Date sent: Wed, 5 Feb 1997 02:15:32 -0600 (CST)
From: LindaP (Texas)
Subject: What if education- Tucker

>Subject: What if education- Tucker
>
>March 30, 1994
>

> 
>What If Education Broke Out All Over?
> By
>Gerald W. Bracey
>All children can learn.'' This is education's mantra. No matter that it is
>meaningless. It is still
>the educator's first article of faith, at least to judge by how often it is
>said. Not only do we
>claim that all children can learn, we currently argue that they should, they
>must. Their
>economic well-being and that of the nation depends on it. The New York Times,
>denying
>that the 1993 Adult Literacy Survey was a cause for alarm, put it this way:
>What has changed--and it's a recent change--are our expectations. Only in the
>last 20-odd
>years, for instance, have colleges and universities become truly serious
>about increasing
>the diversity of their student bodies. Only in that period have we begun to
>expect anything
>like truly equal opportunity at success for all Americans. As a nation, we
>are still shedding
>the durable assumption that a literate elite would make the decisions for a
>less educated
>society. The kind of egalitarianism that demands truly equal opportunity is
>still in its
>infancy. ...
>Thus, "all children can learn'' is transformed into an egalitarian
>opportunity and, hence, all
>children will learn. But what would happen if all children did learn? What
>would happen if,
>as Phillip Schlechty, the director of the Center for Leadership and School
>Reform in
>Louisville, Ky., once lightheartedly put it, education "broke out all over?''
>Society would, quite literally, fall apart. I do not know if education so
>refines the senses or
>simply makes people allergic to sweat, but educated people simply refuse to
>scour urinals,
>pick up garbage, unclog sewers or carry out any number of other unpleasant
>tasks. Wasn't
>that, after all, the point of getting an education? In this country, waiting
>tables is an
>honorable profession only while attending school, unlike in Europe where it
>may be a
>career. The next time you attend any conference cast your gaze on the large
>cadre of
>undereducated waiters, maids, janitors, and other staffers without whose
>attention and
>ministrations all the fine-sounding papers and speeches would not be
>deliverable.
>I mention these problems with getting the educateds' hands dirty because, as
>we fret about
>the Great S.A.T. Race and the International Test-Score Olympics, we have lost
>sight of
>another problem: We already have too many educated people. It is a problem
>exacerbated
>by an economic recovery unlike any other seen previously: It has not produced
>any good
>jobs nor is it likely to.
>In 1992, I calculated for Phi Delta Kappan that 26 percent of college
>students worked in
>jobs that required no college. Nine months later in Education Week, the
>former American
>Enterprise Institute official Tait Trussell put the figure at 30 percent. The
>educational
>demographer Harold Hodgkinson once told me he visited a community college
>where 35
>percent of the students already had a bachelor's degree. Although the
>service-sector staff
>is generally undereducated, a recent issue of Time referred to a new
>phenomenon: B.A.
>bellboys. The Washington Post has spoken of college graduates getting
>"McJobs'': "The
>lucky ones are those who have landed office jobs filing, photocopying,
>answering phones;
>those less fortunate (or less well connected), peddle clothes at The Gap or
>pull espresso at
>cafes.''
>If this were not bad enough, we have been getting, and swallowing, advice
>from such
>persons as Lester Thurow, Robert Reich, and Marc Tucker that are making
>matters worse.
>According to these workforce gurus, we can no longer afford our Taylorized
>assembly
>lines where workers do simple, repetitive tasks all day. We have to make work
>smart, let
>even the lowest-ranking workers make decisions. Look to the Europeans, they
>have said.
>The Europeans have moved farther along in this process than we have. Said Ray
>Marshall
>and Marc Tucker in their 1992 book, Thinking for a Living: "It turns out that
>a choice for
>diversified quality production [the European model] is a choice for a
>companion set of
>social goals: high wages, a low wage spread, worker participation, and full
>employment.''
>Mr. Marshall and Mr. Tucker called Japan and Germany the "economic
>juggernauts'' and
>"the twin colossi of the world economy.'' "Workers of the World, Get Smart,''
>was the
>perky, glib title of a New York Times Op-Ed piece by Mr. Reich. But in the
>text, even Mr.
