing starts last year were the highest since 2007. The stock market is up 10,000 points since March 9, 2009, when it bottomed out. Car sales set a record for numbers, 17.5 million units sold, and value, $570 billion worth of new wheels, in 2015. Almost 300,000 jobs were added in December. 

According to Forbes the numbers were good all year:

The numbers were also impressive in 2014. According to CNN 2.95 million jobs were added, the best figure since 1999.

Of course, we’ve also been told repeatedly that teachers in Finland are doing a stupendous job—whereas our teachers are chopped reindeer liver! Finnish schools are amazing! Everyone graduates! Some kids graduate twice!! Boy, oh, boy, everyone in Finland is prepared to compete in a global economy.

That’s why Finnish unemployment stood at 9.4 % in November 2015, almost double the U.S. rate.

THE BIGGEST, BADDEST school reformers keep insisting we must prepare students to compete in a global economy. But what if problems facing U.S. workers today—stagnant wages, declining benefits, lost pensions—have nothing to do with the system of education? Let’s consider scores for the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) for 2012, the last year available.

Sure. Finland looked good:

True…the United States was mired in the middle of the pack:

But look at Mexico! Mexican teachers weren’t exactly tearing it up when it came to preparing kids to compete in a global economy. They finished 53^rd in mathematics, 55^th in science, and 52^nd in reading.

Yet none of it mattered. The Mexican unemployment rate at the end of 2015 was just under four percent. That means Mexico was doing better than a number of countries scoring in the top ten on PISA tests, including The Netherlands, 6.6%, Canada, 7.1%, Ireland, 8.8%, and Poland, 9.8%.

And Finland, too.

WE KNOW JOBS in the U.S. auto industry rebounded between 2009 and 2013, from 560,000 to 690,000, a 23% bump. But the educational preparation of students had little to do with the jump. Jobs in Mexican auto plants soared during those years, from 368,000 to 589,000, a gain of 60%. We know, too, since 2009, that U.S. wages in the auto sector have fallen by 12.7%. It doesn’t take a renowned economist to explain that teachers are blameless in all of this. Jobs in the auto industry drained from the U.S., not because our students aren’t prepared to compete and Mexican students are. It boils down to manufacturing costs in the U.S. (wages plus benefits) which averaged $35.67 per hour in 2013. Companies could send jobs to Mexico and spend $6.36.

The idea that bad U.S. schools are to blame for current economic woes is absurd on its face and harmful in effect. Do we really believe, for example, that it’s going to turn out great if we let Big Corporations sink their greedy claws into the schools? To put it plainly, the people who run the Big Corporations are the people we should be worried about. From steel to electronics to women’s underwear, the story is the same, of jobs lost, sent overseas.

In 1992 U. S. textile and apparel industries employed 1.8 million workers in the USA. Fourteen years later 576,000 jobs remained. Were teachers in Bangladesh, where many of those jobs ended up, doing really great? In 2013 workers in the textile and apparel industries there saw a whopping 77 % increase in wages and benefits. It had to be the schools! And the teachers! And maybe it had to do with the fact that, even with that raise, workers in Bangladesh were earning an average of $67.40 per month.

In the end, if we want to help America’s next generation we can start by focusing on the hypocrisy underlying the blame-the-schools game. We can expose the lies. We need to point the finger in a proper direction and elect men and women who want to protect the American middle class.

It might even help if we stopped buying goods and services from Big Corporations that keep outsourcing jobs.

ACCORDING TO THE Economic Policy Institute, between 2001 and 2013, 3.2 million American jobs were eliminated or displaced as a result of a trade imbalance with China. Who then, we should ask, loves producing in and/or buying Chinese-made products and selling them to us? Who loves doing business in China even if the Chinese government arrests a hundred human rights lawyers in a single weekend? Who loves sucking up to communist officials, building “good business relationships,” even when those officials kidnap publishers who criticize corrupt communist rule? And which Big Corporations are only too happy to turn a blind eye, if profits are high, when China’s chief of naval operations warns the U.S. is in danger of touching off a war with “provocative acts” in the South China Sea?

