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Failing Grade: It's often said that bad times are useful for putting matters into stark and informative relief, as rarely do first principles and priorities emerge as crystalline as when catastrophe looms. The best public example of this I've been involved with up dose and personal was almost two decades ago when I worked for Governor Al Quie. As opposed to recent years in which Minnesota has been awash in cash, state governments here and elsewhere in the early 1980s faced huge budget deficits, one after another. I don't want to suggest that these were anything but painful moments; figuring out whom to lay off in order to balance the state's books is an inherently dispiriting exercise. (Though I trust the folks actually laid off had reason to feel even more dispirited.) Nevertheless, as a matter of governance, it was an uncommonly potent exercise, as it caused Quie and the people around him to focus--really focus--on the state's most fundamental responsibilities. This included, in some instances, accepting the acutely unpopular obligation to raise taxes. But all this is the stuff of cliche. Instead of bad times, what about exceptionally good ones, like the ones we're now enjoying? What parallel insights can we derive from them? Let me suggest one, about education, in light of the remarkable, ongoing state of our nation's economy and the persistent failure of many men and women to tap into that bounty. I was in both Dallas and Fort Worth recently as part of a continuing project sponsored by the Aspen Institute, aimed at making work "work" better for low-income employees across the United States. Unemployment in the Dallas-Forth Worth "Metroplex," we learned in our briefing books, rivals that of the Twin Cities. Meaning it's extraordinarily, some might say miraculously, low: just a shade over 3 percent. As to be expected, given such labor-market tightness, we heard from employers who cited no end of problems in finding enough employees--be they highly skilled or, more to the point, low-skilled. (A recent study cited almost 45,000 unfilled jobs in the Twin Cities at the end of 1999.) The Texas employers told of offering cash bonuses to new hires and of turning an eye if a reasonably promising candidate had an otherwise disqualifying criminal record. One panelist reported on how another firm (outside of Texas, I believe) had dropped screening new employees for drugs because so few candidates showed up clean for their interviews. And, getting to the heart, employers talked about lowering their sights regarding the most basic skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic. But we also heard from frustrated workers: men and women laboring in poor jobs. And while I don't recall meeting with anyone who might be described as hardcore unemployed, the unsurprising fact is that not everyone in Dallas-Forth Worth who says he or she wants to work is actually doing so. While unemployment in the region is below what many scholars used to consider "full employment," it's measurably higher, for example, in the African American community, where 7.9 percent of black men, and 6.4 percent of black women, were officially out of work as of a year ago. How to explain this disconnect'? How to reconcile, on the one hand, the legions of employers who, to the point of spasm, bend over backwards in their search for employees, with the inability, on the other hand, of a substantial number of people to find or hold a job in the first place? Or, how to make sense of the fact that even when low-skilled men and women find entry-level jobs, they often find it impossible to rise to something better? I start by acknowledging several points, including the fact that more people are working than ever before. thanks to the terrific economy and the twin spur of welfare reform. I also recognize that many jobs are not just bad, they're dead-end, and no one reading this column would welcome being locked into one of them. And as is especially the case in places like Texas with large immigrant populations, it's just not in the cards for people who speak English poorly, if they speak it at all, to ascend smoothly through the ranks of a field or industry. But even if we take all this into account--as well as all the other routinely listed impediments to advancement, including deindustrialization in cities, bad bus routes in suburbs, and, most notably, racism all around--heady times are accentuating a harsh fact: the mammoth degree to which public education is failing to work whatsoever for large numbers of students. This is not the place to apportion blame among schools, kids, parents, television, sun spots, and the rest. Take your pick. But it's important to recognize just how little employers are frequently asking of prospective workers when it comes to the most rudimentary academic and social skills--and how millions of folks still can't deliver. We talk ceaselessly about "high standards" in elementary and secondary schools and raising the bar to new rafters, as well we should. But it may be taking economic good times--a boom that can reverberate only so far and cover up so much despite its power--to spotlight just how low the bar has fallen in many instances. -- Mitchell B. Pearlstein is president of Center of the American Experiment, a conservative think tank in Minneapolis. |