It's About the Money, Stupid

Oh, it so totally is.

America is no longer about freedom.

Its not about opportunity.

It's not about a fair deal or a moral center

Its about money.

Who has it.

What it buys them.

What protects it and helps make more for those who already have more than they could spend in 10 lifetimes.

A  perfect fall day was marred yesterday by the intrusion of reality, courtesy of The New York Times.

The venerable Grey Lady took the time and devoted the resources to demonstrate statistically, what  most of us already knew intuitively -- we're ruled by the rich, our public servants are really their public servants and -- this little piece of reality courtesy of our friends in Harrisburg -- the only tool we have to level the playing field is being systematically undermined to ensure we no longer have access to it.

In a stunning and thoroughly depressing example of public service journalism, published on-line yesterday and, in all likelihood, in print today, the Times demonstrated that in a nation of 120 million people, just 158 families and the companies they control, have provided more than half of the seed money for the campaigns of those seeking the presidency.

And best of all, thanks to the Supreme Court's 'Citizens United' decision, an ironically named case if ever there was one, it's not even illegal.

And here's a surprise for you, The data says:

"Regardless of industry, the families investing the most in presidential politics overwhelmingly lean right, contributing tens of millions of dollars to support Republican candidates who have pledged to pare regulations; cut taxes on income, capital gains and inheritances; and shrink entitlement programs."

The Times probably should have added "undermine public education" to that list.

It's no surprise really. Logic dictates what happens.

To be elected, you need money to get your name and message out. Once elected, why would you support policies that are opposed to the interests of those who paid for your election?

And why would a person with money to spend on elections give it to someone who supports policies that might cost them money?

There is a counter-balancing force built into the American system, to provide a check to those with unimaginable millions.

It is the millions of votes which, for the moment, still belong to the people who do not have enough money to buy their own candidates.

Each voter still remains free to make up their own mind. So it follows that the true battlefield of political power in America is the place where those minds are molded, the media and the classroom.

Whether you are conservative or liberal, there is a media platform just for you, one that caters to and re-affirms your views, reinforcing what you believe to be true, whether the facts on the ground support it or not.

But that is where the short-term skirmish is fought, where the voters in any specific election are courted, coddled or confronted.

Long-term strategists however, see where the real battle is being fought -- against seemingly overwhelming demographic changes. It's in the classroom.

One look at the U.S. Census will tell you that by 2020, or certainly by 2040, white people will be a minority in America. It doesn't matter how you feel about this, it is an inescapable fact.

What does matter is what you do about it.

So who are the 158 wealthiest families in America and what are they doing about these inescapable changes?

The Families the Times's research tells us are this powerful "are overwhelmingly white, rich, older and male, in a nation that is being remade by the young, by women, and by black and brown voters. Across a sprawling country, they reside in an archipelago of wealth, exclusive neighborhoods dotting a handful of cities and towns?"

And what they are doing is funding candidates who support policies that do not benefit those who will soon be the majority of American citizens, the poor, the young, the women and the black and brown voters.

One of the first ways they did that was to lock them up. Potential black voters are incarcerated in this county at a race nearly twice that of potential brown voters and seven times the rate of white potential voters, according to the Prison Policy Initiative.

The land of the free incarcerates its citizens at a greater rate than any other nation on earth, yes, more than China, and in a disproportionately skewed way. A cynic might say they are jailing potential Democratic votes.

And before you say "do the crime do the crime," ask yourself, what time did the people who crashed the economy do? The answer is none. Not one of them went to jail. The people who threw thousands out of their homes and ruined lives, often fraudulently, are now even wealthier, thanks to a taxpayer bailout.

And a guy who robbed a convenience store? He is doing five years is he's lucky.

Never ones to miss an opportunity, the powerful have even managed to ensure that prisons are increasingly privatized, making sure that there is a direct return on investment for private prison companies that invest in a candidate.

But the even longer view strategy, is what is being done to public education.

The founders knew that a Republic the geographic size of America could only work if the voters were informed. It's why they allowed newspapers to pass freely through the postal system, in a desperate bid to ensure people in South Carolina know what people in Massachusetts were doing and thinking.

But since paucity of communication is no longer an issue, the remaining option is to control what those voters are thinking, or, better yet, make sure they aren't very good thinkers at all.

