Don't Eat the Seed Corn

Abstract

MY FARMING skills extend only as far as the backyard vegetable garden, but I know what it means to eat the seed corn. For whatever reasons people -- or societies -- are driven to such an extreme, they will be consuming their own future. Unfortunately, that is what the Bush Administration's budget is proposing for the several million young people who have already left school or are edging out before graduation. At the U.S. Department of Education, a frantic effort is under way to develop regulations for the new Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which emphasizes children in grades K-8. Its reading initiative and Title I provisions, for example, focus on the early grades. Meanwhile, over at the U.S. Department of Labor, federal officials aren't sweating over what to do about young people who haven't benefited from current reforms (high schools, after all, have changed very little). They just want to phase out or severely reduce the few programs designed to hold on to vulnerable young people. Officials explain that the programs have not proved themselves successful. This is a somewhat disingenuous excuse, considering that the funds, at least for the Youth Opportunity Grants, became available only 18 months ago. The Administration's proposed budget would cut youth programs in the Department of Labor by 11%, most of it taken from the Youth Opportunities Grants. In the new budget, that program would be down to just $45 million from $225 million this fiscal year. The budget would also reduce funding for the youth activities under the Workforce Investment Act, namely the Youth Advisory Councils. In sum, the Bush Administration doesn't seem to care much about young people who are about to enter the work force -- or the streets. So why should anyone except a young person ill prepared for work be concerned? Because these young people are our seed corn. On average, 800,000 young people in this country drop out of high school every year. Over a decade, that's eight million potential workers, students, active citizens, and parents. Moreover, within two years, kindergarten enrollments will begin to decline, and, as the changes in demographics roll through the schools, we can anticipate considerably fewer high school students (except in a few states on the eastern seaboard and a few others in the far West). In a demographic study for the National Association of Secondary School Principals, Harold Hodgkinson comments, If you built schools for the 1.6 million more high school children from 1995 to 2005, many of them will be empty in 10 years. Because of these demographic changes, the growth of the labor force will be down to just 1% annually by 2015 and down to 0.2% by 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In other words, we need to make sure that every young person in this country can be productive. The practical reason is that they will be needed by the economy. And if you anticipate retiring before all this comes to pass, think of who (and how many) will be contributing to your Social Security. Ideally, schools ought to make sure that all students earn at least a high school diploma. But only a handful of schools do, and many urban high schools lose half of their students before graduation day. It will be a long time before such schools have the capacity to keep young people engaged. Yet out in the neighborhoods surrounding these schools there are places and programs that offer hope to young people who are looking for a way back to the main road, according to Dorothy Stoneman, president of YouthBuild USA. Started in East Harlem in the 1970s, this organization provides education, training, and youth development opportunities for young people as they work to refurbish housing in their low-income communities. …