The Two Nations in Education

How come if the US education system is so poor, asks Robert Samuelson, that the economy is so good? How do you answer the following riddle:

Why do Americans do so badly on international educational comparisons and yet support an advanced economy?

I know. The answer to the riddle is simple: Democrats and Republicans. Democrats are the cause of the lousy school system, and Republicans are the cause of the advanced economy. But let us allow Samuelson to suggest a more nuanced explanation.

The short answer is that the US has two systems for the education of the American people.

In trying to explain the riddle, let me offer a distinction between the U.S. school system and the American learning system.

The school system is the formal system of schools and colleges. What some of us call the “education blob.”

The American learning system is more complex. It's mostly post-high school and, aside from traditional colleges and universities, includes the following: community colleges; for-profit institutes and colleges; adult extension courses; online and computer-based courses; formal and informal job training; self-help books.

Exhibit A in the learning system is the for-profit University of Phoenix founded in 1976.

Now it has about 300,000 students (half taking online courses and half attending classes in 163 U.S. locations). The average starting age: 34.

Samuelson reckons that “the American learning system” is effective for two main reasons. As he puts it:

• First, it provides second chances.
  
• Second, it's job-oriented.
  

What we Americans need to think about is how to transfer the successful features of the American leaning system over to the US school system. Problem is that the US school system costs a ton of money and it doesn’t deliver too much to the bottom line.

(No I don’t mean eevil capitalist profits. I mean outcomes, as in educated, productive people.)

My own view is, first, that there is a lot of value in getting basic literacy and numeracy, but that parents understand that so deeply that we don’t need the government enforcing it.

Second, I think that most teenagers should be out in the job market. And it wouldn’t hurt if they were experiencing some mild-to-moderate exploitation. Because that is what will get them off their duffs and into some job-oriented learning.

Third, I’m inclined to support some sort of government-backed second-chance operation. As bureaucratic and unionized as community colleges have become, they do perform an important function. Probably it’s a function that would be better performed by a private-sector, government-subsidized operation.

As for the current US schools sector. You tell me: What’s the point?

The Real Plame Story

For perennial hawk Frank J. Gaffney Jr. the astonishing thing about the Plame game was the identification of leaker Richard Armitage as “no partisan gunslinger.” What do you mean, he writes.

Rich Armitage in truth is the consummate partisan gunslinger. It's just that his partisanship is... the other sense of a partisan: one who wages war from behind enemy lines.

But that is not what astonishes me. What astonishes me is that the unmasking of Armitage as the leaker who put the name of Valerie Plame, CIA wife of former Ambassador Wilson into the public square unmasks something much bigger. “A conspiracy so vast...” as the saying went in another time when the loyalty of the State Department was in question.

It shows that the State Department has been blocking and hindering the Bush Administration’s foreign policy ever since 9/11, and that nobody has paid the price for this disloyalty.

Indeed, it is the Bushies who have paid the price with three years of investigations and humiliations—while everyone else looked on and sniggeringly knew what had really happened all the time.

I would say that many senior revolving-door Republicans, the kind who occupy presidential sub-cabinet appointments in a Republican adminsitration, are going to be taking a long, slow look at the State Department and CIA operations of the past few years. The next Republican president will have a State Department task group whose job it will be to make sure, at any cost, that enough of the president’s men get jobs at State to keep it on-side, or at least prevent it from actively working to sabotage the president’s foreign policy.

Don't Look For Education Reform From Within

When you have been president of Harvard, as Derek Bok has been, or dean of Harvard College, as Harry Lewis has been, you ought to have some ideas about how to fix higher education.

But according to Robert Kagan himself a former president of Yale, neither Derek Bok in Our Underachieving Colleges nor Harry R. Lewis in Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education has a clue what to do about the “imperial faculty.”

They wield their statistics and show how much trouble colleges are in. And they understand it is a problem of leadership.

Both Harry Lewis and Derek Bok have entered a devastating judgment on contemporary university leadership — more devastating, and more self-incriminating, than they appear to know.

But neither of them are really willing to tackle the real problem, an education system taken over by its producers.

As things stand now, no president appears capable of taming the imperial faculty; almost none is willing to try; and no one else from inside the world of the universities or infected by its self-serving culture is likely to stand up and say “enough,” or to be followed by anyone if he does. Salvation, if it is to come at all, will have to come from without.

But this is hardly surprising. When people have the power to control their terms of employment they abuse that power damnably. The only thing that gets the powerful to reform is the threat of disaster, the moment when Attila the Hun gallops over the horizon.

That moment seems as yet a long way off.

Mortgage Moms Feel the Heat

Back in the Nineties it was the Soccer Moms who voted for Bill Clinton. Then after 9/11 it was the Security Moms who voted for President Bush.

Now, according to Jeffrey H. Birnbaum and Chris Cillizza in the Washington Post, it’s the Mortgage Moms, people who are up their eyeballs in debt.

Flat wages and rising debt nationally have converged to leave millions of middle-class households feeling acutely vulnerable to bumps in their financial planning.

Debt. The numbers are huge.