Who loves doing business with China? Walmart does. Loews Hardware does. Apple does, too.

The Big Corporations cry in their beer over all the “lousy” graduates our schools send their way. “Oh, we do wish we could hire more of them!” they wail. “But, they’re just not well-enough prepared.”

Also: they want to earn more than $67.40 per month.

So let’s turn our attention, finally, to the Magic Kingdom and see how this line of hooey almost always plays out. Last fall, Disney Corporation cooked up an elaborate cost-cutting scheme. Disney would hire an outsourcing firm in India to send 250 workers to Florida, all on temporary visas. Once here they would be trained by their American counterparts, the very workers the U.S. public schools supposedly cannot produce. Disney would get rid of the American workers, send the Indians home, and let them work from a call center overseas. “I just couldn’t believe they would fly people in to sit at our desks and take over our jobs,” said one newly-unemployed American worker. 

YET THEY DID. And if some Big Corporate type can ever figure out how to outsource Mickey’s job, good old Mickey will be out on his ear.

Don’t let yourself be fooled by those who keep trying to pin the blame for economic woes on America’s public schools. 

Sorry, Mickey, we're outsourcing your job!

America's Teachers Stink Up the Place Again!

I'm a former teacher.  So it's hard to have to face up to the facts about how bad America's teachers really are.  In fact, it can be downright depressing.  Time for a glass of spiked eggnog, I suppose.

Even the liberal New York Times piled on recently, in a story titled "Death Knell for the Lecture:  Technology as a Passport to Personalized Education."

The focus of the story was actually the promise of internet teaching--but to make internet teaching sound like the solution you had to first identify the problem.  In the first paragraph, then, we learned that among developed countries the United States ranked 55th in quality of elementary math and science education, 20th in high school completion rate and 27th in the fraction of college students receiving undergraduate degrees in science or engineering. 

Bad schools and bad teaching, obviously. 

The point was simple:  We needed to replace bad teachers with superior internet lessons.  Or we needed to replace bad teachers with cardboard cutouts or mannequins or maybe lamp posts.  Whatever.  We're 55th among developed nations!

It makes you wonder, though.  What do these kinds of lists actually prove?  I decided to do a little sleuthing. 

If we use the same simple approach, we uncover a variety of chilling problems that demand immediate internet action. Online cops, anybody?  In a recent survey by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development the United States finished dead last (cheap pun absolutely intended), 32nd out of thirty-two advanced nations, when it came to murder rates.  And we're dead last by six feet and a mile.  The Netherlands fell to tenth with one murder per 100,000 population.  Finland finished one step above us, in 31st, with 2.5 murders.  The United States landed in the morgue with 5.2 murders per 100,000 population.

Clearly:  worst cops in the world.

According to another chilling survey we ranked 30th out of thirty advanced nations in obesity rates.  So what do we learn from studying this chart?

We learn that America has absolutely the worst dieticians in the civilized world.  Online dieting advice probably represents the last hope for fat people in the District of Columbia and all the fifty states.

Maybe we should jail more teachers?

Thank god, though, for America's judges!  Clearly the best in the world.  Where do you think we stand in rates of incarceration?  Not 20th, for god sakes, not 27th.  Certainly not 55th.  No!  We're #1.  Liechtenstein has the worst judges, with only 19 people per 100,000 behind bars (you figure their cops must be too inept to catch anyone).  Japan (58) and South Korea (94) beat us in education but their judges are pathetic, and probably need a few internet lessons on how to run an effective justice system.  China?  Failing badly.  Only 122 prisoners.  Mexico?  No good.  Only 200.  Puerto Rico finishes in 35th place (303 prisoners) out of 212 nations; but they're just copying us.  Grenada is #13 with 423, The Seychelles # 6 with 507, and Rwanda is #2 with 595.

Thank god we live in the United States of America, with the best jurists in the world--maybe in the universe!  We lock up 743 people for every 100,000 in population.

That's what simple lists prove--and when I get the first Pulitzer prize ever awarded to a blogger, you can say, "I knew him before he became a famous celebrity and his head got all swelled." 

