Gerald Bracey on The 'Fastest Growing Occupations'

From Susan Ohanian:

This is the text of an invited address given by Gerald R. Bracey at the annual convention of the American Educational Research Association in San Diego on Tuesday, April 14, 2009. Dr. Bracey was invited to give the "Charles Degarmo Invited Lecture" to AERA. Dr. Bracey explained in an e-mail two days before he delivered the address,"What follows are the first few pages of an invited address I will give at the annual convention of the American Educational Research Association in San Diego on Tuesday. The pages quote a lot of statistics from President Obama and Secretary of Education Duncan and then show that the statistics are all wrong. It pains me to do this since I campaigned for Obama, canvassed for him, donated to the campaign and, of course, voted for him. But listening to what he says about education, it is easy to see why Diane Ravitch said that in education, Obama is a third term for Bush and Duncan is Margaret Spellings in drag.

I've excerpted Bracey on the point that most jobs in the future are fairly low level, a perfect way to explain the way the ed deformers are trying to fool the public into believing college is necessary while at the same time setting up a school system focused on test prep and narrow skills. What they are doing is serving Walmart and McDonalds future low-skilled employees.

What about those 30 fastest growing occupations? I’ve never seen that statistic presented in quite that way, but it also means that half of the 30 fastest growing jobs DON’T require a B.A. or better. But, the signal point about this statistic is that the 30 fastest growing jobs don’t account for many jobs. And the few that do are occupations like personal care aides, home health aides, nursing aides — low-paying service sector jobs needed in and for an aging nation.

Retail sales accounts for more jobs than the top ten fastest growing occupations combined. For every systems engineer needed by a computer firm, Wal-Mart needs about 15 people on the floor. The ten occupations accounting for the largest NUMBER of jobs in a Bureau of Labor Statistics projection from 2006 to 2016 were retail sales, cashiers, office clerks, registered nurses, janitors and cleaners, bookkeeping clerks, waiters and waitresses, food preparers and servers, customer service representatives, and truck and tractor drivers. I will show the falsity of Miller's and Duncan's linking of education and economic crises in detail later in the talk, but it terrifies me that our new President and Secretary of Education have apparently bought into the old falsehoods.

Little wonder that Diane Ravitch said that in education Obama was a third term for Bush and that Duncan was Margaret Spellings in drag.

Obama and Duncan seem to be following the long-established line that you can get away with saying just about anything you choose about public schools and no one will call you on it. People will believe anything you say about public education as long as it’s bad.

The real causes of the current economic mess

I think one of the reasons we see so many such comments is captured a bit in the first two quotes. Neither Miller nor the President could bring himself to actually blame the schools for today’s economic catastrophe, but they laid on them some of the responsibility for any recovery. There is a long history of trying to link test scores to a nation’s economic health. That notion needs to become extinct

Let’s take a moment to reflect on the causes of the current mess. Banks used very little capital of their own to buy extremely risky real estate assets, granting subprime mortgages and mortgages on overpriced houses, often without even making credit checks. Then they used virtually unfathomable instruments such as credit default swaps to insure against loss. But insurance companies that insured those risks, like AIG didn’t have the capital to pay off the swaps when the banks’ bets went bad. The situation has produced a slight reworking of the opening rhetorical flourishes of that landmark document, "A Nation At Risk:"

We feel compelled to report to the American people that the business and financial foundations of our society are being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur—companies that extolled themselves as models of excellent practices have deceived the American people with sloppy, undisciplined, and greedy practices that are driving Americans out of their homes, threatening their retirements, and dashing their hopes of a financially secure future. Indeed, if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre corporate financial performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.

Read it all: http://www.susanohanian.org/show_commentaries.html?id=661

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Is the NY Times Asking, "Where is Hitler When We Need Him?"

Dave Leonhardt had an interesting piece on the impact of stimulus packages in the Great Depression in yesterday's NY Times.

More than any other country, Germany — Nazi Germany — then set out on a serious stimulus program. The government built up the military, expanded the autobahn, put up stadiums for the 1936 Berlin Olympics and built monuments to the Nazi Party across Munich and Berlin.

The economic benefits of this vast works program never flowed to most workers, because fascism doesn’t look kindly on collective bargaining. But Germany did escape the Great Depression faster than other countries. Corporate profits boomed, and unemployment sank (and not because of slave labor, which didn’t become widespread until later). Harold James, an economic historian, says that the young liberal economists studying under John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s began to debate whether Hitler had solved unemployment.