>Reich, now the U.S. Secretary of Labor, had to back off and admit that "no
>country has yet
>found the formula'' to produce more jobs and good jobs.
>And when people actually looked to Europe they saw a continent in economic
>shambles.
>They saw unemployment rates around 12 percent and rising. To get more people
>into the
>workforce, workweek-cutting proposals are being floated in Germany, while
>job-sharing
>proposals have surfaced in France. Only a year after Mr. Tucker and Mr.
>Marshall's book,
>neither Germany nor Japan had the aura of a colossus. Indeed, the Jan. 5,
>1994, edition of
>National Public Radio's "All Things Considered'' reported ominously that
>unemployment
>rates in Germany were approaching those of the Weimar Republic just prior to
>the rise of
>Hitler.
>A prophetic, if accidental, graphic about the consequences of making work
>smart occurs
>on page 34 of Mr. Tucker's America's Choice: High Skills Or Low Wages! It
>depicts the
>"old organization of work'' as six front-line workers backed up by 18
>support-staff
>members. The "new organization of work,'' designed to push complexity and
>decisionmaking as far down the hierarchy as possible, shows eight front-line
>workers
>backed up by six support staff. No one apparently noticed that in the new
>organization of
>work, 40 percent of the workers had disappeared.
>The graphic represents reality. Everywhere one reads about companies
>"downsizing'' or
>"re-engineering'' in order to get or stay lean-and-mean and competitive (not
>one article has
>listed the schools as part of the problem). Said one former executive in The
>New York
>Times: "It's very scary. American companies are really learning to do it
>smarter, and that
>means with fewer people.''
>As people looked back on 1993, however, many argued that American companies
>were not
>learning to do it smarter. An American Management Association study found
>that only 45
>percent of leaner-meaner companies generated higher profits, that two-thirds
>of companies
>that downsized one year did it again the next year because the process set
>off a downward
>spiral of reduced sales and profits. Even for those companies that increased
>profits, "very
>little so far has found its way to workers in the form of more jobs or higher
>wages.''
>Downsizing is cutting muscle as well as fat.
>Indeed, the American worker has become his own worst enemy: A graph in the
>Sept. 29,
>1993, Washington Post shows the number of manufacturing jobs declining by
>three million
>since 1979. On the same graph a soaring line crosses the downward-spiraling
>jobs curve:
>productivity. The rise is almost annual and the size of recent gains has
>surprised everyone.
>Gains like those in the last two years have not been seen since the 1960's.
>(Contrary to
>popular opinion, worker productivity never declined. The label above a curve
>in the
>Hudson Institute's Workforce 2000 does say that "productivity has declined
>substantially
>since 1965,'' but a close inspection of the curve reveals that the decline is
>in productivity
>improvement: Until recently we were getting better more slowly, but in no
>year has
>productivity itself declined.)
>The productivity of the American worker is the highest in the world and
>climbing.
>Comparing the unit labor cost of manufacturing in this country to that of 12
>other nations,
>the so-called G-7 nations, plus Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands,
>Korea, and
>Taiwan, one finds that U.S. costs are barely 80 percent of those nations'.
>It is not just downsizing that is costing jobs. We got over our fears about
>automation in
>the 1960's. Now we ought to get anxious again. In last September's issue of
>Harper's,
>Richard J. Barnet of the Institute for Policy Studies framed the predicament
>well. "The
>problem is starkly simple,'' he wrote, "an astonishingly large and increasing
>number of
>human beings are not needed or wanted to make the goods or to provide the
>services that
>the paying customers of the world can afford.'' Mr. Barnet argues that
>automation will
>create some jobs, but cost more: "I have visited a variety of highly
>automated factories in
>the United States and Europe, including automobile, electronics, and printing
>plants. The
>scarcity of human beings in these places is spooky.''
