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The Tsongas Committee - A Call
to Economic Arms « Chapter II Education
1992 Democratic Presidential Primary
The Tsongas Committee
 |
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| Chapter
II |
|
A CALL TO ECONOMIC ARMS
Forging A New American Mandate
PAUL E. TSONGAS
lI. Education - The Meeting House of Our Society
America in the 1990's will rise or fall as our public schools rise or fall. The health of our school systems is the major building block determinant of our long term economic and social viability.
Knowledge is power. Work skills are power. Real power. Real economic power. The lack of knowledge and work skills is weakness. It is economic impotence. It is the transition from greatness to irrelevance.
Knowledge and work skills are also hope. They are the only source of social mobility available to millions of our fellow citizens. They are what turns despair into hope. Only they can create true opportunity so that young people choose lives of promise over lives of personal and societal destructiveness.
Education is America's great calling.
Education, ah, education. Everyone is for it. It is the motherhood and apple pie issue of the 90's. Well, at least the rhetoric would suggest so. The reality is quite different.
Republicans talk about it. President Bush, during the campaign, said that he wanted to be known as the education President. No one would call him that two years later. Money for the Persian Gulf and Star Wars and the Stealth bomber? Sure. Money for serious funding of schools? Gee, that's really a local and state issue. Money for serious skills training for non-college bound students? Gee, that's not how we think in America.
Democrats love to talk about it as well. As with the Republicans, the talk is not purposefully false. It is, in fact, well intentioned. But improvements in education to many Democrats only means a lot more money. It does not mean serious structural reform. Cutting edge issues like merit pay and teacher competence standards are offensive to some teacher unions and as a result some Democrats oppose them. Controversial experiments like Boston University's takeover of the Chelsea schools, national testing of high school seniors, school choice, magnet schools for young black male students, uniforms for public school students, limiting bilingual education - all make Democrats very nervous. This is not to argue that any of these ideas is valid. This is to argue that new and radical concepts need to be tested. We need an atmosphere where the search for educational excellence is an objective undiluted by considerations as to what some interest groups may oppose.
Businessmen talk about education as well. They opine about how critical a well-trained and educated workforce is to their survival. Some business leaders - David Keams of Xerox and John Akers of IBM come to mind - have become national spokesmen in behalf of public education. They have put this issue at the forefront of their personal agendas and have rendered the nation a great service by doing so.
They, however, are not typical.
Go to the corporate suites of your Fortune 1000 companies and ask a very simple question of the chief executive officers and members of the board of directors. When was the last time you set foot in a public school classroom? The answers would reveal the obvious. The issue of quality public education does not enjoy the personal involvement of the very people who proclaim its vital importance. And in some cases, they are even putting their resources toward ballot initiatives that would reduce taxes and devastate public education.
Is public education the top priority in America? Is it the vehicle to provide true opportunity for those who don't happen to be affluent? Is it the only way of having a workforce capable of competing against its international counterparts? Is it the place where our societal values are reinforced, and, sadly, in some cases, introduced for the first time?
The answer to these questions must be a resolute ''Yes!" resounding from coast to coast.
Yes, it means money. Real money. It means that when budget crunches come, public education is not viewed as the obvious candidate for slashing.
Today it is. As chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Regents, I saw a Democratic governor cut the public higher education budget by 22% from 1988 to 1990 while state appropriations as a whole increased 18%. Then, in 1991, we found ourselves with a Republican governor whose staff was seeking ways to actually close three to five campuses. Education, thus, has been an equal opportunity candidate for bi-partisan attack. Why? Well, in Massachusetts both governors were openly proeducation in their public pronouncements. That did not prevent the bloodletting. Political realities intruded. There is one fundamental truth at work here. Students in K through 12 can't vote. And students in public colleges often don't vote. Unless these students are protected by their voting elders, in particular the business community, they are vulnerable because they have no counterattack capability.
Making public education a top priority means openness to new - even radical - notions of educational innovation. Let's criticize bold ideas after they have been found to be flawed, not before they are tested.
This means structural reform. Merit pay and standards of teacher competence. School based management. Uniform testing standards for graduating seniors. Parental involvement in choosing teachers. Parental and teacher involvement in choosing principals. Longer school days. The powers that be in the teacher unions must be leaders in bringing about these necessary changes. Some already are. All must be. The same is true with school officials, school committees, mayors and city councils.
