harikari.com

The story of American education today is one replete with achievement gaps: achievement gaps between different states; between rich and poor, white and black, white and Hispanic; between school districts, individual schools and even between children within individual schools.  In elementary school our children compare well internationally; by high school they have plummeted to the bottom of the international league.  We spend more money overall on education than any other country but we get the least bang for our buck.

These findings are highlighted in a recent report by McKinsey & Company: “The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools.”  The report’s recitation of our educational failures will sound all too familiar to anyone who even vaguely follows this issue.  Where the report is particularly useful is in quantifying the economic cost of our national failure to educate our children to world standards.  Among the report’s findings, for example, is that if the United States had in recent years closed the achievement gap with top performing nations such as Finland and Korea, our Gross Domestic Product in 2008 could have been between $1.3 to $2.3 trillion higher (or 9-16% of GDP).  In a further example, if the gap between black and Latino student performance and that of whites had been similarly narrowed, the report finds that US GDP in 2008 would have been between $310 billion and $525 billion higher (or 2-4%).  The gain would likely have been even bigger had the gap between the lowest achieving states and the rest been narrowed to a similar degree.

Why it is that 25 years after a landmark report admonished that American K-12 education was characterized by a “rising tide of mediocrity” our children languish near the bottom of the international achievement league?  The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found in 2006 that US 15-year-olds ranked 25^th out of 30 nations in math and 24^th in science.

The litany of depressing statistics goes on and on but the key point here is that if we don’t turn things around, we will not be able to maintain our place as the foremost economic power.  And what about the lost employment opportunities in such fields as high technology as Microsoft, Intel and others rely increasingly on foreign graduates of American universities because we don’t produce enough of our own?  These are jobs that pay $77-100,000 a year for a software developer.

K-12 education is principally a state responsibility and the states have failed dismally.  Even President (and former governor) George W. Bush recognized it with what was probably his most useful legislative accomplishment: No Child Left Behind (NCLB).  To his credit Bush took the improvement of US education seriously enough that he was willing to push the federal government more deeply and intrusively into the issue than ever before.  Regrettably, too many of the darts he fired at state backsides to prod them into doing better have missed their mark. 

For example, insisting on annual testing from third grade on has turned out to be overkill, taking up too much of the time of teachers who have a lot to do during the shortest school year in the industrialized world.  A laudable requirement aimed at raising the proficiency of math and other teachers has been largely circumvented by many states.

Most serious of all, whilst NCLB required that states meet student proficiency targets across the board or face consequences, it made the fatal error of leaving both the definition, and the testing of “proficiency” to the states.  This has led to perverse outcomes as some states strive to meet NCLB benchmarks but without actually doing much to improve their children’s performance.  This was highlighted in a recent Time Magazine article by Walter Isaacson advocating national educational standards for US children.  In one particularly egregious example, Mississippi tested its 4th graders in reading and pronounced 89% of them proficient or better, making them the highest achievers in the nation.  When they were tested under the more rigorous (and meaningful) National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), only 18% were actually proficient – putting them dead last.

Not all is bleak since not all states are led by boneheaded governors like Haley Barbour in Mississippi, or Terry Sanford in South Carolina who famously tried to refuse federal stimulus dollars for education, preferring to use it instead (if he really absolutely had to take it) to pay down state debt.  North Carolina and Texas are southern states that, along with Virginia, have made significant strides to improve their children’s education.  We have in Massachusetts a state whose children’s educational level compares favourably with the best performing countries in the world.  If the top five American states were tested separately they would do well when stacked against their international peers.  The problem is there are fifty states not five and the worst performing ones are dragging the nation down.  And even in the better ones there is much room to improve.

I agree with Isaacson that we need national standards and a national test; “national” does not have to mean “federal.”  In fact, we shouldn’t reinvent the wheel again but maybe settle on a curriculum and test regimen with a proven track record: the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System or MCAS. The fact is if all US children performed at the level of those in Massachusetts we would have much less to complain about.  Why not adapt MCAS for the nation as a whole or at least use it as the basis for a national examination? While we’re at it, I suggest we try to learn from that state how they have managed to get a first time pass rate of around 90% of their children for what is a rigorous examination.

We also need to improve the funding mechanism for education in this country.  As most states grapple with the current deep recession, education is being cut almost everywhere. How is this going to improve our ability to educate our children or to compete economically in the future?  They’re not cutting education funding in competitor nations so why are we?  Can we not get our priorities straight and assure education funding regardless of the economic ups and downs?

Why is our spending not cost effective?  Maybe we spend too much money on things like school transportation when we have parents and public transport which should carry the load.  And there doesn’t seem to be any doubt that we spend way too much on educational bureaucracies.  Fifty of them and that doesn’t include the school districts themselves (about13000 of those).  How about states pooling their bureaucratic resources instead of clinging to their very expensive independence?

The school year is too short.  It needs to be increased to at least 200 days a year from 180.  And while we’re at it, let’s make teaching the highly paid profession it should and needs to be to attract the best and brightest.  Yes, both suggestions will take money – see the paragraph above.

Many will say we can’t afford or don’t have the will to take these tough and expensive steps to bring our children up to where they can compete with the best in the world.  I would answer with a question: How can we afford not to?