No sane person enjoys mixing nuance and Nazis, but this bit of economic history has a particular importance this week.

I was particularly taken with, "The economic benefits of this vast works program never flowed to most workers, because fascism doesn’t look kindly on collective bargaining."

Well neither does most of the American political system look kindly on collective bargaining. How about the attack on teacher unionism as the major obstacle to education progress, by the likes of Bill Maher and Nicholas Kristof and by many Democrats?

Remember the anti-strike Taylor Law?

How about Reagan's firing of the air traffic controllers, which opened the floodgates to antilabor sentiment in this country? The Obama administration's waffling on card check, which would restore a semblance of balance between labor and management?

One could claim that a key element in the financial crisis is this imbalance between labor and a powerful corporate oligarchy that basically controls the American government that has lead to the massive disparity in wealth. It was well-known that during the boom years, American workers did not participate in the benefits.

Remember the shouts of "more productivity" in exchange for raises from the likes of Giuliani and Bloomberg?

Take teachers in NYC, who got supposedly big raises, but for longer working hours and more working days, while paying more for health care. We paid beyond the pale for the 2005 contract which stripped teachers of so many seniority rights and created the ATR mess.

Young teachers, especially in charter schools like KIPP are being paid 20% more for 60% more work and with nowhere the same benefits as public school teachers. This is the new model of non-career educators with no families or other serious obligations outside the school door that is being so praised by liberals and conservatives alike.

Arguments that labor has massive power and influence over the American political scene by anti-worker propagandists are a joke.

This Leonhardt point is revealing:

Europe is doing less than the United States, but the gap isn’t huge. It just seems so because European stimulus tends to arrive quietly, from existing safety net programs. In this country, where the safety net is weaker, stimulus comes largely from new laws.

Yes, Virginia, we have a weak safety net.
Weak labor = weak safety net.
Low wage, non-union companies like Walmart and McDonald's, among our largest employers = a population mass that under financial crisis will not be able to afford a Big Mac = global financial meltdown.

Related
Orleans School Board suspends teacher raises, allows larger classes
Cutting teacher salaries in New Orleans can easily occur because they destroyed the union. How will that work out for stimulating the economy? How will the hordes of Teach for America recruits brought in handle that? TFA will encourage them to keep their heads down and think about the kids instead of their livelihoods.


European Workers Rebel as G-20 Looms
At companies, including Caterpillar in France and Visteon in Northern Ireland, workers have occupied offices and detained bosses.
The Christian Science Monitor
America's press generally presents these people as left-wing lunatics, not as angry regular workers. I bet you can't wait to occupy your school and detain your principal and assistant principals.

The Obamagogues' Liars and Our Future

Susan Ohanian puts out a daily digest of dynamic articles. This one by Rich Gibson ties many points together from Geithner to Duncan to Obama. All these years we are told there is no money to reduce class size but magically trillions appear to bail out banks and for wars. Their solution is to look for quality, heroic teachers who will work 12 hour days till they burn out, who just happen to be brand new at half the salary. Why do we accept this? Gibson's call to action may be starting to resonate but there is a lot of work to be done. The communities under attack and socially conscious teacher must organize together so if it ever comes to having to shut down schools to fight back, there will be less chance of dividing people. There are two ways to shut down schools to stop the madness: a strike or a parent/student boycott. Imagine both.

Just a taste before reading the entire article. Gibson says:

"No money for schools - print it"

"This is a full scale class war, with the rich assaulting poor and working people everywhere. This is going on in schools, in warfare, in the financial crisis, in the health care system, in the foreclosures: everywhere."

"the union bosses are on the side of the banksters and their bought and paid for hucksters who serve in the executive committee of the rich, the government. The union bosses deny that this real class war is going on, and lure people into support for the emergence of what has all the markings of fascism, as with the eradication of any semblance of academic freedom in schools."

And my favorite:

"No money? Go print it. You did for the banksters, now go get ours. You admit that reason had nothing to do with the bailouts. That was about power. If you do the printing, we will not accept the money as
a bribe to go back in and continue the racist child abuse that is whatever you plan to call NCLB. We will treat the money, and our new colleagues, as victories, and we will press on for more still."

The Obamagogues' Liars and Our Future

http://susanohanian.org/show_commentary.php?id=649
Publication Date: 2009-03-12
By Rich Gibson

It is not our education system. It is Theirs. It is not our economy. It is Theirs.


