In my latest reading of I'll Be Short: Essentials for a Decent Working Society, Robert Reich focused on education. I have three items.
1.
Somewhere in the book, Reich says that businesses should form
apprenticeships for local students who are not planning to go to
college. I cannot find where exactly Reich said that, but that sort of
idea corresponds with something that Reich says on page 44: "We'll
return to the older view that corporations are, in a sense, citizens of
our American community, that citizenship carried duties as well as
rights, and that there is and must be an ethical basis to doing business
in America."
This caught my attention because of the debate
concerning the U.S. Supreme Court decision, Citizens United. Critics of
that decision, many of whom are on the Left, argue that corporations
are not citizens and thus lack First Amendment rights (i.e., to make
generous political donations, to make Hillary: The Movie, etc.). When Mitt Romney said that corporations were people, many from the Left attacked him for that. And
so it's ironic to read Robert Reich say that corporations are citizens
and have rights. The problem is that there's a feeling that
corporations do not act as citizens, for many believe that
they're primarily pursuing their own self-interest, regardless of the
social impact of what they do.
2. Reich appears to support school choice, but only for public schools.
He emphatically denies that he supports vouchers, or at least vouchers
that don't put "a lot of extra money behind poorer kids", since that
would "drain resources from our public schools" as well as encourage the
better students to leave public schools, while the "more needy or
troublesome" students are left behind (pages 69-70). The
problem today, as Reich notes, is that many people from poorer
communities go to public schools that do not have a lot of money, and so
they don't get as good of a start in life as people from richer
communities, who go to better-funded public schools. Not only
is the lack of money a problem, Reich contends, but if a person is
around other people who (say) don't have plans to go to college, then
peer pressure will likely discourage that person from going to college.
A way to address this problem, according to Reich, is to "Let
any public school compete to enroll these kids and receive the money
that goes with them" (page 69). To meet their budgets, public
schools would have to attract students. And they probably wouldn't
cherry-pick, for every student would have money that goes with him or
her.
The problem here, I think, is that schools would
cherry-pick, for they would try to attract the best students, since the
best students would give them the higher test scores. As far
as I could see, Reich does not talk much about No Child Left Behind,
under which public schools have been awarded or penalized according to
how their students do on standardized tests. But Reich does lament that
public schools have become testing factories, which he considers sad
because he does not believe that standardized tests adequately measure a
student's competence or intelligence. Perhaps a kid does poorly on
standardized tests, after all, but he's able to learn and adapt material
in other ways. This brings me to my third item.
3. Reich argues
that people are getting left behind in terms of higher education, as
schools narrow their admissions and seek to attract the students who do
well academically and score high on standardized tests. Reich also
notes that, in some areas, guidance counselors are so over-worked that
they cannot meet the individual needs of students. I was thinking about
whether or not this agreed with my experience. I was fortunate
to have a family and guidance counselors who cared for me and my
future. I also did well in school, and so I got into college with a
scholarship. But, as Reich tells it, there are people who are not so
fortunate. That makes me wonder about what happened to the
students at my high school who did not do as well academically. Did
they go to college? Maybe not. At the same time, I can't say that everyone who didn't make the top ten lost out on going to college. I don't think that would be accurate.