Nat'l Review: U.S. education is risking our economic competitiveness

As far as Lampkin goes in stating the problem, I agree. (Although I'm a little wary of his statistical predictions for GDP growth if America improves its standards of education.) The real question is: What can we do about it? "National leadership" could mean a lot of things. A former aide to President Bush, Lampkin (thankfully?) doesn't elaborate.

I'm all for lengthening the school year and/or making the school day longer. After all, nowadays kids don't have to reap the harvest in summer; and most parents are gone until 6 or 7 p.m. each day anyway, leaving their kids with too much time to spend on the wrong activities. (I'm a radical, I know, but I also think school-funded after-school sports programs should be eliminated. Replacing after-school sports with 30-40 minutes of in-school exercise per day for all kids, no exceptions, would do wonders for students' health and academic performance.)

We shouldn't forget, however, that the per capita productivity of American workers continues to increase. The problem is that lower-skilled jobs are going to countries like India and China that can do them more cheaply. The great danger is that we'll lose even those high-productivity jobs as India and China increase the productivity of their labor force relative to ours, thanks to their superior educational systems.


Rapidly Losing Our Edge
Lagging behind in education is hindering our economic competitiveness.

By Marc Lampkin
September 14, 2007 | NationalReview.com

U.S. should send fewer students to college?

While I disagree on some particulars, I agree with the main thrust of Leef's argument: America is sending too many of its high school students to college who are unprepared and unmotivated to learn. And since colleges and universities compete for students' tuition, the market encourages institutions of higher learning to lower their standards to the lowest common denominator in order to attract and retain these students.

Leef and I agree that making K-12 "more efficient" would obviate the need for a college education for many students. (Germany and Japan manage to do this). "More efficient" in my mind means giving high school students real skills -- through vocational training, public-private educational partnerships, and internships/apprenticeships -- that employers are willing to reward with good pay and benefits upon graduation.

On a more philosophical level, Leef is tapping into a very old debate: Is the point of education to teach students "the best that has been thought and said in the world," or is it to give students practical knowledge and skills that are commercially in-demand?

Leef skews toward the former when it comes to college; but skews toward the latter when it comes to K-12. Thus, his conception of K-12 is basically technical training for the masses, whereas he views higher ed. as an elitist "philosophers' club" where people who are smart enough to gain entry may enjoy knowledge for knowledge's sake. (Funnily, Leef's dichotomy reinforces the conservative stereotype of colleges and universities being "ivory tower" bastions of intellectual elitism.) Presumably, according to Leef's ideal, this elite minority of liberally educated college grads, with their heads full of big ideas, would go on to be the managers and political leaders of the blue-collar and service-sector masses.

For the sake of our civic culture's health and vibrancy, I worry about a populace who has not been evenly exposed to the Great Ideas forming Western culture. These ideas shouldn't be reserved for an educated elite -- which in America, too often is synonymous with a wealthy elite. On the other hand, our teachers are busy enough trying to teach the 3 R's; and teaching the masses "the best that has been thought and said" costs extra time & money. Who's going to pay for it? And who's going to sit still for it, when there's work to be done and bills to pay?

Ah, if only we had guaranteed university education for those students who qualify, like they do in many European countries.... But that's just a pinko-liberal wet dream. It will never happen in the U.S. ...Will it?


Keep 'Em Out
Higher education has been oversold.
By George Leef
September 13, 2007 | National Review

In one of his New York Times columns earlier this year, David Brooks lamented that "Despite all the incentives, 30 percent of kids drop out of high school and the college graduation rate has been flat for a generation." Brooks, like many spokesmen for the higher-education establishment, worries that the United States is falling behind in the international race for brainpower.

That is why we keep hearing politicians talk about the need to stimulate a higher rate of college attendance and completion. We're in a global "knowledge economy," and whereas America used to be tops in the percentage of workers with college degrees, we have now fallen behind a number of other nations. At a big education conference I attended back in February, former North Carolina governor Jim Hunt called this situation "scary."

Sorry, scaremongers, but there is nothing to worry about. If anything, America now puts too many students into college, and we certainly don't need any new subsidies to get more there.

Here are my reasons for holding that contrarian view.