Yes, influencing what people think happens in the media in the short-term, but what the undermining of public education does in the long-term is ensure that America is not a nation of independent thinkers.

Its a classic strategy.

Cut funding for schools, load them with reporting and paperwork mandates for which no funding is provided, and then express shock at how poorly those schools are performing.

Then you demand "accountability," which means testing, lots and lots of testing.

Those tests are, first, the provenance of private companies (another opportunity for return on campaign investment) and, by design or unconscious bias, it hardly matters, skewed to favor those already born into advantage.

As the National Center for Fair and Open Testing recently reported, the SAT scores of college-bound seniors in 2015 reflect what you might expect: the higher your household's income, the higher your SAT scores.

This pattern is also repeated in other ways in Pennsylvania, as we have reported recently in The Mercury, in the results of another set of tests.

"In a policy brief published last year, Ed Fuller, executive director of the Department of Education Policy at Penn State’s College of Education — wrote that school profile scores are more closely tied to things like poverty and a parent’s education than to school effectiveness," I wrote in Monday's Mercury.

In Pennsylvania, the Republican-led effort to starve public education, promote worse-performing charter schools in service of "school choice," provides two distinct benefits.

The first, is the aforementioned assurance that those most likely to get a good education are those from wealthier families, raised in comfort, who are -- consciously or not -- more likely to favor policies which will continue those conditions for their children.

The second is that it dwindles the power and influence of the teachers unions, one of the few remaining bulwarks still manning the barricades against oligarchy.

We've been bullied into believing that all teachers make $80,000 and only work nine months a year.

In truth, as an official of the Federation of Pottstown Teachers recently explained to me, the starting salary is about $43,000 a year, many of them with second jobs to make ends meet.

The brilliance of the Republican strategy is that the burden of paying for public schools has been increasingly shifted to the local taxpayer.

Where once the state once paid 50 percent of the cost of public education, it now pays about 25 percent in Pottstown's case -- all while piling on more requirements and saying innocently on election day, "I never raised state taxes, the problem is these local school boards and those greedy teachers."

Ask a Republican devoted to market forces to explain why, if teacher pay is so good and the job so cushy, that Pottstown this week had 18 substitute openings a day and there is a nationwide shortage of teachers coming out of college.

As a further illustration, consider the mildly impolite conversation I had two years back during an editorial board meeting with state Sen. Bob Mensch, R-24th Dist.

I pointed out to him that during the Rendell years, increased funding resulted in improved test scores in Pottstown, the result Republicans say they seek.

He promised to look into that. He didn't. (I know because I checked with the person I told him to talk to.)

And then he looked me in the eye and said he would be OK with providing more funding to schools if he could be sure the money went into the "classroom resources" and "not a teacher's salary."

"The teacher IS the classroom resource," I replied with some heat.

And then I remembered, silly me, that it's about the money stupid.

Starving public education not only ensures a less-educated voting public, it also cuts the funding of a group of people who vote, and fund candidates who vote, for policies that actually support public education.

Both sides, are acting in their own best interest. I just happen to believe that adequately funding public education is in the best interest of the country and the commonwealth as well as the teachers unions.

And so now we come to last year's election, in which for the first time in modern memory, a sitting governor was ousted by an unknown who said he wanted to -- get this -- adequately fund public education.

The guy who lost that election, the guy who underfunded education to the point that people actually began to take notice, even got religion late in the game.

Tom Corbett implemented a committee to recommend a fair funding formula, but the timing was wrong. Believe me I get no pleasure from being right about this, but I told anyone who would listen that it would be released just as the budget fight heated up, and subsequently minimized.

As a result, the fair funding formula has ended up NOT as the game-changing policy revolution it had the potential to be, but another bargaining chip on the negotiating table, along side a shale gas extraction tax and state-run liquor stores.

(The fact that those liquor store workers who would be put out of work are part of a union should be lost on no one, by the way).

The fact that there is more attention given in Harrisburg to who profits from the sale of booze than how we can give every Pennsylvania student a fair chance at an education, a better job and a life free of a privately run jail, tells you everything you need to know about misplaced priorities.

Its not about the children.

It's not about the taxpayers.

It's about about the money, whose campaign coffer it fills, and how to keep us stupid so we don't figure it out on election day.

Without Public Education, There is No Republic

"A republic madam, if you can keep it."