And the first time I meet Lindsay Lohan at some big Hollywood party, you know what I'm going to say?  "Baby, you need to think seriously about emigrating. Yeah. Liechtenstein would be cool."


For even more chilling statistics please go to:  "Numbers Don't Lie:  Our Teachers (and Doctors) Are Failing." 

If you're a teacher (or a teacher's friend) consider spreading the word about this blog, or becoming a "follower" (not in any cult-like sense). 

I intend to speak for all good teachers whenever I can.

How About Better Parents?

If you missed it, an editorial in the New York Times yesterday, by Thomas L. Friedman, "uncovered" an ugly truth.  Apparently, parents matter when it comes to education!

As Homer Simpson likes to say, "D'oh!"

If you've been reading my blog you know my intent, in part, is to defend good teachers--by far the majority.  Still, I admit:  I've seen some bad ones.  I once worked with an educator who was so unmotivated, you wondered:  If he died at his desk, would students notice the difference between rigor mortis and his normal level of "activity?"  Or would decomposition have to set in?

Yes.  Let's get rid of bad teachers.  In fact, let's say you could get rid of them all today. 

You'd still have the same Continental Divide in education.  You can't make the Rocky Mountains disappear, no matter how hard you flog America's public school teachers.  You can take away their tenure, if you like, and have all the vouchers and charter schools you want.  But you still have good parents and you still have bad ones----and more than a few terrible ones--and therein lies the problem which NONE of our education experts ever address.  Michelle Rhee?  She says it's all teachers.  Arne Duncan?  Same.  Joel I. Klein in New York City?  Yep:  teachers.  Davis Guggenheim in his movie, Waiting for Superman?  In his celluloid world only good parents and grandparents exist. 

So, sure, the problem must be crappy teachers. 


Who'd have imagined?
Parents who read to children at home
or make sure they have books
have children who score higher on
PISA tests.

Friedman, however, cites evidence to prove that--yes--the world is round.  A just-released study by the Program for International Student Assesssment finds that even accounting for variables like race and economic status, children of parents who read to them regularly when they are young, who ask questions about what school was like every day, who check on homework and talk up the idea of getting into college score significantly higher on the PISA tests.

As Friedman notes, in recent years "we've been treated to reams of op-ed articles about how we need better teachers in our public schools and, if only the teachers' unions would go away, our kids would score like Singapore's on the big international tests....But here's what some new studies are showing:  We need better parents.  Parents more focused on their children's education can also make a huge difference in a student's achievement."

Again, we all know good teachers matter.  Still, the evidence has been there all along--and I've been thinking about this issue since 1981, at least, when President Reagan and his advisors first started talking about vouchers and how they would cure all the problems in U. S. education.

In fact, for those who believe vouchers and charter schools are the answer, here's an old bedtime story from that era and you can read it to your children, which will help then when they go to school:

Once upon a time, when the argument for vouchers was new (January 1981) there lived a family in Augusta, Maine. There was no evil stepmother in this story. No mom, either. The father, Willard Radley, was no handsome prince. Mr. Radley had four sons. His problem was not that he required vouchers. His problem was that he produced sperm. 

The boys’ problem wasn’t that they needed vouchers, either. Their problem was that Willard was their dad. 

An investigation began in April 1980, after Ernest Radley, 7, was struck and killed by a car. Ernest’s brothers, ages 5 to 9, laid out a shocking tale for police. Mr. Radley had “induced his children to commit a variety of acts that would allow him to collect insurance money.” 

To be specific:  he ordered them to run into streets and take hits so he could take the profits.

In the real world there are no fairy-tale godmothers and vouchers are not magic wands.  Thirty years later, the argument for vouchers still founders on the same rock.

TOMORROW WE LOOK AT BAD PARENTS IN RECENT NEWS AND ASK:  HOW DO WE HELP KIDS WHO ABSOLUTELY NEED HELP THE MOST?

DO I HEAR:  PARENTAL VOUCHERS, ANYONE????