First, it isn't true that the economy is undergoing some dramatic shift to "knowledge work" that can only be performed by people who have college educations. When we hear that more and more jobs "require" a college degree, that isn't because most of them are so technically demanding that an intelligent high school graduate couldn't learn to do the work. Rather, what it means is that more employers are using educational credentials as a screening mechanism. As James Engell and Anthony Dangerfield write in their book Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money, "the United States has become the most rigidly credentialized society in the world. A B.A. is required for jobs that by no stretch of imagination need two years of full-time training, let alone four."

Second, the needless pressure to get educational credentials draws a large number of academically weak and intellectually disengaged students into college . All they want is the piece of paper that gets them past the screening. Most schools have quietly lowered their academic standards so that such students will stay happy and remain enrolled. Consequently, they seldom learn much — many employers complain that college graduates they hire can't even write a coherent sentence — but most eventually get their degrees.

Third, due to the overselling of higher education, we find substantial numbers of college graduates taking "high school" jobs like retail sales. It's not that there is anything wrong with well-educated clerks or truck drivers, but to a great extent college is no longer about providing a solid, rounded education. The courses that once were the pillars of the curriculum, such as history, literature, philosophy, and fine arts, have been watered down and are usually optional. Sadly, college education is now generally sold as a stepping stone to good employment rather than as an intellectually broadening experience. Sometimes it manages to do both, but often it does neither.

Fourth, it's a mistake to assume that the traditional college setting is the best or only way for people to learn the things they need to know in order to become successful workers. On-the-job training, self-directed studies, and courses taken with a particular end in mind (such as those offered in fields like accounting or finance at proprietary schools) usually lead to much more educational gain than do courses taken just because they fill degree requirements.

"But wait," I hear readers saying, "isn't it true that people with college degrees earn far more than people with only high-school diplomas?"

That is true on average — an average composed to a large degree of very bright and ambitious people who would be successful with or without a college degree, and also of people who earned their degrees decades ago when the curriculum and academic standards were more rigorous. It simply doesn't follow that every person we might lure into college today is going to enjoy a great boost in lifetime earnings just because he manages to stick it out through enough courses to graduate. The sad reality is that we now find many young people who have spent years in college and have piled up sizeable debts serving up Starbucks coffee or delivering pizza for Papa John's.

A perennial trope among politicians is that more education will make everyone better off. Having a more efficient educational system — one that taught the three Rs well in eight years rather than poorly in 16 — would indeed be a benefit. Simply putting a higher percentage of our young people into college, however, makes just as much sense as spreading more fertilizer on a field that's already been over-fertilized.

Study: The Conservative -- yes, Conservative -- MSM

Wherefore the dastardly lib'rul media?

Media Matters published a study after individual interviews with each major U.S. paper to find out which syndicated columnists they published. (Syndicates won't give out this information). Among other facts, MM discovered that:

> "Sixty percent of the nation's daily newspapers print more conservative syndicated columnists every week than progressive syndicated columnists. Only 20 percent run more progressives than conservatives, while the remaining 20 percent are evenly balanced."

> "In 38 states, the conservative voice is greater than the progressive voice -- in other words, conservative columns reach more readers in total than progressive columns. In only 12 states is the progressive voice greater than the conservative voice."

So, at least when it comes to syndicated columnists -- the journalists whose job it is to shape public opinion -- the mainstream media is conservative. End of story. Case closed.

Independent: Violence in Baghdad mocks U.S. optimism

The view from Baghdad: Mounting death toll which makes a mockery of US optimism

By Kim Sengupta

September 11, 2007 | The Independent Online UK


http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2950298.ece

WAR ALERT! - FOX says we're planning to bomb Iran

The clock is ticking. This is going to happen, and there's nothing Congress can do to stop it. Get ready, 'cause here we go again….

U.S. Officials Begin Crafting Iran Bombing Plan
By James Rosen
September 11, 2007 | FOXNews.com

A recent decision by German officials to withhold support for any new sanctions against Iran has pushed a broad spectrum of officials in Washington to develop potential scenarios for a military attack on the Islamic regime, FOX News confirmed Tuesday.