>Jobs are being created. They just don't pay anything, as witness the
>B.A.-bellboy
>phenomenon. In the last year, manufacturing shed 255,000 positions while the
>restaurant
>industry alone added 294,000. While there has been a hue and cry about the
>fastest-growing jobs requiring more education, those jobs account for only a
>tiny
>proportion, 4 percent by one estimate, of all jobs. As one minimum-wage B.A.
>put it in The
>Washington Post, "We are getting jobs that chimps could do.'' Jobs come
>without pension
>or medical-care benefits and impermanent workers have become ubiquitous as a
>cost-cutting device. A New Yorker cartoon captured the phenomenon well: A man
>stands
>on the proscenium of a stage and tells the audience, "Tonight, the role of
>Aida will be
>sung by a temp.''
>With 86 percent of our students graduating from high school or obtaining a
>General
>Educational Development diploma and 60 percent of those going on to college,
>the
>discrepancy between the educational level jobs require and the educational
>level people
>bring to them will only increase. Even America's Choice found that the
>difference in
>education requirements between current jobs and the new jobs to be created
>differed by
>only eight months. Other estimates put the difference closer to four months.
>It matters not
>which figure is right: Even the higher number can be met simply by the
>differential
>educational attainments of those retiring from the workforce and those
>entering it. Barely
>50 percent of people retiring from the workforce in 1994 at the age of 65
>(assuming their
>pensions haven't disappeared) graduated from high school.
>There are other reasons for becoming educated, of course. For many, learning
>can be fun
>in itself. Educated people live longer, richer lives and may even enjoy life
>more. These
>nonutilitarian outcomes of education have virtually disappeared from
>discourse about
>education in recent years. In the last few years, discussions of education
>and education
>reform have been marked by a dreary instrumentality about jobs. The dread
>vision of
>"competition in the global economy'' has replaced the terror of the Red
>Menace as a scare
>tactic to keep Americans in line.
>In utopian visions, such as B.F. Skinner's Walden Two, people who did the
>scut work got
>more positive reinforcements. In reality, it has never happened that way.
>When other
>countries have overeducated their citizens beyond the limits of the
>marketplace, the
>solution has not been to rearrange the distribution of rewards, but to import
>workers from
>underdeveloped nations. America's immigrant population has been soaring in
>recent years
>so we won't face an immediate crisis, but unless we can insure a steady
>stream of illiterate
>newcomers, we eventually will face a crunch, a crunch brought on by our very
>success.
>All this is not to say that education has become less important. Quite the
>reverse. Two
>graphs carried in this publication have illustrated the paradoxical trends
>that are
>transpiring. One repeated what has been said earlier: Over the last 15 years,
>the probability
>of landing in a poor-paying job has increased for all levels of education,
>albeit more
>steeply for high school dropouts than for those with some college. The other
>graph
>showed the wage differentials among those with differing educational
>attainments. As
>people move from dropout to diploma to baccalaureate to doctoral degree,
>their salary
>doubles with each step. As more and more people become well educated,
>employers will
>have a better and better, deeper and deeper pool of potential applicants to
>pick from--and
>will need to pick fewer and fewer for an ever dwindling number of good jobs.
>Not a bad
>deal for the businessman.
>In any case, it looks to me like educational attainments and job requirements
>are on a
>collision course. Unless, of course, we develop technologies that eliminate
>the use of
>humans in the dirty work. Then we'll have to revisit the queasy social
>problems discussed
>in places like Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless You Mr. Rosewater. Says a character
>in that
>novel, "The problem is this: How to love people who have no use.'' For the
>time being,
>though, the problem is that if we reached our announced goals, a lot of
>well-educated,
>highly skilled people are going to be shooting craps on the porch stoop. This
>doesn't
>mean we shouldn't try, especially given the inequality of opportunity
>currently. It does
>mean we ought to look honestly at the problem. And it is more than just a
>problem of equal
>opportunity. Said Richard Barnet, "In the end, the job crisis raises the most
>fundamental
>question of human existence: What are we doing here?'' Is anyone looking into
>the
>problem? I haven't seen anyone even take a peek.
>
>Gerald W. Bracey is a research psychologist and writer living in Alexandria,
>Va. He is a
>member of the Mecklenburger Group.