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The Eighth Bracey Report
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Illustrations © 1998 by Jem Sullivan |
Return to The Eighth Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education
Golden Apples
The Friends-in-Need Award goes jointly to Alan Krueger, an economist at Princeton University, and Peter Schrag, recently retired as op-ed page editor for the Sacramento Bee. Both reexamined the conventional wisdom that our public schools have failed, Krueger in a paper delivered to the New York Federal Research Bank Conference on Excellence in Education and later published in the Economic Policy Review, and Schrag in the October 1997 issue of the Atlantic.1 Krueger wrote, "Contrary to popular perception, most standardized test scores have not declined in the last quarter century, and the National Assessment of Educational Progress data show a modest upward trend."
Krueger's paper also partially corroborates data reported in the September 1998 Kappan Research column, in which I noted that, over a four-year span, black students and white students gained equal amounts on various NAEP assessments. Krueger does not report data by ethnicity, but he does show that lower-class and middle-class students exhibit similar increases during the school year but that lower-class students tend to lose ground over the summer while middle-class youngsters continue to improve. (These data were originally reported by Doris Entwistle and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University.)
Schrag provides a very balanced treatment of various myths concerning decline, historical comparisons, and international comparisons. Along the way he points out that good news about schools serves no one's political agenda for education reform. Conservatives want choice, vouchers, and privatization, so they bash away. Liberals want to keep the schools public but with more resources for reading tutors, smaller class sizes, and so on, so they, too, accentuate the negative. In speeches I have pointed out that President Clinton does not celebrate American 9-year-olds' second-place finish in How in the World Do Students Read? Rather, he laments that only 40% of third-graders can "read independently" (a contention for which he has no data).
To Schrag's conclusions, I would add that business and industry and large universities are not always friends of the schools either. Business and industry would like schools to do for free what they must otherwise pay for in on-the-job training (something observed by Jane Addams in 1897).2 Thus they complain. The schools of education in large research universities have invested heavily in crisis rhetoric in order to pry money loose from governments and foundations by arguing, in effect, "We have all these terrible problems in schools. Give us a bundle, and we'll fix them."
When the TIMSS Final Year data appeared, Schrag phoned me to get my take on them. After I gave him my views, I asked why he had mentioned Iris Rotberg and me in his essay, but not David Berliner and Bruce Biddle, whose book, The Manufactured Crisis, had appeared two years prior. "Oh," said Schrag, "I wrote that article three years ago. They [Atlantic editors] called recently and asked if it was still timely. I just prettied it up a little."
1. Alan Krueger, "Reassessing
the View That American Schools Are Broken," Economic Policy Review,
March 1998, pp. 29-43; and Peter Schrag, "The Near-Myth of Our Failing
Schools," Atlantic, October 1997, pp. 72-80.
2. Thomas Cochran, Business in
American Life: A History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972), pp. 131-32.
The Ernest Hemingway Crap Detector Award goes to Paul Pekin, a freelance writer in Chicago, for his article "School House Crock."1 Pekin took on John Leo, U.S. News & World Report's perpetual whiner, for writing about a report from the Mackinac Center for Public Policy that claimed college students cannot handle simple problems, such as "How much change should you get back after putting down $3 to pay for a 60 cent bowl of soup and a $1.95 sandwich?" Although the called-for answer is 45 cents, the real answer cannot be determined, because it would depend on state and city taxes, which vary greatly. Pekin reports that the Mackinac Center "turns out to be a right-wing think tank, founded in 1987 with the aid of John Engler, the present 'New Republican' governor of Michigan, champion of school vouchers and privatization." Being right wing is not synonymous with being wrong, of course, but as Pekin puts it, "These attacks upon higher education have an eerie similarity." Ditto those on elementary and secondary education. And they tend to be funded by a small number of right-wing foundations, as reported in the Center for Responsive Philanthropy's Moving a Public Policy Agenda: The Strategic Philanthropy of Conservative Foundations.
