Improper Diagnosis, Reckless Treatment

Abstract

IN THE June Kappan, Marc Tucker summarized the Tough Choices report. We (and others) critiqued it, and he responded. We charged Tucker with trying to stampede policy makers into adopting reckless school reform recommendations by asserting, without evidence, that an emerging international economy made our K-12 schools obsolete and by claiming that adoption of the report's proposals could prevent middle-class living standards from falling. International digital competition is real, but increasing the supply of college graduates will not make wages rise for a group whose earnings are already stagnant. Tough Choices insists that our future competitiveness requires 95% of all students to be college-ready at a new, higher academic standard, but it provides no justification for contradicting the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) projection that fewer than one-third of future jobs will require college degrees at today's lower standard. BLS also expects not more than another quarter or so of new jobs to require some college training. (1) Tough Choices is the sequel to a report issued in 1990 by a predecessor group, which attributed the nation's low productivity growth in the 1970s and 1980s to inadequate American schools. But in the June Kappan we showed that this analysis proved to be spectacularly wrong. Since the mid-1990s, the productivity of American workers (educated in the 1970s and 1980s) has accelerated at historically unprecedented levels and indeed has been rising faster than in any other industrialized nation. This productivity renaissance relied upon the very work force whose skills were criticized in the earlier report. If American middle-class living standards are threatened, we argued, it cannot be because workers lack competitive skills. Rather, the richest Americans have commandeered the fruits of this productivity growth and denied fair shares to the workers, educated in American schools, who have created increased national wealth. (2) middle class, in short, is threatened not by lack of skills but by poor pay for skilled jobs. Social and economic policy reform, not school transformation, must be the remedy for this middle-class squeeze. As we said in June, we are not satisfied with our schools. We are concerned about the academic, cultural, civic, and moral preparedness of today's young people; we consider it urgent to reduce gaps in outcomes that fall along lines of race, ethnicity, and income. But school inadequacies are not generating economic crisis, and so school reforms motivated by false expectations of economic collapse are bound to be misguided. In any field, proper diagnosis is a precondition for effective treatment. In his June response, Tucker belittled our analysis, claiming that Mishel only wanted to deflect attention to economic policies advocated by his institute and that Rothstein only represented the views of educators who resented being blamed for national economic failures. We will not use our space here to respond in kind to this attack on our motives but urge him to stick to the issues in his rejoinder to this article. Tucker also denied our charge that his report sees skill development as virtually the only policy lever for shaping the economy. But here is how he himself summarized the report: The fact is that education holds the key to personal and national economic well-being, more now than at any time in our history (emphasis added). (3) We judge our summary of this theme to be fair. Tucker next claimed that the past decade's productivity surge does not reflect the skills of workers graduating from contemporary American schools; rather, he attributes it to returning World War II veterans educated by the GI Bill and to education advances during the 1950s and 1960s. There is a 50-year lag, he asserted, between educational improvement and productivity growth. While technological change certainly accumulates over many years, returning World War II veterans were in their prime working years back in the 1950s and 1960s. …