Finally, and most fundamentally, it means that all of America must get to know what the inside of a classroom looks like.
Parents are going to have to invest their time in the buildings where their children are fashioning the dimensions of their lives. Teachers are going to have to be assisted. They are going to have to be made to feel as important as their task really is. They are also going to have to be scrutinized. Parents are going to have to be able to know the differences in teaching philosophies. They must learn to tell when a principal is being creative and caring, and when a principal is just playing out the string. Parents are also going to have to see their role as nurturing children other than their own in these classrooms. Parents should help involve retirees and grandparents in this task as well. The public schools should become the meeting houses of our society where all of our society is walking through the school doors on a regular basis. This is the New American Mandate.
This approach must involve institutions as well as individuals. I would suggest the following matrix. The public schools (pre-K through 12) are at the center of the matrix. Arranged around it are four centers of institutional capability and energy. Each of the four focuses its efforts towards the public school center. The four are public higher education, private higher education, non-profit institutions (clergy, hospitals, museums, foundations, performing arts, etc.) and the business community.
What this translates into is the rector, the priest, the rabbi, the museum director, the lawyer, the executive vice president, the faculty member, the college hockey coach, the chief executive officer, the surgeon, the secretary, the shop foreman, the researcher, the union organizer - all will be in the classrooms, affirming by their very presence the criticality of education.
What do they do there? Anything. Everything. It will range from a once-a-year reading to a third grade class to once-a-month tutoring of a particular student. It will mean a corporate funded day spent at a college campus to expose sixth graders to the notion that college may be relevant to them. It may mean mentoring a whole class and taking responsibility for elevating their horizons, their career sightlines.
Does this make a difference? That is no longer a question. There are staggering examples of outsiders radically affecting the lives of students whose classes they become part of. The Dr. Eugene Lang intervention at his Bronx alma mater junior high school is the most acclaimed example but there are countless others. It works. Hopefully, we can get to the point where every student in every classroom has someone beyond the overloaded teacher caring about his or her future. That outside person must attest to the basic truth that as goes public education so goes America.
The interface of these people and the classroom will, of course, change things forever. Everyone investing his or her time in a classroom will, by definition, become a committed advocate for quality education. This will translate into real political power in behalf of the educational system. It will also translate into corporate and non-corporate resources being funneled to the system.
To educators, that is the good news. More threatening will be the sense of overview, and the realization that these outsiders will be rendering judgements about the performance of teachers and administrators. Some will balk at this, unsure of this brave new world. They cannot be allowed to prevail.
These intervenors should be seen as a wonderful resource. They can help seek out technical assistance relationships with colleges and corpora tions, both as to teaching theories as well as management techniques.
It will be a different world. Committed, competent teachers and administrators will welcome the respect and caring. The new found availability of resources will strengthen their sense of the relevance of their profession.
The political leaders must by their personal actions bring about this "meetinghouse of our society." That's how one becomes the education President or the education Governor or the education Congressman. The President must be willing to devote considerable personal time to make this happen. It must be an unrelenting theme. The President must be the Principal-In-Chief.
New Educational Needs
There are two areas where the discussion on education has finally begun to focus.
First is the pre-kindergarten stage. More and more it is becoming obvious that the experiences of a child at the youngest ages predetermines his or her capacity to learn in a school setting. Youngsters arriving at school from dysfunctional families are immediately at a disadvantage. There is a much greater likelihood of their academic efforts being rendered futile before they even begin.
We are going to have to focus resources on children from difficult environments in the pre-kindergarten years (a la Headstart) and during the after-school hours when these children confront the reality of empty apartments and homes.
The second area of new focus is skills training. There is now a steady drumbeat from observers that the great shortfall in American education involves not the student who goes to college but the student who doesn't. It is the "non-college bound post-secondary gap."
The great economic challenge that we face will be fought in the trenches of the workplace. It will be a competition of skills. There will be a direct link between the skills of the nation's workforce and the resultant standard of living of that nation. Manufacturers will go where the workforce is the most highly skilled, no matter where that may be. This is not a matter of choice for them. It is a matter of being competitive.
