What Thomas Friedman Doesn't Say, Part Three
Recap: In Part One, we saw how Thomas Friedman's op-ed divorces the McKinsey Group report's comparison of education's purported "good years" during the '50s and '60s from the wider context of those decades' fairer tax burden and narrower wealth gap: he fixates on comparing test scores between now and then, and fails to compare the corresponding division of wealth. We then noted Friedman's failure to go beyond parroting McKinsey's interpretation of the international rankings from PISA test scores, and let education scholar Gerald Bracey complicate those interpretations.
In Part Two, we discovered that the McKinsey Group, far from being "neutral," was instrumental in creating the blueprint for the magnificently corrupt Enron group, but somehow managed to survive the fallout from that scandal with enough credibility to be championed by Mr. Friedman and the New York Times. I'd already noted in Part One that the McKinsey report claimed to be neutral, but had on its steering committee the anything-but-neutral wing of the anti-union privatization reformers associated with NYC schools chancellor Joel Klein and his Education Equality Project.
New York education professor and Change.org contributor Jessica Shiller added in comments that Klein has the McKinsey Group on the NYC schools payroll for consultancy services which, if true, further undercuts their neutrality claim.
Friedman doesn't say any of this in his column. He just uses his position at the most influential newspaper in America to draw conclusions from McKinsey's report of "how far we have fallen behind in K-12 education and how much it is now costing us." As we'll see, Friedman doesn't draw conclusions about that cost at all; instead, he merely rubber-stamps the McKinsey report's conclusions in an exercise that's less analysis than PR summary.
About those costs:
Friedman writes (emphasis added),
Using an economic model created for this study, McKinsey showed how much those gaps are costing us. Suppose, it noted, “that in the 15 years after the 1983 report ‘A Nation at Risk’ sounded the alarm about the ‘rising tide of mediocrity’ in American education,” the U.S. had lifted lagging student achievement to higher benchmarks of performance? What would have happened?
Let's stop here for a second. If Friedman had given a full disclosure about the history of the McKinsey group - its results with Enron, its conflicts of interest with Joel Klein and the EEP - we might be less ready to follow Friedman's argument that it's "model" "shows" anything. Even without such disclosure, we still have cause to ask about Friedman's easy readiness to accept that a think tank's "economic model created for this study" is a valid one. Friedman lays no claim to expertise in evaluating such models, and shows no evidence that he approached this one with any skepticism.
On the contrary, with the same lack of complexity he showed in his infamous "Iraq: Suck. On. This" support for the Bush administration's "model" for invading Iraq, Friedman barges straight past all such complexity to tell us that the hypothetical model is the reality; it shows us the "costs." Never mind that his text itself tells us this is an exercise in "supposing." Never mind, too, that the costs of the Iraq war - which Friedman supported as our opportunity to tell the Islamic world that some of its behavior, per Friedman, "is not okay" - will amount to around $3 trillion (and that's a low estimate from the Washington Post).
Friedman shows a similar lack of investigative skepticism when he barges past the McKinsey report's citation of the 1983 report, "A Nation at Risk," as the marker for when "reform" should have begun. Anybody familiar with the report knows "A Nation at Risk" was an extremely ideological piece, bordering on propaganda for business interests wanting to feed at the trough of public education funds - while simultaneously undermining the entire public school system. (Gerald Bracey offers a solid refutation of its claims here.) Here's Alex Molnar of Arizona State University, Tempe, discussing A Nation at Risk at the 2003 conference of the decidedly mainstream Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD):
At the same time . . . the corporations were supporting the ideology behind "A Nation at Risk" and demanding that schools improve, they were also demanding a whole host of economic development strategies which had the effect of knocking the pins out from public funding for public schools. Economic development strategies, like tax incremental financing, industrial revenue bonding, equipment and inventory tax exemptions, and so on, all had the effect of transferring the tax liability, to a very large extent, from corporations to individual homeowners. And with the predictable consequence that, by the mid- and late-eighties and early-nineties, there were tax limitations measures on the ballot in many States, as homeowners found that they were literally sometimes, particularly fixed-income senior citizens and blue-collar workers, who saw their income declining throughout the eighties and into the nineties, that they literally had a choice to pay their ever-escalating public school tax bills or cap the amount of money. The only way they could give themselves a raise was to lower their taxes.
So, on the one hand, you have the explosion of school-business partnerships; on the other hand, you have the embrace of economic development strategies, which have the effect of constricting the resources available for public education.
Friedman doesn't say anything about "A Nation at Risk." Continuing to avoid any mention of the effect of tax policy on education, he just repeats McKinsey's propagandistic meme of that report's "alarm" about the "rising tide of mediocrity," and in effect implies that all would be well, and we wouldn't have suffered the McKinsey report's hypothetical "costs," if we'd just given public schools, as well as tax breaks, to the business sector during the Reagan administration.
And what are those costs, according to Friedman? They're whatever the McKinsey Group says they are:
The answer, says McKinsey: If America had closed the international achievement gap between 1983 and 1998 and had raised its performance to the level of such nations as Finland and South Korea, United States G.D.P. in 2008 would have been between $1.3 trillion and $2.3 trillion higher. If we had closed the racial achievement gap and black and Latino student performance had caught up with that of white students by 1998, G.D.P. in 2008 would have been between $310 billion and $525 billion higher. If the gap between low-income students and the rest had been narrowed, G.D.P. in 2008 would have been $400 billion to $670 billion higher.
So there's "the answer," in black and white (never mind its hypothetical foundations). If only we we'd done whatever it was we should have done to make the immensely more populated, more multi-cultural, more multi-linguistic, and much-more-mired-in-poverty America more like Finland and Korea, 2008 would havealmost paid for the Iraq war.
Friedman still hasn't told us McKinsey's "answers" about exactly what it is that we should have done. More on that in Part Four.
Image by Charles Haynes
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