That is what Benjamin Franklin famously said to a passerby when she asked him what the Constitutional Convention of 1787 had given the country.

I know this is the day that we celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence, but in many ways, the document that followed 11 years later is the more important of the two.

The Declaration declared what we were not -- subjects of a king -- and described our aspirations.

The Constitution declares what kind of nation we are, and how we intend to go about building it -- and continues to do so.

It is, however, an imperfect document by design.

For example: The reason the Constitution did not free the slaves is that do have done so then would have meant the dissolution of the nation.

Politics, even then, is the art of the possible.

So the founders wisely left some things for us to take care of later.

We are not doing a very good job.

And the place where we're really falling down is education.

The founders worried that democracy would fail if attempted on such a large scale. It had never been done before and the only successful democracies, which had not lasted, were rarely practiced in a place much larger than a city state, Athens being the most obvious example.

They reasoned the only things that could overcome the problems of an uninformed set of voters spread out and isolated over a broad area being given the power of the vote were:

1) the ability to communicate on a nationwide basis, and
2) an education system that ensured those voters could understand and interpret for themselves what was being communicated.

This is the part of the blog where I provide some quotes from the founders to shore up my case:

• "I consider knowledge to be the soul of the republic, and, as the weak and wicked are generally in alliance, as much care should be taken to diminish the number of the former as of the later. Education is the way to do this, and nothing should be left undone to afford all ranks of people the means of obtaining a proper degree of it at a cheap and easy rate." -- John Jay
• "Learned institutions ought to be the favorite objects with every free people. They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty and dangerous encroachments of the public liberty." -- James Madison
• "Educate and inform the whole mass of the people ... they are the only sure reliance of the preservation of our liberty." -- Thomas Jefferson
• "A Bible and a newspaper in every house, a good school in every district -- all studied and appreciated as they merit -- are the principal support of virtue, morality, and civil liberty." -- Ben Franklin
• "The best means of forming a manly, virtuous and happy people will be found in the right education of youth. Without this foundation, every other means, in my opinion, must fail." -- George Washington

So now that you're convinced the founders considered education important -- I mean Thomas Jefferson not only instituted public schools in Virginia, he founded the University of Virginia and considered it his greatest achievement -- ask yourself, how are we doing in that department?

To say that public education is in crisis in America and right here in Pennsylvania is an understatement.

At the root of the debate is an understandable desire to measure what our taxes are paying for, butting up against the belief that the value of a good education (and by extension, a good teacher) is incalculable.

One side of the debate demands tests scores and, more recently, teacher and school evaluation matrices to try to get some kind of accountability built into the system.

This is an understandable impulse and not to be dismissed out of hand. After all, if the value of a good teacher is incalculable, so is the damage a bad one can inflict.

Less understandable is the tendency to cleave to the idea that private industry can do a better job at teaching children than the local school district, simply because its private industry.

If you can do it better, prove it.

So far, particularly with cyber charter schools, the proof remains elusive.

One of the largest is K12 Inc., which, in Pennsylvania, runs Agora Cyber Charter.

For those interested in accountability, Agora  has never. Once. Met any measure of adequacy set by those who clamor for more accountability.

Yet, it continues to draw tax money unmolested in the same way those "failing" public schools we love to label do, schools whose students perform far better than those taught by Agora.

Happily for the executives of Agora, they continue to collect $2,000 per student in salary which, with with 75,000 students, means $21 million of taxpayer in the pockets of eight executives who run a school that fails children they are paid to help.

Certainly, not all charter schools are failures, and we should learn and adopt the best of those that succeed, but where is the outrage over THESE failing schools?

As any scientist will tell you (you learn this in school by the way) you cannot start an experiment with the conclusion, only a hypothesis.

This experiment with "school choice" has run its course and the conclusion is, some charter schools work better than public schools, some don't. But almost zero cyber-charters perform better than public schools.

There have been some successes, and they should be allowed to continue, but its time to put the focus back on the schools the founders knew were this democracy's only hope.

Lord knows, no public school is perfect and I have had my differences with how the Pottstown School District is educating my son.

But this is part of the process of raising children and my wife and I have done what we can to try to make those schools better, not abandon them.

But making them better has now given way to fighting to keep them from getting worse.