The amount of mortgage debt alone has more than doubled since 2000, to nearly $9 trillion.
...
Among the most exposed are those who bought into one of the great fads in mortgage lending in recent years -- adjustable rates. Next year, $1 trillion worth of adjustable-rate mortgages -- about 11 percent of all outstanding mortgage debt -- is scheduled to readjust to a higher interest rate for the first time, according to LoanPerformance, a research company.

Right now we are at the stage in the business cycle where people are still talking about a “soft landing.” Humans are, by their nature, hopeful.

But that puff of smoke you see when an airplane lands at your local international airport is a reminder that on any landing, soft or hard, someone gets burned.

And the Mortage Moms, who are getting burned by the ratcheting adjustable mortgage rates, are not likely to be voting for the party in power this fall.

French Ex-pats in London

The French were already having a rough summer, with presidential hopeful Nicolas Sarkozy advising them to get a clue in his new book Témoignage (Testimony).

But now comes Marc Levy with his bestselling novel

Mes Amis Mes Amours, the story of two divorced Parisian men who move to the UK to raise their children. The plot was really just a framing device for Levy’s real purpose: a love letter to his adopted home of London.

What? A Frenchman in love with Britland? Certainly. As Levy tells Giles Hattersley, “England is so marvellous!”

The French are not amused. In a recent debate on French radio

It might be acceptable, they conceded, to live in London for some high-paying job, but the idea of crossing the Channel to improve on l’art de vivre was anathema.

So sit down in London at a café

on Bute Street, known affectionately among London’s large French population as Frog Alley. This evening, in the shadow of the Lycée Français, the bookshops and boulangeries are full of yummy mamans buying their children ice-creams and talking French.

Frog Alley? You mean the French ex-pats in Britland have a sense of humor? This is something I have to see.

Want more? Here is Levy again.

Paris is like a dead city with no progress while everything here [in London] has the buzz.

Or this, on French women. Too many of them adopt

the “Ce n’est pas possible” attitude as a life philosophy... that power can only come with saying ‘non’. They say it without thinking, all the time, every day, to everyone they meet. It’s like they think, “Lets start with ‘non’, have a think, then if we change our minds we can say ‘non’ to ‘non’.

Whereas British women, by all accounts...

Dependency Ratio Hits WSJ

Earlier this week I criticized an article by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker. In the article Gladwell criticized the notion of a company defined-benefit pension plan. It could never work because of the natural changes in the “dependency ratio” between workers and non-workers.

But I critiqued the notion that the dependency ratio is out of our control. The dependency ratio is only fixed because we chose to fix it, politically. When it comes to the crunch, children could work and so could older people (Disclosure: I’m 60).

Not, you understand, that I’d like to be working at 70. I’d hate it.

Today Ron Gettelfinger, president of the United Auto Workers, gets his say in the Wall Street Journal. Right on Malcolm, he writes.

[I]t makes no sense to transfer these obligations [of pensions and health insurance] to individual households. We need to... protect and develop well-funded public programs which cover every man, woman, and child in America.

Well, you can see where Ron is going. More taxes and more political control in America. But it doesn’t change the basic problem. Whatever benefits are promised or are paid, they have to come out of the present economy. And the more you “fix” things with public programs and the like, the more of a crash you’ll get when extravagant promises can’t be paid.

That is why it is a good idea to get people to declare, by their spending and savings patterns, just how much a retirement pension and health care means to them.

Everyone is in favor of a pension or health care that costs them nothing. The question is, how much are people prepared to sacrifice for future income and health care?

President Bush Makes His Case

Yesterday at the American Legion convention in Salt Lake City President Bush began a series of speeches to bolster support for the war on terror.

Earlier in the week Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld created controversy by delivering a “bad cop” speech accusing the president’s critics of “moral confusion.” But a day later Mr. Bush got to make “good cop” in which he laid out his case in positive terms without descending to blaming his critics.

In The New York Times Anne E. Kornblut and Sheryl Gay Stolberg made it clear that Bush’s attempt to link all fronts in the war on terror together was wrong.

In making the case that the war in Iraq is “the central front in our fight against terrorism,” the president linked Iraq, the summer battles between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon and the growing nuclear threat in Iran under the general rubric of his freedom agenda.



At the same time, he placed various factions of terrorists — Sunnis who swear allegiance to Al Qaeda, Shiite radicals who join groups like Hezbollah and so-called homegrown terrorists — under one umbrella.



Experts said that might be overstating the facts.



“‘Network of radicals’ suggests they are actually connected in some practical fashion, and that’s obviously not the case,” said Steven Simon, a State Department official in the administrations of President Bill Clinton and Mr. Bush’s father.

Well, maybe. But there is no doubt that we are engaged in a war against all of these forces, all of whom regard the United States as the Great Satan and all of whom are actively using military force against the United States.

And that is a truth that hardly needs overstating.

It is true that President Bush is trying to gin up support for his policies right before an election. But since the ongoing war requires the continuing support of the American people, he is bound to work to secure our approval at election time. It is by elections, after all, that we the people set the broad outlines of the policy of the government of the United States.