This article originally appeared on
AlterNet.
“The
game is rigged,” writes Senator Elizabeth Warren in her new book A
Fighting Chance. It’s rigged because the rich and their lobbyists have
rigged the rules of the game to their favor. The rules are reflected in a
tax code and bankruptcy laws that have seen the greatest transfer of
wealth from the middle class to the rich in U.S. history.
The result?
America
has the most billionaires in the world, but not a single U.S. city
ranks among the world’s most livable cities. Not a single U.S. airport
is among the top 100 airports in the world. Our bridges, road and rail
are falling apart, and our middle class is being guttered out thanks to
three decades of stagnant wages, while the top 1 percent enjoys 95
percent of all economic gains.
A rigged tax code and a
bloated military budget are starving the federal and state governments
of the revenue it needs to invest in infrastructure, which means today
America looks increasingly like a second rate nation, and now new data
shows America’s intellectual resources are also in decline.
For
the past three decades, the Republican Party has waged a dangerous
assault on the very idea of public education. Tax cuts for the rich have
been balanced with spending cuts to education. During the New Deal era
of the 1940s to 1970s, public schools were the great leveler of America.
They were our great achievement. It was universal education for all,
but today it’s education for those fortunate enough to be born into
wealthy families or live in wealthy school districts. The right’s
strategy of defunding public education leaves parents with the option of
sending their kids to a for-profit school or a theological school that
teaches kids our ancestors kept dinosaurs as pets.
“What
kind of future society the defectors from the public school rolls
envision I cannot say. However, having spent some time in the Democratic
Republic of Congo—a war-torn hellhole with one of those much coveted
limited central governments, and, not coincidentally, a country in which
fewer than half the school-age population goes to public school—I can
say with certainty that I don’t want to live there,” writes Chuck
Thompson in Better off Without Em.
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Comparisons with the Democratic Republic of Congo are not that far-fetched given the results of a recent report by
Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development(OECD),
which is the first comprehensive survey of the skills adults need to
work in today’s world, in literacy, numeracy and technology proficiency.
The results are terrifying. According to the report, 36 million
American adults have low skills.
It gets worse. In two
of the three categories tested, numeracy and technological proficiency,
young Americans who are on the cusp of entering the workforce—ages 16 to
24—rank dead last, and is third from the bottom in numeracy for 16- to
65-year-olds.
The United States has a wide gap between
its best performers and its worst performers. And it had the widest gap
in scores between people with rich, educated parents and poor,
undereducated parents, which is exactly what Third World countries look
like, i.e. a highly educated super class at the top and a highly
undereducated underclass at the bottom, with very little in the middle.
The
report shows a relationship between inequalities in skills and
inequality in income. “How literacy skills are distributed across a
population also has significant implications on how economic and social
outcomes are distributed within the society. If large proportions of
adults have low reading and numeracy skills, introducing and
disseminating productivity-improving technologies and work-organization
practices can be hampered; that, in turn, will stall improvements in
living standards,” write the authors of the report.
There
is a defined correlation between literacy, numeracy and technology
skills with jobs, rising wages and productivity, good health, and even
civic participation and political engagement. Inequality of skills is
closely correlated to inequality of income. In short, our education
system is not meeting the demands of the new global environment, and the
outlook is grim, given the Right’s solution is to further defund public
education while ushering kids into private schools and Christian
academies aka “segregation academies.” The Republican-controlled South
is where you see the Right’s education strategy in action. “Inspired by
home-school superstars such as Creation Museum founder Ken Ham, tens of
thousands of other southern families have fled their public-school
systems in order to soak their children in the anti-intellectual sitz
bath of religious denial.” In other words, we’re dumb and getting
dumber.
While charter schools aren’t unique to the
South, conservative states tend to respond most enthusiastically to
their message, which makes Republican-controlled states ground zero for
the further degradation of public education. The U.S. will likely
continue to poll like countries like Indonesia and Tanzania, rather than
Japan and Sweden when it comes to meeting the demands of a global
economy.
Despite their hype and profits, study after
study show that kids in charter schools perform no better on achievement
tests than kids in public schools. But the correlation between a strong
public education system and social mobility is demonstrated clearly in
the OECD report. A 2006 report by Michael A. McDaniel of Virginia
Commonwealth University showed that states with higher estimated
collective IQ have greater gross state product, citizens with better
health, more effective state governments, and less violent crime. In
other words, were we to invest more in public education, we’d be
instantly more intelligent, healthy, safe, and financially sound.
“The
principal force for convergence [of wealth] — the diffusion of
knowledge — is only partly natural and spontaneous. It also depends in
large part on educational policies,” writes Thomas Piketty in his
700-page bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century. In other words,
if we really want to reduce inequality, and if we really want to be a
global leader in the 21st century, we need to invest more into our
education system, which requires the federal government to ensure the
rich and the mega-corporations pay their share. But we need to act now.
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