And the voters are starting to notice.

For the first time, registered Pennsylvania voters polled by Franklin and Marshall have listed education as their top concern in the coming gubernatorial election.

I confess, I don't know as much about Tom Wolf's education plans as I should, and I intend to remedy that.

But I know, and I think the majority of voters in Pennsylvania know, what Tom Corbett's record on funding education is.

We live in a capitalist society and in a capitalist society, money matters.

No, before you say it, I am not advocating "throwing money" at the problems in our schools, but
starving them of the funding they need to provide even the most basic education isn't doing our children any favors.

After all, as Ben Franklin once said (sorry, couldn't resist one more): ""Genius without education is like silver in the mine."

We are headed into extraordinarily difficult times; climate change, economic upheaval, a world-wide terrorist threat.

I'll be blunt.

Stupid, uneducated children will become stupid, uneducated adults who will make stupid decisions and make things worse.

We are going to need as many geniuses as we can muster to understand the nuances of an increasingly complex world.

Starving our public schools is not doing our democracy or our future any favors.

And that's worth considering on the day we celebrate the birth of that democracy.

Pennsylvania Embracing Failure

Albert Einstein is perhaps our most famous
theorist. Turns out, the evidence has proven
him right. Win.

Lately, I have begun to espouse a new philosophy which is distinctly non-philosophical -- "show me that it works."

Both liberalism and conservatism are replete with theories about the way we should live and run our governments and our societies.

Some theories -- trickle-down economics for example -- have lived long beyond the time they should have been abandoned for the simple reason that have failed to produce the results they promised.

(For my entire adult life, I've been waiting for tax cuts for millionaires to ensure me a comfortable middle class lifestyle. Next.)

Failure of this theory is no joke.

Perhaps nowhere is theory more prevalent these days than in the field of education.

And so, although dubious, I was willing to give school choice a chance under the rubric that if it works, let's go with it.

After all, as someone who is the product of public schools, has a child in public schools and reports on traditional public schools on a daily basis, it was hard to argue that public schools don't have their problems.

The answer to those problems, we were told, was a new beginning; charter schools; cyber-charter schools; vouchers; starting from scratch.

Although I've always believed its better to fix the car than to buy a whole new car, I acknowledge that sometimes the car can't be fixed, or that fixing it would cost more than the value of the car itself.

So OK school choice, show me this works.

Fail.

As traditional public education advocates have been shouting from the roof tops for the past week or so, newly re-calculated test results that actually compare apples to apples between charter, cyber-charter and traditional public schools show that fewer than 30 percent of charter schools meet national benchmarks.

By way of comparison, at least 50 percent of traditional public schools run by districts met the benchmarks.

Don't get me wrong, I'm no advocate for standardized tests being the only barometer of school effectiveness. They should be a part of a larger assessment.

But its the school choice people who have shoved those test scores in our face as evidence that traditional schools are failing and who used the skewed results as evidence of their success.

Ooops.

So what's good for the goose is good for the charter school I say.

Remember, the state slapped Pottstown High School with the dubious honor of being a "failing school" for missing one math benchmark and otherwise having grades much better than most charters and ALL cyber-charters.

The 'level playing field' Pennsylvania envisioned for

comparing traditional public schools and charter schools.

Surely, in the interest of "the level playing field" we all claim to want, that label will now be carefully applied to all 12 of Pennsylvania's cyber-charter schools, none of which made the "Adequate Yearly Progress" required under the federal No Child Left Behind Law.

Surely, in the interest of providing parents with as much information as possible to make informed choices, that label will now be slapped on the 61 percent of the 80 brick-and-mortar charter schools that did not make AYP.

Surely you're joking.

This is Pennsylvania people.

Consider that the reason those scores are new, is that until the feds stepped in and said no, Pennsylvania had one way of calculating scores for charter schools and a whole different (much harsher) way of calculating them for traditional public schools.

In other words, as I wrote about in August, there was a double standard.

Shocking I know.

"How could this happen?" You ask.

It's Pennsylvania people.

The better question to ask is how could it not happen?

Charles Zogby talks about Pennsylvania's pension crisis
during a meeting with Digital First Media journalists on Jan. 10.