If our non-supervisory workers are less skilled than their foreign counterparts they will be paid wages that reflect that reality. Third world skills will command third world wages. Highly paid jobs will move offshore and we will be left with the unattractive residuals.
And, if our workforce continues to experience deterioration of wage scales the rest of the economy will deteriorate as well. Thus, in this new world economic order it is not just the capacity of the highly educated which determines our fate, it is the skill levels of the basic worker as well. A skilled American workforce will provide good jobs for educated managers and professionals. An unskilled American workforce will not. The whole system implodes together.
Not surprisingly, our competitors have discovered this already. In Japan, skills are learned in the companies because the companies expect workers to remain with them for the duration of their careers. In America, the reality of three year worker turnover causes our companies to be wary of such an investment. In Germany, the school system coordinates this effort and students are in school/work situations at the age of sixteen. In France, companies are taxed 1% on their sales. If they do worker training they don't pay the tax. If they don't, they pay the tax and the government does the training.
Three models to achieve the same critical end. We have allowed this need to escape serious attention until recently. I believe the French model deserves consideration but adapted to the American context with its vocational technical schools and community colleges taking the lead.
This is a constructive approach to a problem that confronts us. For Democrats, it is far better to pursue this option than to criticize companies for moving their operations offshore. Such criticism will never have a beneficial effect. Companies are never going to forego profitability and competitiveness in order to placate Democratic outrage. These companies are not being un-American, they are simply responding to a perceived differential in the quality of the workforce. To forestall such moves, we have only to provide a workforce that is equally skilled. Certainly for reasons of logistics and management control, any American company would prefer to have its operations as close by as possible. And finally, it has been my experience that American CEO's are more nationalistic than they are given credit for. They want a stronger America. It's our job to help them make the decision that's right for America without diminishing the viability of their companies.
Index
Forging A New American Mandate
PAUL E. TSONGAS
lI. Education - The Meeting House of Our Society
America in the 1990's will rise or fall as our public schools rise or fall. The health of our school systems is the major building block determinant of our long term economic and social viability.
Knowledge is power. Work skills are power. Real power. Real economic power. The lack of knowledge and work skills is weakness. It is economic impotence. It is the transition from greatness to irrelevance.
Knowledge and work skills are also hope. They are the only source of social mobility available to millions of our fellow citizens. They are what turns despair into hope. Only they can create true opportunity so that young people choose lives of promise over lives of personal and societal destructiveness.
Education is America's great calling.
Education, ah, education. Everyone is for it. It is the motherhood and apple pie issue of the 90's. Well, at least the rhetoric would suggest so. The reality is quite different.
Republicans talk about it. President Bush, during the campaign, said that he wanted to be known as the education President. No one would call him that two years later. Money for the Persian Gulf and Star Wars and the Stealth bomber? Sure. Money for serious funding of schools? Gee, that's really a local and state issue. Money for serious skills training for non-college bound students? Gee, that's not how we think in America.
Democrats love to talk about it as well. As with the Republicans, the talk is not purposefully false. It is, in fact, well intentioned. But improvements in education to many Democrats only means a lot more money. It does not mean serious structural reform. Cutting edge issues like merit pay and teacher competence standards are offensive to some teacher unions and as a result some Democrats oppose them. Controversial experiments like Boston University's takeover of the Chelsea schools, national testing of high school seniors, school choice, magnet schools for young black male students, uniforms for public school students, limiting bilingual education - all make Democrats very nervous. This is not to argue that any of these ideas is valid. This is to argue that new and radical concepts need to be tested. We need an atmosphere where the search for educational excellence is an objective undiluted by considerations as to what some interest groups may oppose.
Businessmen talk about education as well. They opine about how critical a well-trained and educated workforce is to their survival. Some business leaders - David Keams of Xerox and John Akers of IBM come to mind - have become national spokesmen in behalf of public education. They have put this issue at the forefront of their personal agendas and have rendered the nation a great service by doing so.
They, however, are not typical.