For those who had the time to stay up and watch Charlie Rose on PBS the last two nights, we were treated to Timothy Geithner, the new Treasury boss, and Arne Duncan, in that order.

What was striking to me was that, in contrast to The Obamagogue, they're both lousy liars.

Geithner looks like he is in a card game and knows that everyone at the table can see he is cheating, but he is smug enough to keep dealing off the bottom anyway. Geithner repeatedly said that those who led the world into this great financial crisis are bad people, but they must be saved as "we are all in this together and must save our economy." He went on to insist that, really, we are all at fault.

Arne Duncan, Education boss, enjoyed Rose's typically softball style (they ended with a near hug). Duncan, following on The Obmagogue's education speech at the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, insisted that schools are really the central organizing point of much of US life
(true) and that he intends to expand that, with schools fully open to the community, as much as possible.

Of course, they must be very good schools, in order to serve our nation, where we are all in international competition with other countries whose education systems are better.

With what I saw as a smirk, that others may see as a cute grin, throughout the interview, Duncan was not so good at dodging the fact that he has never been an educator, nor did Rose do much to press him on the issue. Duncan just harkened back to his days at his lovely mother's knees when she was tutoring poor kids. Mom the Missionary. Son the Bishop.

Rose took for granted that Chicago schools are the better for Duncan's presence, though in a quick comment they agreed that he had closed some of those schools---and Substance News has covered which ones. Guess whose?

Duncan even did a poor job trying to convince us that the President's (and Duncan's) project is "non-ideological, just what is good for kids."

Duncan spoke up, over and over, for merit pay, for charters, for more regimented national curricula, more sophisticated testing, though he made no mention of the militarization of schooling--and Rose never asked. This is the crux of a non-ideology.

Remarkably, Duncan claimed that he spoke to both the president of the NEA and the AFT. Each fully backed The Obamagogue's education speech.

Duncan underlined that the bureaucrats who run both school unions support national standards, as they do. And he reminded us that Al Shanker, the worst union boss in the history of the US, was a progenitor of charter schools, as he was. Duncan told the truth about that, just as The One told us the truth before the election: more wars and more attacks on freedom in schools. That so few actually grasped this is troubling--a very disturbing analytical miscue.

The problem with NCLB, was two fold, per Duncan. It was under-funded. It did not set a high bar for all states. To him, "NCLB needs to be rebranded."

Notably, the Duncan segment of the Charlie Rose Show was sponsored by the Eli Broad Foundation.

The key lie that is shared by Geithner, Duncan, and The Obamagogue, is that we are all in this together. We are not.

This is a full scale class war, with the rich assaulting poor and working people everywhere. This is going on in schools, in warfare, in the financial crisis, in the health care system, in the foreclosures: everywhere.

The education agenda, the finance agenda, all of these are war agendas.

It should be easy to see who is one the side of who. The union bosses are on the side of the banksters and their bought and paid for hucksters who serve in the executive committee of the rich, the government. The union bosses deny that this real class war is going on, and lure people into support for the emergence of what has all the markings of fascism, as with the eradication of any semblance of academic freedom in schools.

Right now, thousands of layoff notices are going out to California teachers who, predictably, will be told that sacrifices must be made in order to save jobs and "our" education system.

It is not our education system. It is Theirs. It is not our economy. It is Theirs.

The core issue of our time is booming color-coded inequality potentially challenged by mass class conscious resistance with a real purpose, a north star: overcoming the system of capital with considerable sacrifice in order to live in a world where people can live more or less equitably by sharing--each contributing to the freedom of the others.

Concessions do not save jobs. Like feeding blood to sharks, concessions make bosses want more. Look at the demise of the United Auto Workers Union, now near dead, after decades of one concession after the next, pensions and health care about to be wiped out (note Delphi).

When they say cut back, we must say Fight Back.

We want, not the status quo, but more school workers hired. No more racist high stakes exams. Recruiters off the campuses.

No money? Go print it. You did for the banksters, now go get ours. You admit that reason had nothing to do with the bailouts. That was about power. If you do the printing, we will not accept the money as a bribe to go back in and continue the racist child abuse that is whatever you plan to call NCLB. We will treat the money, and our new colleagues, as victories, and we will press on for more still.

We have some power too. We can shut down your schools, open freedom school in the midst of growing civil strife, and teach kids the fact that, among other things, all of history really is the history of class struggle.