Pekin notes that Leo did not cite the study formally and certainly provided no data. For his part, Pekin gave the problem to his wife to give to her college freshman composition class, "as multicultural a group as anyone might hope to find." One student who had not yet mastered English put down $30. The other 50 said 45 cents.
This is for you, John Leo. The state of Ohio asked some 4,000 new high school graduates to solve a similar problem.2 "In your job as a cashier, a customer gives you a $20 bill to pay for a can of coffee that costs $3.84. How much change should you give back?" Granted, this problem has one step fewer, and these are high school graduates, not college students. But only 5% of them could not cope with it.
1. Paul Pekin, "School House
Crock," Extra!, January/February 1998, pp. 9-10. Pekin's article
first appeared in the 12 September 1997 issue of Chicago Reader.
2. Knowledge and Know-How (Columbus:
Ohio Department of Education and Ohio Business Roundtable, 1998).
The Right On! Award is captured by the Heritage Foundation for a manifesto in its house magazine, Policy Review, titled "Still a Nation at Risk."1 Despite the derivative and mistaken title, this piece pointed out that
in the midst of our flourishing economy, we are re-creating a dual school system, separate and unequal, almost half a century after government-sanctioned segregation was declared unconstitutional. We face a widening and unacceptable chasm between good schools and bad, between those youngsters who get an adequate education and those who emerge from school barely able to read and write. Poor and minority children, by and large, go to worse schools, have less expected of them, are taught by less knowledgeable teachers, and have the least power to alter bad situations.
This analysis identifies one of our most horrific problems with much greater clarity and accuracy than the original report, A Nation at Risk, which was mostly a golden treasury of ideologically selected and slanted statistics. Familiar names among the manifesto's signatories include Diane Ravitch, William Bennett, Denis Doyle, Herbert J. Walberg, and Chester E. Finn, Jr.
1. Heritage Foundation, "Still a Nation at Risk," Policy Review, July/August 1998, pp. 23-29.
Rotten Apples
The Who Are They Talking About? Award goes to the Heritage Foundation for its article "Still a Nation at Risk." Having identified the current risk (and received a Golden Apple for the effort), the Heritage Foundation goes on to discuss "Delusion and Indifference":
Regrettably, some educators and commentators have responded to the persistence of mediocre performance by engaging in denial, self-delusion, and blame shifting. Instead of acknowledging that there are real and urgent problems, they deny that there are any problems at all. . . . Then, of course, there is the fantasy that America's education crisis is a fraud, something invented by enemies of public schools.1
Well, advocates of vouchers and privatization aren't exactly friends of public schools. But who on Earth are they talking about? Me? I've emphasized the problems of the poor in virtually every Bracey Report. In the Fourth Bracey Report, I pointed out that, while advantaged urban students scored as high in an international math study as the highest countries (Taiwan and Korea), disadvantaged urban students did not score as high as the lowest country. Nowhere have I ever suggested, as the Heritage article implies, that some students can't be held to high standards.
Are they talking about David Berliner and Bruce Biddle? Probably. But in The Manufactured Crisis, Berliner and Biddle devote an entire chapter to real problems in the schools, which include poverty and racial discrimination. They write, "American schools face a series of daunting challenges. . . . The future of American students depends on whether we can spread the best features of our schools more equitably." Later, in a chapter devoted to changes that would improve schools, they call for doing away with ability grouping and tracking, hardly a proposal that would issue from people who have low expectations for some students.
Perhaps the Heritage Foundation is suffering its own delusion. Note that the first statement, which earns Heritage its Golden Apple, contradicts the rhetoric that wins it a Rotten Apple. The second statement presents the tired claim that mediocrity prevails everywhere; the first limits it to poor kids and minorities. In order to champion the poor, the Right is now having to admit that the real problem is not that the whole nation is at risk, but that we have a system of good schools and bad. This admission turns up with great frequency these days in calls for vouchers.
