Skills Commission Wants to Centralize Education

The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce has issued a report on the nation’s education system, entitled “Tough Choices or Tough Times.” Recognizing that the bureaucratic system set up a century ago is not exactly best practice, the report admits that

our education and transing systems were built for another era, an era in which workers needed only a rudimentary education.

So the commissioners do not propose just a modest reform of the current system. Oh no.

The one thing that is indispensible is a new system.

Brilliant, eh? After the total politicization of the education process into systematized bureaucracy for the last century, after a radical restructuring of big business into flattened, responsive, agile market-driven value maximizers, a blue-ribbon commission proposes for education: Centralization!

The core of their proposals is to cut back compulsory school attendance to 16. But to get out of high school students will need to pass a State Board Qualifying Examination. Then they will either go to an Upper Secondary Academic Program or a Regional Vocational School, Community or Technical College. After 2-3 years of study, students will take another examination, their choice of one of the following:

1. International Baccalaureate Exams
   
2. State Board Transfer Examination
   
3. Advanced Placement Exams
   
4. Technical Exams
   

So, in recognition that the current system of high school graduation is meaningless, because schools allow children to graduate who are not up to standard, we will replace the broken tests with new ones.

Given the current uproar over “high-stakes” testing, we can anticipate that the minute the new tests are in place teachers and parents will start to complain that the tests are too hard and that they are hurting little Johnny’s positive self-esteem.

The problem with the current system is the problem with all bureaucratic systems. First of all, it assumes that we know what kind of education system we need. That’s why it is such a failure. And being a government program it has been completely captured by the producer interest of administrators and teachers.

The reason that business reformed out of the Detroit Behemoth model of organization into the the flexible, decentralized model is that nobody knows where the market is going next. If you have a big ponderous system in place you will never be able to adapt to new market conditions in time.

So why does the commission want to repeat the error of the twentieth century with a new rigid centralized, politicized system?

Here’s a clue for the commissioners. The great corporations of 1900 are almost all gone. Disappeared. Broke. Liquidated. That’s why the United States is the most productive country in the world. But the great educational institutions are all still here. Oh, they’ve merged and combined somewhat, but they remain essentially unreformed. That’s why the US educational system is a vast, centralized, subsidized failure.

If you want a modern, flexible educational system that adapts itself every day to the challenge of the twenty-first century, then you need a private-sector business model.

It’s no mystery. The private-sector business model is what you must use if you want to serve the consumer and adapt quickly to changing market conditions.

The same applies to education. We want the educational equivalent of the Toyotas, the Hondas, the Microsofts, the Wal-Marts and the Googles to emerge from nowhere and beat the educational competition to a pulp.

Of course, that’s the one thing that the New Commission on The Skills of The American Workforce didn’t consider.

President Bush Wants To Compromise

President Bush says he’s all in favor of working with Democrats in the new Congress. As Stephen Dinan reports,

"I don't expect Democratic leaders to compromise on their principles, and they don't expect me to compromise on mine. But the American people do expect us to compromise on legislation that will benefit the country," he said.

The president says he is willing to raise

the minimum wage to $7.25 as long as that doesn't hurt businesses. He said the way to protect businesses is to combine the increase "with targeted tax and regulatory relief to help these small businesses stay competitive and to help keep our economy growing."

The president also called for progress on other issues,

renewing the No Child Left Behind education act, boosting energy alternatives to oil and completing an overhaul of the immigration system that includes a guest-worker program.

And the president is also calling for manpower increases in the Army and the Marine Corps. That seems to indicate a certain strategic sense. The president understood that while Republicans controlled the Congress, the Democrats could always put up a huge stink about increasing the size of the armed forces. But now that Democrats are in control of Congress, he can put them in a box if they oppose his efforts to “make us safe.”

What we don’t yet know is how much backbone the president will have in developing the deals with the Democrats. Will he stick to his guns on the minimum wage or cave to Sen. Kennedy, who demands a clean bill?

You’d think he would have learned from the No Child Left Behind Act in which Democrats utterly refused any reform of the monopoly government school system. If you can’t get at least a teeny-weeny bit of reform what’s the point of any legislation to throw more money at the problem?

