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December 28, 2006

Jay Mathews on the Skills Commission report

He's highly critical of the report in a number of areas, but this is a major aspect of his argument:

Almost all the ideas in the report are worthy of support. Teachers salaries should be raised substantially to attract better recruits. Standardized tests should be rewritten to encourage creative thought. Independently operated public schools should be encouraged. Spending on low-income students should be increased.

The problem is the report's fanciful notion that it would be possible -- indeed, they say it is absolutely necessary -- to do all these things at once. The report's authors propose a grand scheme to save our schools and keep India and China from turning the United States into a low-wage economic backwater. They ignore the progress made by some of their own panel members and instead assert that none of the education innovations of the past 40 years have had much effect. "The reason that nothing has made much difference is that every time we tried to change something, we did not change much of anything else," they conclude.

I definitely agree that the report's recommendations, taken together, would take immeasurable political and logistical firepower to make reality.  But the next paragraph is one area where I take exception to Mathews:

Huh? Our schools need to be better, but it is also clear that they are providing the finest training in the world in just about every specialty you could name, and are giving the majority of Americans enough skills to support a middle-class lifestyle. We have gotten as far as we have by muddling along, attacking problems haphazardly, rejecting master plans, and using the liberties inherent in our political, economic and social systems to create new approaches that keep us moving forward. That is the way free enterprise democracies work.

Decentralization of educational governance may or may not be a virtue worth retaining, but I think that's a subject that deserves its own discussion.  Likewise, it's too easy sometimes to conflate K-12 and post-secondary schools, which is what I think Mathews is doing here.  It is our post-secondary network of technical schools, community colleges and universities, not K-12, that has produced the kind of work force Mathews describes. 

There's much, much more in his article, so it's worth your time to check it out.  In the meantime, I promise to comment soon much more in depth on the report and various reactions to it.  (It's also worth pointing out that practically nobody has actually seen the report so far; only the executive summary can be easily accessed.  Presumably the well-connected Mathews got a copy.  My own shiny new edition is en route, and I plan on discussing it in detail very soon.) 

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