What Thomas Friedman Doesn't Say
In this week's NYTimes op-ed, "Swimming Without a Suit," Thomas Friedman pulls an interesting move by connecting the Wall Street meltdown to - what else - America's "decline in education." When Friedman says "that's the conclusion [he] drew from a new study by the consulting firm McKinsey, entitled 'The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools'," he overstates the case. He's not drawing conclusions: he's summarizing those of the report. And he does so without the least sign of skepticism or analysis. Far more interesting than anything in Friedman's piece is what's not in it.
It's a prime example of what David Sirota noted about Friedman back in 2006:
Tom Friedman parrots the propaganda of Big Money, using his column to legitimize some of the worst, most working-class-persecuting policies this country has seen in the last century - all while bragging on television that he doesn't even bother read the details of the policies he advocates for.
Is the McKinsey report "propaganda of big money"? Judge for yourself. It claims to be neutral, but its steering committee consists of (billionaires Eli Broad and Mayor Bloomberg protege) Joel Klein, Klein'sfactually-challenged Education Equality Project (along with it's $.5 million mouthpiece Al Sharpton), and the anti-teacher-union Bill Gates, among others.
I find it hard to believe any such committee will steer any study into "neutral" ground - and McKinsey is a business consultancy firm, anyway. Friedman doesn't bother to share any of this info about the report's origins. He just passes it to Times readers an unchewed, undigested whole.
Friedman starts off with "a quick review":
In the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. dominated the world in K-12 education. We also dominated economically.
Friedman doesn't steer us into other comparisons of 1950s and '60s America with today's, so let's add thisdata from Robert Borosage to the mix:
The Institute for Policy Studies details the staggering contrast to the Eisenhower years. In 1955, the top 400 taxpayers averaged about $12.3 million in income (2006 dollars) and paid, after exploiting every loophole imaginable, 51.2% of that in federal income tax. A half century later, the richest 400 average a breath-taking $263.3 million in income each, and pay a mere 17.2% of that in federal income taxes. (A lower tax rate than paid by most of their secretaries).
If those 400 taxpayers had paid at the same rate in 2006 as a half century earlier, the federal treasury would have collected $35.9 billion more in revenue, or enough to double the energy and transportation budget combined. No wonder Ike, clearly a stealth "socialist", could afford to build the interstate transport system.
Call me crazy, but I suspect we could make a connection between the wealth gap and the achievement gap in those halcyon days to the "decline of education" Friedman is wringing his hands about here. (But Friedman is married to a member of a family worth over $2.5 billion dollars - pre-Wall Street decline, anyway - so that wouldn't be in his interest. This is not to attack his wealth, mind you. It's just to identify his position in America's class structure, and his relevant blind spots.)
Friedman then trots out the McKinsey report's standard fare about America's ranking on international test scores:
For instance, in the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment that measured the applied learning and problem-solving skills of 15-year-olds in 30 industrialized countries, the U.S. ranked 25th out of the 30 in math and 24th in science. That put our average youth on par with those from Portugal and the Slovak Republic, “rather than with students in countries that are more relevant competitors for service-sector and high-value jobs, like Canada, the Netherlands, Korea, and Australia,” McKinsey noted.
Education scholar Gerald Bracey's critiques of such studies are as available to Friedman as they are to me, so it's anybody's question why he parrots McKinsey instead of complicating it. Here's Bracey(emphasis added):
As usual in these comparisons, Americans in low-poverty schools look very good, even in mathematics. They would be ranked third in the 4th grade (among 36 nations), 6th in the 8th grade (among 47 nations). This is important because while other developed nations have poor children, the U.S. has a much higher proportion and a much weaker safety net. When UNICEF studied poverty in 22 wealthy nations, the U. S. ranked 21st.
Friedman's fixation on test score rankings divorced from poverty rankings needs fixing. But it's standard in education punditry today. We ignore poverty, and instead only focus on schools and teachers. Friedman follows that script with his next paragraph, in which he summarizes the McKinsey report on American high schools:
Actually, our fourth-graders compare well on such global tests with, say, Singapore. But our high school kids really lag, which means that “the longer American children are in school, the worse they perform compared to their international peers,” said McKinsey.
Again, Gerald Bracey complicates the Singapore meme:
Who cares if Singapore, with about the same population as the Washington Metro Area, and Hong Kong, with about twice that number, score high? There aren't many people there. (And, as journalist Fareed Zakariya found out, the Singapore kids fade as they become adults.)....
When Zakariya asked the Singapore Minister of Education why his high-flying students faded in after-school years, the Minister cited creativity, ambition, and a willingness to challenge existing knowledge, all of which he thought American excelled in. But, as Bob Sternberg of Tufts University has pointed out, our obsession with standardized testing has produced one of the best instruments in the nation's history for stifling creativity."
Still, there is a problem with education for many of the nation's least privileged children. So how do Friedman's solutions look? More on that in Part Two.
Image by Charles Haynes
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