And then there is the 800 lb elephant in the back of the room, Social Security. If there is to be a deal on Social Security, will it include a provision for individual accounts?

I’d say no accounts, no deal. But what do I know?

Of Course Blogs are Boring and Predictable...

What exactly was the point of Joseph Rago’s rant in today’s Opinion Journal? I read it through twice and I’m still not sure of the point.

Unless the point is that Joseph Rago is thankful that he is an “assistant editorial features editor at The Wall Street Journal” by virtue of being editor-in-chief of the Dartmouth Review, you know, like the Pharisee, who was thankful he was not like other men, publicans and sinners.

When someone drags Henry James into the argument, then you know that it’s time to check Weather.com for snow warnings.

Rego makes the startling point that political blogs are “predictable,” and therefore “excruciatingly boring.” “[R]ight-leaning blogs exhaustively pursue second-order distractions... Leftward fatuities too are easily found.” No kidding!

Of course blogs are derivative; of course they rely on the mainstream media for their reportage; of course 97.8 percent of blog content is pure dreck. Yet blogs themselves are not the worst of the worst. I would suggest that the comments section of blogs is where you go if you really want to wallow in the gutter.

The great boon of the blogosphere, for conservatives, is that for the first time we have a political community, a place where we can rehearse conservative opinions and find a resonance. It’s something that liberals have had for decades with the MSM, National Public Radio, and the faculty lounge. It’s a link in the food chain between genuinely original thinkers, best-selling popularizers, politicians, and the voters. It gets conservative ideas worked over and given life.

So it’s all boring and predictable. But then so, if you like, is a baseball game, and so is religious ritual. So also is the monthly non-profit board meeting you faithfully attend.

Blogs are like every other technical advance of the modern era. No advance ever solves anything. It just raises the stakes.

Blogs may be boring and predictable. But then so are editorials at the New York Times.

Blogs are now part of the national political conversation.

Watch Your Wallet Says Pete Du Pont

Wondering what the new Congress will mean? Pete Du Pont gives us a quick rundown in today’s Opinion Journal

• Tax Increases Democrats will be delighted to let the Bush tax rate cuts expire in the next couple of years.
  
• Spending Increases Although House Democrats say they will let spending stay flat this year, don’t forget that Democrats believe that more government spending is good for America. And if the leaders don’t, the rank-and-file certainly does.
  
• Alternative Minimum Tax This one is a doozy, and is going to bite a bunch of taxpayers in the next few years.
  
• Protectionism Liberals are big on limiting imports.
  
  

It’s easy, and great fun, to criticize the Republicans for all their peccadillos and missed opportunities over the past twelve years. But at least their hearts are in the right place.

But the Democrats actually believe these stupid ideas. They believe that a high tax, high spending state makes for a better America. They believe in steeply progressive taxes. They believe in protecting American workers against foreign competition.

And unfortunately they have The New York Times to play back their stupid ideas to them as the height of sophistication and compassion. And they have a political base that earns its livelihood in the implementation and maintenance of stupid ideas.

The question always is: What do the voters want?

Or more directly, how long will it take for the voters to vomit the Democrats out again?

The Child of a Sperm Donor

Suppose you decided that you wanted a child and you got yourself inseminated by anonymous sperm donor from a sperm bank. You’d be exercising your reproductive choice, of course, as guaranteed by a penumbra of the constitution.

There’s just one thing, and it’s something that we adults tend to forget as we forge ahead on our “sexual choices.”

What does the kid, the issue from such a union, think about having an anonymous sperm donor as a father?

Not much, according to Katrina Clark, the grown child of a sperm donor.

When she was 32, my mother -- single, and worried that she might never marry and have a family -- allowed a doctor wearing rubber gloves to inject a syringe of sperm from an unknown man into her uterus so that she could have a baby. I am the result: a donor-conceived child.

...

As long as [the] adults are happy, then donor conception is a success, right?

Well, not exactly. What about the kid in question?

Of course, she and her mother are proud liberals. Why wouldn’t they be, as a single-parent family? But there’s a question of rights.