Well, however it happened in the Byzantine halls of Harrisburg, I feel confident in the belief that just because former Secretary of Education Charles Zogby was subsequently a highly paid executive with a for-profit company with ties to the largest of Pennsylvania's cyber charter schools in no way ensured that a way would be found to make those companies look good and attract more investment.

Because that would be wrong.

By way of a little history, Zobgy served as education secretary under Republican governors Ridge and Schweiker from 2001 to 2003, and as the Director of Governor Ridge's Policy Office from 1995 to 2001.

Before returning to government service as Tom Corbett's budget secretary, a happy coincidence if ever there was one, Zogby, served as the Senior Vice President of Education and Policy for K12 Inc.

That for-profit company is an online school curriculum developer and provider with ties to Pennsylvania Virtual Academy and Agora, two of Pennsylvania's largest cyber charters.

This makes K12 seem like a perfectly nice company.

In July, K12 Inc. offices were raided by federal agents and the firm is also under investigation on Wall Street for lying to investors and in Florida for using non-certified teachers.

Surely, given the lobbying, the money, the poor performance, one would think it's time for some detailed examination of this school choice experiment.

Surely, given that not a single cyber-charter school demonstrated adequate effectiveness in educating our students to a state-wide standard, we would have a halt on any new cyber-charter school applications until we could figure out how to do better.

Surely, I've mentioned this is Pennsylvania right?

More money, worse results?

Let's have more of that.

Well in Pennsylvania, when there's doubt about the effectiveness of an entity using public money to do a sub-standard job, we respond by saying: "let's have us some more of that."

Yup, in a move that strains credulity, Pennsylvania is now considering approval of eight new cyber charter schools.

That's a 50 percent increase in the investment of public money in a model now shown to be failing.

Not satisfied with that depressing statistic, see if you can guess who would be contracted to run one of these eight new cyber charter schools -- you guessed it, K12 Inc.

That's how we roll in the Keystone state.

This year, Pennsylvania taxpayers will spend about $400 million so that roughly 35,000 students can be taught through cyber charters instead of traditional public schools.

By 2017, we the taxpayers would be spending an additional $108.3 million to educate another 9,800 students in cyber schools if these new proposed cyber-charters are approved.

Talk about throwing good money after bad. 

WHYY's Newsworks reported on Dec. 5 that:

Rhonda Brownstein

In their review of the Philadelphia School District's operations, the Boston Consulting Group described the quality of Pennsylvania's cybers as "notoriously low."

The consultants recommended that the district start its own online program to draw students back.

And Rhonda Brownstein of the Education Law Center wants a freeze on all new cyber charters.

"With all of the dismal academic performance, we think that the Pennsylvania Department of Education should slow down, take a look at what the problem is, and not go on to approve additional [cybers]," she said.

But, according to Newsworks, the Pennsylvania Department of Education is doing the exact opposite.

Carolyn Dumaresq, PA's deputy secretary of
education sees "value" in a schools model that
fails to meet standards 100% of the time.

After all, it is the Pennsylvania Department of Education.

It's not like its some non-partisan public entity dedicated to giving the Commonwealth's children the very best education for the lowest price.

So, Carolyn Dumaresq, Pennsylvania's deputy secretary of education, showed up at the hearings "touting the value of online options," according to the Newsworks report. 

Perhaps she went to a cyber-charter school herself. I'm having trouble understanding how more money and poorer results defines the word "value."

"The beauty of the cyber charter is that any child, anywhere in Pennsylvania can participate," said Dumaresq. "I think they serve a unique role in providing additional opportunities for students."

Which of course, brings us back to theories versus actual evidence in the real world; where the "opportunity" to participate in a failing enterprise from anywhere in the state, is a value greater than a public school where your chances of academic success are greater.

A decision on the new charters is expected tomorrow. Anyone want to bet they all get approved?

Corbett listens to a question from Phil Heron, right, the

editor of the Delaware County Daily Times during a Jan. 10

meeting with editorial staff from Digital First Media.

When I joined a group of Digital First Media editors and reporters to meet with Gov. Corbett so he could highlight the crisis of pensions in Pennsylvania (see today's Mercury for an in depth-analysis of that problem) I asked him about the results for school choice.

As I wrote in a Jan. 13 post, Corbett's affection for the theory allows him to by-pass the facts.

