Prologue: What Education Cannot Do
Before taking up the long list of public school crypto- (and not-so-crypto) privatization initiatives in our final installment concerning the consequences for public education in a time of pandemic, let’s clear the slate regarding the stated purposes of education and the reason/s these purposes have become controversial over the past 30 years.
Below, a sampling from several state constitutions, setting out the purposes of education and responsibilities of (four) individual states for providing such an education to all residents. [Note: Highlighting is ours.]
(1)
Article 14, §1 Arkansas Constitution
Text of Section 1:
Free School System
Intelligence and virtue being the safeguards of liberty and the bulwark of a free and good government, the State shall ever maintain a general, suitable and efficient system of free public schools and shall adopt all suitable means to secure to the people the advantages and opportunities of education.
(2)
State Constitution, New Hampshire
Part 2, Form of Government, Encouragement of Literature, Trades, Etc., New Hampshire State Constitution.
[Art.] 83. [Encouragement of Literature, etc.; Control of Corporations, Monopolies, etc.] Knowledge and learning, generally diffused through a community, being essential to the preservation of a free government; and spreading the opportunities and advantages of education through the various parts of the country, being highly conducive to promote this end; it shall be the duty of the legislators and magistrates, in all future periods of this government, to cherish the interest of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries and public schools, to encourage private and public institutions, rewards, and immunities for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and natural history of the country; to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and economy, honesty and punctuality, sincerity, sobriety, and all social affections, and generous sentiments, among the people: Provided, nevertheless, that no money raised by taxation shall ever be granted or applied for the use of the schools of institutions of any religious sect or denomination.
(3)
ARTICLE VIII, Section 1. North Dakota Constitution
EDUCATION
Section 1.A high degree of intelligence, patriotism, integrity and morality on the part of every voter in a government by the people being necessary in order to insure the continuance of that government and the prosperity and happiness of the people, the legislative assembly shall make provision for the establishment and maintenance of a system of public schools which shall be open to all children of the state of North Dakota and free from sectarian control. This legislative requirement shall be irrevocable without the consent of the United States and the people of North Dakota.
(4)
The Page Amendment, Minnesota Constitution (proposed 2022; not yet approved*)
“All children have a fundamental right to a quality public education that fully prepares them with the skills necessary for participation in the economy, our democracy, and society, as measured against uniform achievement standards set forth by the state. It is a paramount duty of the state to ensure quality public schools that fulfill this fundamental right. The duty of the state established in this section does not infringe on the right of a parent to choose for their child a private, religious, or home school as an alternative to public education.”
Democrats have backed themselves into a corner over the past 30 years by supporting education through claiming that a university degree represents the 21st-century path to the middle class, out of poverty and into the land of plenty. In other words, their argument for public education has been essentially an instrumental (as opposed to intrinsic) one of the sort, “Get an education and get a good-paying job.” The converse of this argument? “If you don’t get an education, that’s on you.” It’s somewhat analogous to blaming those who became ill with COVID-19 due to the nature of their work, or the fact that they live in multi-generational households, or because they suffer from underlying co-morbidities such as diabetes or autoimmune diseases: “Your bad luck is your own fault.”
It’s an argument that devalues and shames those without a college degree, who accounted for 62.5% of the U.S. population in 2020. How can one-third of the population look down on the other two-thirds when in fact this is not their fault?
How’d we get here? Here are some of the major economic and political transformations in the U.S. economy and political environment over the past generation:
- The rise of heavy industrial production in the mid-to late 19th century up through approximately 1970 (mechanization / urbanization / two World Wars which ignited the economy)
- This shift in the economic base (to industrial production) was accompanied by a long, often violent conflict between industrial workers and owners (“robber barons”), culminating in the National Labor Relations Act (1935) that inter alia guaranteed all workers the right to organize without employers’ exercising unfair labor practices. Formerly rural farmworkers became industrial workers, were unionized, and gained access to wages well above poverty level, enabling their entry into the post-World War II middle class.
- Inflation and changes in individual and corporate tax structures after around 1980 (in part fueled by the oil crisis/embargo in 1973-1974, which had been partly caused by the falling rate of the USD) and the rise of industrial capacity outside the U.S. initiated
- A process of deindustrialization, i.e. the movement of large production facilities to locations where labor was cheaper; this process involved both shifts from more costly, more heavily-unionized northern states to southern ones, as well as the shift to other countries (offshoring) including Mexico, China, and Southeast Asia, where labor costs were a fraction of what they were in the U.S.
- This loss of industrial production in turn led to the U.S.’s transformation from a production economy to a human and financial services economy, accompanied by
- A precipitous drop in union membership (down to 10.3%, from 20% in 1983), which in turn
- Depressed wages for workers, while it simultaneously
- Increased profits for owners, leading to
- An ever-growing gap in earnings/savings between owners/the (higher) professional classes and workers/service providers. (Cf. for example the 70% increase in wealth for U.S. billionaires during the pandemic, whose worth soared from $2T to $5T since March 2020), which has
- Resulted in 40% of Americans not having savings of $400 today to cover an unforeseen emergency (car repair, dental work, death in the family)
During the past 30-40 years, as (1) through (10) were occurring, the working middle class lost ground continuously. Factories closed and no comparable jobs came to replace them. There was a shift from a “production” to a “service” economy. Democrats, whose most powerful base – both in terms of funding and in terms of voter turnout – was falling out of the middle class and into the “working poor,” had to figure out a way to continue to attract the displaced and discouraged. The solution they arrived at was “go to college” – a university degree suddenly became the ticket (formerly provided by high-paying union jobs) to the middle class.