Germany — a pivotal player among three European nations to rein in Iran's nuclear program over the last two-and-a-half years through a mixture of diplomacy and sanctions supported by the United States — notified its allies last week that the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel refuses to support the imposition of any further sanctions against Iran that could be imposed by the U.N. Security Council.

The announcement was made at a meeting in Berlin that brought German officials together with Iran desk officers from the five member states of the Security Council. It stunned the room, according to one of several Bush administration and foreign government sources who spoke to FOX News, and left most Bush administration principals concluding that sanctions are dead.

The Germans voiced concern about the damaging effects any further sanctions on Iran would have on the German economy — and also, according to diplomats from other countries, gave the distinct impression that they would privately welcome, while publicly protesting, an American bombing campaign against Iran's nuclear facilities.

Germany's withdrawal from the allied diplomatic offensive is the latest consensus across relevant U.S. agencies and offices, including the State Department, the National Security Council and the offices of the president and vice president. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns, the most ardent proponent of a diplomatic resolution to the problem of Iran's nuclear ambitions, has had his chance on the Iranian account and come up empty.

Political and military officers, as well as weapons of mass destruction specialists at the State Department, are now advising Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the diplomatic approach favored by Burns has failed and the administration must actively prepare for military intervention of some kind. Among those advising Rice along these lines are John Rood, the assistant secretary for the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation; and a number of Mideast experts, including Ambassador James Jeffrey, deputy White House national security adviser under Stephen Hadley and formerly the principal deputy assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs.

Consequently, according to a well-placed Bush administration source, "everyone in town" is now participating in a broad discussion about the costs and benefits of military action against Iran, with the likely timeframe for any such course of action being over the next eight to 10 months, after the presidential primaries have probably been decided, but well before the November 2008 elections.

The discussions are now focused on two basic options: less invasive scenarios under which the U.S. might blockade Iranian imports of gasoline or exports of oil, actions generally thought to exact too high a cost on the Iranian people but not enough on the regime in Tehran; and full-scale aerial bombardment.

On the latter course, active consideration is being given as to how long it would take to degrade Iranian air defenses before American air superiority could be established and U.S. fighter jets could then begin a systematic attack on Iran's known nuclear targets.

Most relevant parties have concluded such a comprehensive attack plan would require at least a week of sustained bombing runs, and would at best set the Iranian nuclear program back a number of years — but not destroy it forever. Other considerations include the likelihood of Iranian reprisals against Tel Aviv and other Israeli population centers; and the effects on American troops in Iraq. There, officials have concluded that the Iranians are unlikely to do much more damage than they already have been able to inflict through their supply of explosives and training of insurgents in Iraq.

[If this report is accurate, then these unnamed "officials" have come to a foolish conclusion. If America declares open war on Iran by bombing it without provocation, then Iran will be within its rights to attack U.S. troops openly in Iraq, using Iranian soldiers, missiles, tanks, hardware – everything they've got. Then we'll truly have the regional "spillover" and regional war that the U.S. occupation of Iraq is purportedly trying to prevent. – J]

The Bush administration "has just about had it with Iran," said one foreign diplomat. "They tried the diplomatic process. China is now obstructing them at the U.N. Security Council and the Russians are tucking themselves behind them.

"The Germans are wobbling …There are a number of people in the administration who do not want their legacy to be leaving behind an Iran that is nuclear armed, so they are looking at what are the alternatives? They are looking at other options," the diplomat said.

Vice President Cheney and his aides are said to be enjoying a bit of "schadenfreude" at the expense of Burns. A source described Cheney's office as effectively gloating to Burns and Rice, "We told you so. (The Iranians) are not containable diplomatically."

The next shoe to drop will be when Rice and President Bush make a final decision about whether to designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and/or its lethal subset, the Quds Force, as a terrorist entity or entities. FOX News reported in June that such a move is under consideration.

Sources say news leaks about the prospective designation greatly worried European governments and private sector firms, which could theoretically face prosecution in American courts if such measures became law and these entities continued to do business with IRGC and its multiple financial subsidiaries.

If the Bush administration moves forward with such a designation, sources said, it would be an indication that Rice agrees that Burns' approach has failed. Designation of such a large Iranian military institution as a terrorist entity would also be seen, sources said, as laying the groundwork for a public justification of American military action.