I started by asking him about the "voucher lite" program, that uses a business tax break to divert what would have been tax receipts that could have funded public schools (you'll remember them as the ones that are doing better than charter schools). Instead, the money goes to foundations that offer scholarships to private schools.

According to an analysis I did in August, by an overwhelming margin, the program favors schools with a religious affiliation.

So I asked Gov. Corbett if using the state to facilitate religious education bothered him.

"Are you asking me if I'm against school choice? No, I'm not against school choice. Competition is always good," Corbett replied, completely ignoring the question I had actually asked him.

When I pointed out, as we've shown here, that test scores at charter schools, cyber and otherwise, are in general worse than those in traditional public schools, he was untroubled.

Smiling, he said these experiments in choice are "just getting started" and will have to "do better."

Faith in the theory that "competition is always good" trumped evidence that this is not always the case.

I would have hoped that a former prosecutor would be more moved by evidence.

But that's just a theory.

After all, this is Pennsylvania.

There Goes $11-million for Our Schools (I Didn't Vote for That!)

Are You Kidding Me?

Blogger's Note: Blatant Plagiarism alert! I haven't done this too often, but the idiocy of this latest set of circumstances is so well encapsulated in this March 15 post in the Yinzercation blog (P.S. I have no idea what that stands for) that I figured, why re-invent the wheel? These guys have got it covered.

Here's what they posted:

Earlier this week, Governor Corbett asked where he was supposed to get the money to fund public education in Pennsylvania.

Yesterday, he signed into law a new Voter ID bill, which does not appear to solve any actual problem in the state, will most certainly face expensive legal challenge, and worse, will cost taxpayers an estimated $11 MILLION to implement.

The Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center reports that other states have faced “substantial financial burdens” after passing similar laws: “Indiana, with about half as many registered voters as Pennsylvania, adopted a voter ID law in 2005 and spent $12.2 million over four years implementing it. Missouri has estimated voter ID legislation would cost $17.4 million over three years to inform its 4.1 million registered voters of the new requirements. Independent estimates for a proposed North Carolina law range from $18 million to $25 million over three years.” (May 2011 report)

Even taxpayers who are not outraged by the new law’s attempt to disenfranchise voters should be incensed that the Governor is signing new legislation expected to cost our state $11 MILLION.

He says, “We are reducing the funding in education because we do not have the money — it’s that simple.” (See “The Old Divide and Conquer Tactic“)

No.

What’s simple is not passing unneeded laws that spend more money while proposing additional devastating cuts to our schools at the same time.

$11 MILLION would pay for a whole lot of teachers.

Note to the Pennsylvania legislature: it’s time to focus on real problems in the state – like reversing the proposed budget cuts to public education – not imaginary ones that waste taxpayer money.

* * *
Hi,
Me again. I'm back with a final note.

According to this Roll Call, not one local state representatives (by pure coincidence, all Republicans by the way) voted against spending $11 million to solve a problem that does not exist (a PA Legislature specialty).

The PA State Asylum for the Politically Deranged, Harrisburg

Voting in favor of spending $11 million on voter ID while there is "no money for public education" were Tim Hennessey (26th Dist.), Tom Quigley (146th Dist.), Marcy Toepel (147th Dist.), David Maloney (130th Dist.), Mike Vereb (150th), Warren Kampf (157th Dist. ) and Curt Schroder (155th Dist.) 

In the State Senate (Roll Call), the area's only no votes came from Andrew Dinniman (D-19th Dist. and Judy Schwank (D-11th Dist.).

John Rafferty (R-44th Dist) and Bob Mensch (R-24th Dist.) both voted in favor.

As a public service, I've provided e-mail links to our local legislators which can be accessed by clicking on each of their names, just in case you would like to communicate your thoughts on this waste of time and money.

Undermining Public Education, Hobbles Our Hope for the Future

Undermining education undermines jobs

As the presidential campaign gears up and every candidate is sure to use the word "jobs" in every sentence they speak, I am sometimes struck by the acknowledgement gap that exists between the words "jobs" and "education."

Education, particularly public education, is a dirty word these days.

Depending on who you listen to, education is either the primary cause of Pennsylvania's budget deficit, a financial black hole into which the public's money is recklessly and unthinkingly flung, the refuge of lazy teachers who get every summer off; or, in some extreme cases, "factories" where "weird socialization" occurs.