Go to the corporate suites of your Fortune 1000 companies and ask a very simple question of the chief executive officers and members of the board of directors. When was the last time you set foot in a public school classroom? The answers would reveal the obvious. The issue of quality public education does not enjoy the personal involvement of the very people who proclaim its vital importance. And in some cases, they are even putting their resources toward ballot initiatives that would reduce taxes and devastate public education.
Is public education the top priority in America? Is it the vehicle to provide true opportunity for those who don't happen to be affluent? Is it the only way of having a workforce capable of competing against its international counterparts? Is it the place where our societal values are reinforced, and, sadly, in some cases, introduced for the first time?
The answer to these questions must be a resolute ''Yes!" resounding from coast to coast.
Yes, it means money. Real money. It means that when budget crunches come, public education is not viewed as the obvious candidate for slashing.
Today it is. As chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Regents, I saw a Democratic governor cut the public higher education budget by 22% from 1988 to 1990 while state appropriations as a whole increased 18%. Then, in 1991, we found ourselves with a Republican governor whose staff was seeking ways to actually close three to five campuses. Education, thus, has been an equal opportunity candidate for bi-partisan attack. Why? Well, in Massachusetts both governors were openly proeducation in their public pronouncements. That did not prevent the bloodletting. Political realities intruded. There is one fundamental truth at work here. Students in K through 12 can't vote. And students in public colleges often don't vote. Unless these students are protected by their voting elders, in particular the business community, they are vulnerable because they have no counterattack capability.
Making public education a top priority means openness to new - even radical - notions of educational innovation. Let's criticize bold ideas after they have been found to be flawed, not before they are tested.
This means structural reform. Merit pay and standards of teacher competence. School based management. Uniform testing standards for graduating seniors. Parental involvement in choosing teachers. Parental and teacher involvement in choosing principals. Longer school days. The powers that be in the teacher unions must be leaders in bringing about these necessary changes. Some already are. All must be. The same is true with school officials, school committees, mayors and city councils.
Finally, and most fundamentally, it means that all of America must get to know what the inside of a classroom looks like.
Parents are going to have to invest their time in the buildings where their children are fashioning the dimensions of their lives. Teachers are going to have to be assisted. They are going to have to be made to feel as important as their task really is. They are also going to have to be scrutinized. Parents are going to have to be able to know the differences in teaching philosophies. They must learn to tell when a principal is being creative and caring, and when a principal is just playing out the string. Parents are also going to have to see their role as nurturing children other than their own in these classrooms. Parents should help involve retirees and grandparents in this task as well. The public schools should become the meeting houses of our society where all of our society is walking through the school doors on a regular basis. This is the New American Mandate.
This approach must involve institutions as well as individuals. I would suggest the following matrix. The public schools (pre-K through 12) are at the center of the matrix. Arranged around it are four centers of institutional capability and energy. Each of the four focuses its efforts towards the public school center. The four are public higher education, private higher education, non-profit institutions (clergy, hospitals, museums, foundations, performing arts, etc.) and the business community.
What this translates into is the rector, the priest, the rabbi, the museum director, the lawyer, the executive vice president, the faculty member, the college hockey coach, the chief executive officer, the surgeon, the secretary, the shop foreman, the researcher, the union organizer - all will be in the classrooms, affirming by their very presence the criticality of education.
What do they do there? Anything. Everything. It will range from a once-a-year reading to a third grade class to once-a-month tutoring of a particular student. It will mean a corporate funded day spent at a college campus to expose sixth graders to the notion that college may be relevant to them. It may mean mentoring a whole class and taking responsibility for elevating their horizons, their career sightlines.
Does this make a difference? That is no longer a question. There are staggering examples of outsiders radically affecting the lives of students whose classes they become part of. The Dr. Eugene Lang intervention at his Bronx alma mater junior high school is the most acclaimed example but there are countless others. It works. Hopefully, we can get to the point where every student in every classroom has someone beyond the overloaded teacher caring about his or her future. That outside person must attest to the basic truth that as goes public education so goes America.
The interface of these people and the classroom will, of course, change things forever. Everyone investing his or her time in a classroom will, by definition, become a committed advocate for quality education. This will translate into real political power in behalf of the educational system. It will also translate into corporate and non-corporate resources being funneled to the system.