If we do not resist, we can look quickly into the future and see what is in store for us. Here is The Duncan/Obamagogue model, Michelle Rhee:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/0/11/AR2009031103742.html

Responding to Randi

by guest blogger, Vera


By now you have all received a Dear Colleagues letter from President Weingarten calling for you to sign up in a “union campaign” in response to the looming cutbacks. Some comments on her statements (italics):

Unemployment…is expected to reach 9 percent in 2010.

What about the real unemployment situation? Including part time and discouraged workers? Where have our union historians and analysts been in recent years when many economists have been pointing out a real unemployment rate of between 9 and 12%, indicating a structural problem that would eventually have a huge impact on effective demand? And then, the widespread destruction of higher paid union jobs which left many workers with significantly lower incomes. All of which, in turn contributed to the explosion of private debt, the financial bubble, and the predictable collapse.

At least 46 states are facing huge budget deficits... In Albany, the deficit for the upcoming fiscal year has reached more than $15 billion.

What about the decades-long shortchanging of cities and public services as a result of taxation and spending policies? Examples, lower federal taxes on rich, states forced to pick up costs formerly paid by federal government, huge military spending, federal subsidies for corporate giants like farming and oil monopolies, and NYC subsidies to wealthy real estate and business interests. Why didn’t the union join the call for a stock-transfer tax, which would have tapped into all the profitable speculative trading?

Between the city and state, education is slated for more than $1.5 billion in cutbacks.

Where was the money when the city was rich? Why weren’t new schools built and why weren’t CFE funds spent where they were mandated to be spent—in the schools? Now we have nothing to give up. Many of our schools are already overcrowded; our class sizes are already too large, children have to travel miles all over the city because schools haven’t been built in neighborhoods with expanding populations, adding enormous transportation costs on to the education bills. Not to mention the cost of a growing education bureaucracy dedicated to excessive testing, data manipulation, administrative policies punitive toward teachers, demoralization of staff, and harassment of senior teachers. Then there is the costly chaos of closing large schools, opening up small ones, hiring four principals for one school building, repeatedly changing the bureaucratic structure, and hiring costly educational experts and monitors, with their checklists and buzzwords but nary a clue about what to do to make our schools more effective.

Predictably, the calls are already going out to reduced pensions and health benefits.

Why hasn’t our union joined the nationwide voices that are calling for universal health care? Where is a union-led movement to make social security more of a safety net for retirees by raising the income ceiling on taxable income and increasing benefits? Where were our union-designated pension board members when our pension funds were being put at risk through speculative investment?

A major call to action…a powerful public information, lobbying and action campaign…calling for… federal help and some additional fair taxes…and a hard look at the expenditure side to prioritize the classroom…[and identify] alternative education savings including downsizing the DOE’s vast testing apparatus… [and] the possibility of a retirement incentive.

Here are battles that should have begun long ago. Fair taxes? Where was the union when the upper tax rate was reduced from 39% to 35% at a time when the income gap between rich and poor was increasing greatly? Where was the union when the Bush administration launched a war that is expected to cost us three trillion dollars? Where was the union when successive administrations and congressional regimes paved the way for the eroding of our real economy through a free trade race to the bottom, the proliferation of offshore accounts to avoid paying taxes, and the destruction of a responsible banking system through deregulation? As for the vast testing apparatus, this is only one of the many boondoggles that have enriched corporate friends of the mayor and chancellor at the expense of our school system and our union members.

An effective call to action necessitates:

• clear economic demands, not just begging for a few crumbs: raising income and corporate taxes on the wealthy, closing tax loopholes and eliminating most subsidies, and re-directing federal money to states and municipalities
• 
  
• mobilization of the entire labor movement nationwide to fight on behalf of workers (non-union and union) for jobs and services, universal health care, portable pensions, and adequate social security
• 
  
• a call for an end to the war in Iraq and a drastic downsizing of military expenditures
• 
  
• a campaign to end mayoral control and to replace the present DOE bureaucracy with a non-politicized, elected, responsible and accountable body of educational leaders who have the support of parents and teachers.

ICE-Mail Debate on McCain/Obama/Biden/Palin

Worth checking out some of the angst on the left. Comparisons to Germany in the early 30's are not crazy. I've been reading Alan Furst 1930's spy novels and Hilter was still considered a joke by many as late as 1938. Remember, he came to power due to economic dislocation. So don't laugh too hard at Bush followed by Palin. It can only get worse. I asked my mattress today how much interest it pays.

Posted at Norm's Notes.