To which I say, even if all of that were true, and I doubt it is, that does not do away with the need for the function.

Why can't we agree to fix public education, instead of "throwing the baby out with the bath water," or trying to starve public education into some kind of stasis, so we then can blame it for not adequately educating our kids.

The educator bubble?

I will be the first person to say that sometimes it seems that educators live in a bubble, separated from the real world where the rest of us have been paying a heavy share of their own health benefits for more than a decade and go years without a raise.

At the same time, not many of us can say we've spent any time in their world, struggling to deliver a mandated curriculum to a room packed with 20 to 30 6-year-olds, several of whom have severe learning disabilities but are nevertheless judged by the same standardized tests which have become the only measure for the value we place on education.

What got me started on all this was, first, this article in The Atlantic about how complicated manufacturing jobs have become in America and the need for an educated work force to man the factory jobs for which a high school education is no longer adequate.

Then I saw this article in Sunday's Washington Post and I really got riled.

Today's manufacturing machines are complex

We keep talking about how manufacturing jobs have left the U.S. for Asia, Mexico and elsewhere, and it's true they have.

The U.S. has lost nearly 4 million manufacturing jobs in the past 10 years.

(And how is China preparing to receive those jobs? A massive public education effort.Would that we had that much foresight.)

But significantly, the Post also revealed that a recent report for the Manufacturing Institute found that as many as 600,000 manufacturing jobs in this country are going unfilled.

Why?

A shortage of skilled workers.

Factory floors these days look more like laboratory clean rooms than grease and metal-filing filled machine shops, with high-tech computers doing the work once done by 10 un-skilled laborers.

Lament it if you will, but we won't be going back -- ever. Time to adjust to the present and plan for the future.

Here's the thing, those machines need at least one skilled workers to run, program and maintain them. Add to that the fact that many of the workers who remain and run these machines are aging and we may soon find even more jobs leaving for overseas, not because it's cheaper, but because the workers there are better educated.


So what's our plan?

Apparently, cut public funding for public education.

Have we not learned yet that it's cheaper to educate our citizens, then to imprison them or support them indefinitely on Welfare?

The Post article quotes 27-year-old Greg Rowles who got a job paying between $18 to $28 per hour because he "took some classes at the local community college."

Pottstown's Western Campus of Montgomery County Community College is among the 50-fastest growing in the country, but when it comes time to prepare for a future of high-tech manufacturing jobs, what is our plan?

Cut community college funding.

In a Feb. 7 article I wrote for The Mercury, MCCC President Karen Stout lamented this short-sighted approach as is proposed on Gov. Tom Corbett's budget.

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett

In his budget address, Gov. Corbett said: “Maintaining our commitment to the technical professions and practical trades keeps a bargain with today and builds for tomorrow. As our energy sector expands and manufacturing revives, Pennsylvania needs a trained work force ready to meet the demand for workers."

This will apparently be achieved with a  4 percent cut to MCCC's budget, on top of last year's cut of 10 percent.

“On a per-student basis, we’re looking at the same level of state funding that we received in 1994,” Stout told me.

Like the Post story, Stout said that manufacturers here in Montgomery County need qualified workers.

A Feb. 17 lasagna dinner raised $1,187 for West Campus scholarships

" I was meeting with CEOs of manufacturing firms in the Upper Perk area and they were explaining how important the work we’re doing is to those companies, and the jobs it will create, but we can’t keep offering new programs that adapt to the needs of the job market with these constant cuts to our funding,” said Stout.

The cuts will, in all likelihood, lead to an increase in tuition costs and a need for more lasagna dinners like the one shown here to raise more money for more scholarships.

Which brings me to another aspect of how we're sabotaging our best chances of growing our way out of this recession.

Rich kids are doing better than poor kids in testing

The third spoke in this tirade of mine was this Reuters article, which also ran in The Atlantic, which looks at new research showing that "the difference in test scores between affluent and underprivileged students has grown 40 percent since the 1960s."

The achievement gap between rich and poor students is now twice the gap between white and black students.

More worrisome is information that indicates when it comes to college-completion rates, the rich-poor gulf has grown by 50 percent since the 1980s, according to the Reuters report, which was based on this more detailed report in The New York Times.

Poor kids are now 50% less likely to finish college than rich ones

So what are we doing to level the playing field for poor families? Why making it even more tilted in favor of affluent families of course.