To educators, that is the good news. More threatening will be the sense of overview, and the realization that these outsiders will be rendering judgements about the performance of teachers and administrators. Some will balk at this, unsure of this brave new world. They cannot be allowed to prevail.
These intervenors should be seen as a wonderful resource. They can help seek out technical assistance relationships with colleges and corpora tions, both as to teaching theories as well as management techniques.
It will be a different world. Committed, competent teachers and administrators will welcome the respect and caring. The new found availability of resources will strengthen their sense of the relevance of their profession.
The political leaders must by their personal actions bring about this "meetinghouse of our society." That's how one becomes the education President or the education Governor or the education Congressman. The President must be willing to devote considerable personal time to make this happen. It must be an unrelenting theme. The President must be the Principal-In-Chief.
New Educational Needs
There are two areas where the discussion on education has finally begun to focus.
First is the pre-kindergarten stage. More and more it is becoming obvious that the experiences of a child at the youngest ages predetermines his or her capacity to learn in a school setting. Youngsters arriving at school from dysfunctional families are immediately at a disadvantage. There is a much greater likelihood of their academic efforts being rendered futile before they even begin.
We are going to have to focus resources on children from difficult environments in the pre-kindergarten years (a la Headstart) and during the after-school hours when these children confront the reality of empty apartments and homes.
The second area of new focus is skills training. There is now a steady drumbeat from observers that the great shortfall in American education involves not the student who goes to college but the student who doesn't. It is the "non-college bound post-secondary gap."
The great economic challenge that we face will be fought in the trenches of the workplace. It will be a competition of skills. There will be a direct link between the skills of the nation's workforce and the resultant standard of living of that nation. Manufacturers will go where the workforce is the most highly skilled, no matter where that may be. This is not a matter of choice for them. It is a matter of being competitive.
If our non-supervisory workers are less skilled than their foreign counterparts they will be paid wages that reflect that reality. Third world skills will command third world wages. Highly paid jobs will move offshore and we will be left with the unattractive residuals.
And, if our workforce continues to experience deterioration of wage scales the rest of the economy will deteriorate as well. Thus, in this new world economic order it is not just the capacity of the highly educated which determines our fate, it is the skill levels of the basic worker as well. A skilled American workforce will provide good jobs for educated managers and professionals. An unskilled American workforce will not. The whole system implodes together.
Not surprisingly, our competitors have discovered this already. In Japan, skills are learned in the companies because the companies expect workers to remain with them for the duration of their careers. In America, the reality of three year worker turnover causes our companies to be wary of such an investment. In Germany, the school system coordinates this effort and students are in school/work situations at the age of sixteen. In France, companies are taxed 1% on their sales. If they do worker training they don't pay the tax. If they don't, they pay the tax and the government does the training.
Three models to achieve the same critical end. We have allowed this need to escape serious attention until recently. I believe the French model deserves consideration but adapted to the American context with its vocational technical schools and community colleges taking the lead.
This is a constructive approach to a problem that confronts us. For Democrats, it is far better to pursue this option than to criticize companies for moving their operations offshore. Such criticism will never have a beneficial effect. Companies are never going to forego profitability and competitiveness in order to placate Democratic outrage. These companies are not being un-American, they are simply responding to a perceived differential in the quality of the workforce. To forestall such moves, we have only to provide a workforce that is equally skilled. Certainly for reasons of logistics and management control, any American company would prefer to have its operations as close by as possible. And finally, it has been my experience that American CEO's are more nationalistic than they are given credit for. They want a stronger America. It's our job to help them make the decision that's right for America without diminishing the viability of their companies.
Index
| Introduction |
1 |
||
| I. |
Economic Survival –
The Creation of National Wealth |
5 |
|
| II. |
Education
– The Meeting House of Our Society |
32 |
|
| III. |
The Environment —
Equilibrium With Earth |
38 |
|
| IV. |
Energy, Fossil Fuels
– Someday There Won't Be Any |
47 |
|
| V. |
Foreign Policy – Time
to Heal Thyself |
58 |
|
| VI. |
The
Culture of America – The Essential Need |
70 |
|
| VII. |
Return to Purpose |
85 |
|
| VIII. |
Biography |
86 |
Copyright © 2023 Eric M. Appleman/Democracy in
Action. 