What Thomas Friedman Doesn't Say, Conclusion

[Part One here. Two here. Three here.]

Friedman still hasn't said exactly what "we should have done," though, to prevent our hypothetical "education recession." He delivers that in his conclusion:

It is not that we are failing across the board. There are huge numbers of exciting education innovations in America today — from new modes of teacher compensation to charter schools to school districts scattered around the country that are showing real improvements based on better methods, better principals and higher standards.

In other words, pretty much the Duncan-Klein-Rhee agenda. I mis-spoke in an earlier post when I said Friedman parrots the McKinsey report's conclusions. They only touch on teacher compensation, better standards, applying best practices from better-performing districts to worse-performing ones. Still, Friedman's only re-hashing the bromides echoing from Arne Duncan and, sadly, President Obama across all the mainstream media, most of which are far more problematic than the media suggests.

But it's Friedman's conclusion that really saddens me:

With Wall Street’s decline, though, many more educated and idealistic youth want to try teaching. Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America, called the other day with these statistics about college graduates signing up to join her organization to teach in some of our neediest schools next year: “Our total applications are up 40 percent. Eleven percent of all Ivy League seniors applied, 16 percent of Yale’s senior class, 15 percent of Princeton’s, 25 percent of Spellman’s and 35 percent of the African-American seniors at Harvard. In 130 colleges, between 5 and 15 percent of the senior class applied.”

Part of it, said Kopp, is a lack of jobs elsewhere. But part of it is “students responding to the call that this is a problem our generation can solve.” May it be so, because today, educationally, we are not a nation at risk. We are a nation in decline, and our nakedness is really showing. (emphasis added)

Let's parse this: "Wall Street's decline" is causing more elite school grads to apply for teaching jobs. And we're supposed to believe this is due to a sudden "idealism" instead of a sudden evaporation of the usual options for Ivy grads. (And let's note that Friedman here reports an opinion straight from Kopp's chummy and conflict-of-interest-laden phone chat with him - another instance of parroting instead of questioning.) As the Daily Beast puts it,

For other students, the sinking economy is increasing interest in jobs whose low-pay, high-karma profile used to make them less sexy than higher-paying jobs in fields like investment banking. Apparently it’s easy to be altruistic when no one else is offering you a job, and nonprofits are reporting large increases in applications.

Is this a new wave of Obama-inspired community service, or just would-be investment bankers looking to take a few years to build their resumes, earn a small but steady paycheck and continue with their more lucrative plans once the Dow is back over 10000? Probably a combination of both.

Even assuming idealism is at the core of this, there are almost four million teachers in America. Elite schools don't graduate a sliver of that number. It's not a scalable solution, even if the "idealistic" (and option-less) young stayed on the job. And they typically don't.

Dan Brown, also responding to Friedman's piece, expands on these obvious facts, showing the lead beneath Friedman's silver-plated bullet:

I'm concerned that [Teach for America is] being propped up by many as a cure-all for America's education woes, when it is nothing of the kind. Teach For America currently contains 6,200 corps members, which constitutes about 0.16 percent of the 3.9 million K-12 teachers in America. And for many within that fraction of a percent, it's a two-year jump in the pool, not a long term endeavor.

. . . . Sure, many Ivy Leaguers are interested to work in underserved schools. TFA may represent an "island of excellence," as Friedman puts it, but it's not a replicable model, since the premise of its success is predicated on exclusivity. Its model of skimming the cream of America's top colleges to serve in 29 regions around the country (the Pacific Northwest is ostensibly on its own) is unequipped to strike at the heart of our costly teacher turnover crisis and its searing impact on our achievement gap.

Brown proceeds to offer another scenario of different economic costs related not to the sensationalistic (and hypothetical) "long-term recession" purportedly caused by the achievement gap, but to the failure to retain more career teachers over the long term:

In 2007, the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (NCTAF) conducted an extensive and illuminating study on teacher turnover, which calculated an annual nationwide cost of over $7 billion for the replacement of people leaving the profession.

That's staggering, and doesn't take into account the invaluable institutional knowledge or student-teacher relationships lost when experienced teachers depart the job early and overwhelmed rookies run for the exit. The study's findings on the importance of recruiting and retaining quality teachers speak directly to the long term health of our education system-- and our economy.

Overall, the most saddening thing about both Friedman's piece and the McKinsey study itself is that they do not say anything to address the poverty at the root of the achievement gap. No talk of the absence of parental support - or even presence - for poor children due to the absence of a living wage law; no talk of all the other roots of poverty that the United States chooses not to address when it views schools through on Overton Window opening out to a thoroughly rightward view. That rightward view got its biggest push with the release of "A Nation at Risk" back in 1983, which the McKinsey Report echoes resoundingly - this time with an appeal to all our pocket-books. (It's worth noting that the economic model created for the McKinsey report, and upon which the whole "recession" scenario is founded, is based on the theories of Eric Hanushek, a free-market fundamentalist and long-time advocate of vouchers whose research has been criticised for cooking data to support his ideology.* Thomas Friedman doesn't say that, but it's true.)

If America's most educated elite in Washington and on Wall Street - whose elite college children are now signing up in droves to save us all, we're to believe, through Teach for America  - hadn't given 1.3 trillion in tax cuts to the very wealthiest during the Bush administration, spent another trillion on the Iraq invasion, and cost the rest of us trillions more in bailing out Wall Street after de-regulating it (out of trust for its Ivy-educated leaders), we'd be in a completely different America today - and one that could withstand these hypothetical costs.

Friedman writes in this piece that, to deal with this "decline," we need a "sense of urgency and follow-through that the economic and moral stakes demand." A truly moral stance would be to look away from the McKinsey report's manufactured crisis, and address instead the real one: the economic decline, for all but the very wealthiest, that has overtaken America in the past three decades.

And when Friedman, quoting the far-from-average Warren Buffett, says that the economic meltdown shows that schools are "swimming without a swimsuit," I can't help but wonder if Friedman is not revealing his own nakedness. We all have opinions, and Friedman's piece is just an opinion column, after all. And I'm sure Friedman is a decent man in many ways. But the opinions in "Swimming Without a Swimsuit" seem to come from one who has for far too long been swimming with . . . the Suits.

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(More to come on the McKinsey Report itself.)

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*Here's a snippet from Hanushek that should give us more pause now than it did before the deregulatory crows came home to roost last year:

The United States has led the world in fostering the elements of a strongly functioning and growing economy. These include a mature system of property rights, the maintenance of generally open and competitive labor and product markets, minimal intrusion of government through regulations and taxation, and, of course, a broad system of education and human-capital development.  (Source: Hanushek, “Education and the Economy:  Our School Performance Matters,” Education Week 24(21), February 2, 2005. Pdf here.)

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