As The Mercury reported last year, Pennsylvania's lopsided method for public education funding discriminates against the Commonwealth's children based solely on their zip code.

Poor communities like Pottstown are getting the scraps. Under Corbett's proposals, state funding was to be cut by $600 per student last year in Pottstown, leading to the painful contemplation of cuts to music and art.

But in places like affluent Lower Merion -- where two new high schools, one complete with an indoor pool, had just been completed -- Corbett wanted to cut funding by a mere $83 per student.

This year's spread, shown below in a chart I made for this story in Sunday's edition of The Mercury, is less extreme, but the pattern remains the same.

So let's put all this together.

Children, the workers of tomorrow, from low-income families have less chance of doing well in school and even less of a chance of completing college; so we cut the funding to their primary and secondary schools; this while the increasingly well-paying manufacturing jobs left in the U.S., will require even greater education; this while we cut funding to community colleges, the cheapest and most applicable college education to allow those poor children to access those jobs; and therefore make it even less likely those children can afford the education they need to get those jobs, and perhaps improve the odds for success of their children, the next generation of American workers after them.


Someone please explain to me how this is a sustainable plan for long-term success.


Maybe I'm missing something, but I just don't see it.

Tell me how the above ensures the future success of all Americans and the continued success of our nation.

And don't tell me what you don't want to pay for.

I didn't want to pay trillions for the Iraq war, but that's the price we pay for living in a Democracy.

I agree, no one wants to pay for failing schools. But why can't we figure out how to make them successful schools?  Is it really that hard?

Shouldn't every politician prefer to pay for schools over prisons? Shouldn't we the taxpayers?


So enough fulminating, the real question is, what to do about it?

The answer, I believe, is to fix what's wrong with public education, not torpedo it and hope "the market" will get the job done. That's the easy way out.

(The market works for some things. I believe that now. I've seen it. But it is not a panacea for everything that ails us.)

Admittedly, fixing what's wrong with public schools  -- and I take a moment here to point out that there is a lot that is right with public schools -- is hard, complicated and politically explosive work.

But we don't elect our public officials to make easy choices do we? If that were the case, we could leave it all in the hands of Pottstown Borough Council.


It will require sacrificing some sacred cows.

In all likelihood, it will mean lower pensions for educators, more contributions toward their health benefits and consolidation of school districts, perhaps to the county level as is done in Maryland.

It will also require a state funding formula closer to the one implemented by the prior administration which is based on the "costing out study," which looks at a district's actual costs in determining how much aid it should receive and uses that to close the achievement gap between rich and poor students.

It could be funded by (shudder) a tax hike or a revenue source from, say, a natural resource we have in abundance and now being harvested at bargain basement prices.

But we have to do something other than let public education die on the vine. The founders realized this and saw the need for an educated population to make this republic work.

Until the founding of the United States, society had two models to choose from: either elites ran everything and enjoyed all the benefits, or, as was the case before that, there was chaos and all that mattered was who was strongest.

The founders tried to walk the line between those two, envisioning "the best" of the nation naturally assuming leadership (which, admittedly, to them, meant white, land-holding males); but they also pictured "the best" leading an educated populace, one that could understand the issues facing the nation and come to logical well-reasoned decisions (and votes) about how to face them.

To accomplish this, they favored a radical plan of raising public discourse and decision, by educating the public, at the cost of the public.

Thomas Jefferson proposed an extensive system of free public education in Virginia, and, as president, submitted to Congress in 1806 a proposed amendment to the Constitution to legalize federal support for education.

"Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that, whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them right," Jefferson said.

John Adams

His fellow signatory on the Declaration of Independence, John Adams, put it, as he had a tendency sometimes to do, more bluntly: “The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people and be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves.”


Even Pennsylvania's founders enshrined it in our own Constitution.


Article III, Section 14 of the Pennsylvania Constitution requires it: "The General Assembly shall provide for the maintenance and support of a thorough and efficient system of public education to serve the needs of the Commonwealth."

Raise your hand if you think there is anything "thorough" or "efficient" about their efforts to provide for public education these days.

Seriously, raise your hand. I realize this is a volatile subject, post your thoughts on what should happen to public education. Maybe you think I'm totally off base on this. I invite you to say so civilly here.