But many – most – of those to whom this new mantra was addressed couldn’t afford the cost of a college degree. And so, another “solution” was found: the college loan program.
Given that this mantra was financially-motivated (“Go to college and you’ll get a good job”), colleges and universities obliged by gearing ever more programs of study to getting a job after graduation. Many degrees have ended up as what was once referred to as “technical training” with a much higher price tag. In consequence, the humanities and social sciences have seriously declined in terms of enrollment and offerings; entire degree programs have been cancelled. Many university graduates have only rudimentary (or no) knowledge of the subjects which once formed the foundation for an educated human being – philosophy, history, literature, foreign languages. All have fallen out of favor because they don’t automatically guarantee a decent job.
Today, about 37.5% of the U.S. population has college degrees; 13% has a master’s degree, and 1.2% has a PhD. Although many graduates don’t enjoy middle-class salaries, one thing both higher- and lower-end graduates share is upper-class debt. In 2021, 43.4 million students (sixty-two percent of the total) were burdened with $1.6 trillion dollars in debt; average debt held by individuals for undergrad student loans is $28,950, and $57,520 for families where both partners carry debt burdens (2019 figures). Loan totals increase considerably at the professional degree levels (e.g. medical school: $201,490; law school: $145,500). Sixty-two percent of students graduate with debt weighing down their future – the prospect of owning a home, for example, diminishes considerably for those with student debt, which is nearly impossible to discharge in bankruptcy (thanks, Senator Joe Biden).
The dream of gaining admission to the middle class through education, which has for a generation been touted as the solution to the loss of manufacturing and production jobs as the latter were being offshored has not materialized, nor will it.
Of course there were other means of steering the economy in new directions in the wake of offshoring, and there were other tools in the political economy toolkit to address the drastic decline in prosperity of the former blue-collar middle class. Medicare for All, a permanent Child Tax Credit that applied to all incomes, even those too meager to be taxed, a progressive taxation system for the top 1-5% (remember – it reached 90% during Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency), tuition-free study at all public colleges and universities are a few that come to mind. And the specter of climate change, the urgent need to transition to renewable/sustainable energy, to retrofit the entire U.S. housing stock for extreme temperatures, to rebuild our infrastructure and urban cores sustainably – all of these needs have been known for the last 20 years, we just haven’t implemented them on a scale that would have both gainfully employed former industrial production workers and made the U.S. more resilient in the face of what is coming in the next half-century. Creating a sustainable and resilient new national infrastructure to ward off at least some of the consequences of climate change would have compensated for the working class prosperity which has been lost.
But none of the above happened, and there are only faint prospects of action before it’s too late, both for the working class and for the climate and natural environment.
Education must walk in lockstep with the overall goals of a society – and in societies where the greatest possible profit for the smallest possible number of beneficiaries, without regard to economic externalities that harm both people and the environment reigns above all, there is little chance for education to accomplish what the business class, the financial class, and the political class do not want it to accomplish.
Neither K-12 nor college education can put food in hungry children’s mouths (in 2019, 10 million children, around 20% of school-age children, were living below poverty level), nor money in their parents’ pockets when they’re earning $7.25 an hour (the federal minimum wage since 2009). Education cannot pay their own or their caregivers’ medical costs in case of a major illness or life-threatening accident; it cannot clean up the air they breathe, or the water they drink, or the food they eat. And in the absence of all of these, teachers cannot do their job, which is to teach.
What we are left with, then, are the idealistic promises and goals (today more honored in the breach than the observance) set forth in the state constitutions quoted above. More than 40 million students/graduates are burdened with debt that will never permit them to enter the traditional middle class, symbolized perhaps most conspicuously by home ownership following World War II (the U.S. is now in the early stages of a seismic shift from a home ownership society to a rental society, as we will discuss in the post on Housing and Homelessness later in this series). Our population has been gravely harmed by the coronavirus pandemic, from which an estimated 10%-20% of those infected will suffer from “long COVID” for an unspecified and unknown period, and with as-yet unknown costs for the economy. And we confront a K-12 public education system which, already weakened over the past 30 years, is now being subjected to a brutal frontal attack on its very existence.
In our next – and final – post on Education in a Time of Pandemic, we will consider the push towards privatization which is threatening a foundational institution of the United States: free public education for all.
Further Reading
“I Am Not a Proof of the American Dream”
“If You Think Republicans Are Overplaying Schools, You Aren’t Paying Attention”
“Disdain for the Less Educated Is the Last Acceptable Prejudice”
“Moral Relativism and the Bottom Line”
*“The Page Amendment Is a Trojan Horse to Destroy Public Schools”