I'm here to tell you that emotionally, many of us are not keeping up. We didn't ask to be born into this situation, with its limitations and confusion. It's hypocritical of parents and medical professionals to assume that biological roots won't matter to the "products" of the cryobanks' service, when the longing for a biological relationship is what brings customers to the banks in the first place.

So Katrina decided to try and find out who her sperm-donor father was, and quickly found out. Wonderful!

Only, of course, the sperm donor really didn’t want to be an actual “father.” After the excitement of discovering her father and sharing her feelings about being donor conceived,

I noticed that his enthusiasm for our developing relationship seemed to be waning. When I told him of my suspicion, he confirmed that he was tired of "this whole sperm-donor thing."

We humans wouldn’t be humans without our searing combination of ruthless selfishness and genuine caring. But wouldn’t a system of rational ethics have something to say about the ethics of having a child when one of the parents was just an anonymous cipher? Wouldn’t it at least recognize that every child wants a mother and a father: her mother and her father?

There’s one good thing. Katrina isn’t angry at her mother.

I've never been angry at my mother -- all my life she has been my hero, my everything.

Thank goodness for that.

The Widening Middle Eastern War

Jordan’s King Abdullah recently warned of three developing civil wars in the Middle East. There’s the headline war in Iraq. But there is also a developing civil war in Lebanon. And now there is the growing likelihood of civil war in the Palestinian Occupied Territories between the forces of Fatah and Hamas, reports Claude Salhani.

According to Laurie King-Irani, "The Palestinians have let themselves fall right into the trap set for them by the Israeli extreme right."

Well maybe, whatever a remark like that is supposed to mean.

But for us the Middle East is probably more like the Germany of the Thirty Years War from 1618 to 1648. There is a religious conflict between Sunni and Shia. There are great powers around the periphery, each with their interests. And there is plenty of money to keep soldiers in the field.

The immediate consequence of the Thirty Years War was to promote France to the front rank of the great powers, and to delay for 200 years the emergence of Germany as the pivot of Europe.

None of that was obvious at the beginning of the Thirty Years War. So we may be surprised by the outcome of the eternal Middle East conflict.

But it is clear that the articifial borders created by the western powers in the ruins of the Ottoman Empire after World War I are creaking and crumbling—as they were bound to do sooner or later. Nobody would care about that, were it not for Israel and oil.

Before the Great Middle Eastern War is over, the Middle East will probably end up as devastated as Germany in the middle of the seventeenth century.

And then there is Somalia.

Middle Class Muscle in South China

Everybody wonders what is going to happen in China. Will it reform out of its Communist Party monopoly? Or will it come to a smash-up as the irresistible force of a vibrant economy collides with the immovable object of an ossified political system?

Our friend at the New York Times, Howard W. French, reports that things are starting to move in Shenzhen, just across the border from Hong Kong.

When citizens found out about a plan to build a highway through their middle-class neighborhood they decided to fight.

Over the next two years they managed to halt work on the most destructive segment of the highway and forced design changes to reduce pollution from the roadway.

There are numerous similar stories. Of course a lot of the stories are NIMBY-style activism. But the movement goes beyond that. Citizens formed an internet group Interhoo,

an independent association of civic-minded professionals who discuss municipal policy issues, publish position papers and quietly lobby the government over development strategy and other issues.

Even in Communist dominated China, Interhoo is making a difference.

“In the past five or six years there are signs that new politics, economics and culture are emerging in Shenzhen,” said Jing Chen, a scholar with the China Development Institute, a local research group, and a member of Interhoo. “There is an awakening of awareness on public issues. The 6,000 members of Interhoo discuss these issues and have published books that have had a great influence over the government.”

Of course, the New York Times being what it is, we get the story presented as a case of community activism.

But the larger question gets back to the basic Hayekian argument about spontaneous order. Society is just too big and complicated to be governed top down. Continued prosperity requires horizontal relationships, contractual give-and-take.

Can the authoritarian political class in China resist the competence and the energy of the burgeoning middle class? And, deep down, does it want to?

That will be the great question for China and the Chinese people.