Today the wealthiest among us are complaining about Obama’s plan to let the Bush tax cuts expire in 2011, putting the top tax rate back where it was under Clinton at 39.6%.  The rich and all their blowhard mouthpieces are screaming about how Obama’s plans to use the increased revenue to pay for much needed infrastructure rebuilding, school buildings, education, and the expansion of healthcare coverage is “socialism” and a “war on the wealthy.” 

What they’re not saying or admitting to is that there hasn’t been a better time to be rich in this country than since just prior to the Great Depression when the top marginal income tax rate was 25%.  Since then the top rate has been as high as 94% and as low as 28% for a three-year stretch during the Reagan era.  It was above the current rate of 35% for seventy-two of the previous seventy-seven years.  Remember that “Socialist” Eisenhower era of the fifties?  The top marginal rate during his presidency was 91%. 

The rich are now entering their tenth year of Bush’s Low-Tax Party for his “base.”  They’ve been given hundreds of billions of dollars in the form of a 4.6% tax reduction on their earned income and a 5% tax reduction on their income from capital gains.  The money the rich received from these enormous tax breaks was supposed to somehow trickle down to the other 95% of us.  Wealthy entrepreneurs were ideally supposed to use those tax savings to provide increased benefits for the working class in the form of salaries and other benefits like healthcare and retirement plans. 

Well let’s take a look at how that “trickle down” action worked.  Here’s a bar chart from The American Progress Report publication titled Understanding Bushonomics – How We Got Into this Mess in the First Place.  The dark bars indicate 2002 levels of income and the light bars indicate 2006 levels of income.

The text on the chart reads:  “Between 2002 and 2006, real household income in the U.S. grew by 836 billion.  Fewer than 15,000 families got 25% of that Growth. … The 133 million households that make up the bottom 90% of American families divided only 4% of the nation’s income growth raising their average income from $30,354 to $30,659.”

Want another view of “trickle down” economics?   Take a look at this pie chart from the same publication.

The top 1% decided to keep 73% of our increased income for themselves.  The top 10% kept 95% of the income.  The bottom 90% got to share the remaining 5% of the increase. 

This is how Reagan’s economic model, embraced by Bush, works.  Now might be a good time to point out that Reagan at least showed some restraint.  When he lowered the top rate to 28% he raised the capital gains rate from 20% to 28%.  His thinking was that because the rich were getting such a huge cut in income taxes – from 50% to 28% – their capital gains should no longer be taxed at a lower rate than their earned income.  Bush, on the other hand, was so beholden to his base that he cut their income taxes and lowered the capital gains tax to 15%.  And the rich got way richer and the rest of us fell behind.  This system combined with the rapacious greed exhibited by “the haves” has led to our nation’s greatest gap of income inequality since before the crash of 1929. 

So when you hear some extremely wealthy person or one of their gasbag media mouthpieces whining about paying 4.6% more of their grossly inflated incomes to the U.S. government, remember these charts.  The rich took nearly all of the income.  They should be paying way more income taxes. 

Froma Harrop pointed out in her latest column that Republicans often remind us that even John F. Kennedy cut taxes.  But they fail to mention that he lowered the rate to 70%, which is 30 points higher than where it will be when the Bush tax cuts expire.  You think your hearing cries of socialism now?  What would you hear if Obama raised the top marginal rate to 70% again?  Or 91% as it was during Eisenhower’s time?

I’ll tell you what you’d hear.  Socialism!  Job killer! Communist!  War on the Wealthy!  Class War! 

Well screw them.  Even with those extremely high top-tier tax rates, the American economy prospered, and everybody’s incomes went up dramatically, not just for the top 1%.

Did I mention that all that economic growth and leveling of incomes took place during times of war?  That’s right…  During WWII the top tax rate was within the range of 81% to 94%.  During the Vietnam War the top rate ranged from 70% to 77%.  Over the entire Cold War, the rate started at 86.45%, went up to 92% and down to 28% right before it ended.  Presidents used to ask Congress to collect money to pay for the costs of waging wars.  Each generation was taxed to pay for the wars so that the next generation wouldn’t be overburdened with a previous generation’s war debt.

And what did our last “War President” do with tax rates while he waged his “War on Terror?”  His administration gave us the biggest tax cut in our nation’s history.  The tax cuts resulted in somewhere around 1.9 trillion dollars in lost tax revenue, and the lion’s share of those tax savings went to the wealthiest among us.

So you see, it has been an extremely good time in our history to be very wealthy.  If you were a wealthy person during the last decade, you saw your income double and your taxes go down.  What a deal!

Well all parties have to come to an end, and now it’s time for the greedy people at the top to start giving back some of what they kept from the rest of us.  Don’t feel sorry for them.   They don’t need your pity. 

We need their money.  We need it to repair our crumbling infrastructure.  We need it for new schools and better education systems.  We need it to build new energy-efficient transit systems.  We need it to make our population healthier.  We need it to invest in research to develop clean energy sources.  We need it for our country’s future. 

Investing this money now will help us recover from the current financial crisis, and spending it in ways that leads to lower energy use, and in ways that make all of us healthier and smarter will grow our economy and make us competitive again.  That’s how everybody wins.