1. The Heritage Foundation, "Still a Nation at Risk," Policy Review, July/August 1998, pp. 23-29.
The With Friends Like These Award goes to the Ontario Ministry of Education and Training. Recall that Ontario is home to John Snobelen, the man who as education minister once said that "you have to generate a sense of crisis" about the education system. He's out of office, but his spirit lives on in his successor, David Johnson. The ministry constructed the graph shown below.
International Test Results
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This bar graph shows eighth-grade TIMSS math results for the top seven countries. ("Slovenia" should have been "Slovak Republic." Guess they don't study geography in the ministry.) The chart also shows science results, but the grapher assumed that the countries finished in the same order in science as in math, so most of the scores are wrongly assigned.
What's worse, these countries' scores are followed by the Canadian results and then by the provincial results for the five provinces that tested sufficient numbers of students to generate reliable provincial estimates. From this graph one would conclude that Canada was the lowest-scoring country and that only British Columbia had scores higher than the next-lowest country. And poor Ontario, it's the lowest of the low in lowly Canada. Having deliberately constructed a graph to portray Canada as a loser, the ministry sent it to every household in the province.
There are, of course, 33 more countries in TIMSS, and, as a nation, Canada scored above average in both math and science. Ontario's math score is merely one percentage point below the international average, and its science score is just two percentage points off the international mean.
The Schools Can Never Win Award goes jointly to the Toronto Globe and Mail and the Washington Post.1 This prize might have been named The Manufactured Crisis Goes Global Award. The Globe and Mail looked at the results of the First International Adult Literacy Survey, in which Canadians did fairly well, and declared that no country could be happy with the results (probably a surprise to the top-ranked Swedes, who, as reported in the March 1998 Kappan Research column, are quite satisfied with their schools). The Washington Post has constantly upbraided U.S. schools for low finishes in international studies. But in an editorial, the Post observed that the nations in FIALS did not differ significantly from the U.S. (which finished just behind first-place Sweden in the proportion of good readers). Rather than congratulate U.S. schools for being at least as good as other nations, the editorial declared, "This grim news may at least have the advantage of diluting the temptation, common among education reformers, to dream that somewhere out there exists the perfect system that America should adopt wholesale." Another manufactured crisis: coming soon to a country near you.
1. Alanna Mitchell, "Weak Literacy Skills Imperil Prosperity," Globe and Mail, 7 December 1997, p. A-14; and "School Reform Maryland Style," Washington Post, 13 December 1997, p. A-22.
The Whirling Dervish Spin Award goes to James Glassman, columnist and host of the TV talk show "Techno-Politics," and to the show's producer, Jack Harris of Blackwell Productions.
"Would you come to a studio to be interviewed on camera about TIMSS for 'Techno-Politics?'" Harris asked me by phone. Sure. "Techno-Politics" is a cross in format between "60 Minutes" and the Sunday morning talk shows. It airs in Washington, D.C., on Saturday mornings on PBS. I hope everyone else was watching cartoons. I went and chatted with Harris for an hour, and all went well -- or so I thought. The interview allowed me to make all the points I'd made in the May and September issues of the Kappan.
A few days later, Harris called to say that "a few shots" had been spoiled because of a camera problem. He asked whether they could come to my house to reshoot. Sure. They showed up and took forever to get the camera to work right -- so they said. Now I'm not so certain it wasn't a ruse to try and make me impatient and so perhaps less articulate. Although the interviewer had called it a reshoot, all the questions were new.
I had never heard of "Techno-Politics" and had no idea what the show's politics were. But I knew I was in trouble when the show began and the host walked on camera and said, "Hi, I'm Jim Glassman." Other than Milton Friedman, I doubt there is anyone in the country who believes more strongly in the divine hand of a free market than James K. Glassman. Aside from the market, Glassman, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, loves all things Right and hates the public schools and their defenders.
Glassman attempted to show -- with large dollops of sarcasm, crosscuts, and voice-overs -- that, while the TIMSS Final Year results clearly show American schools to be unmitigated disasters, I and Howard Gardner and a few others have been trying to portray low TIMSS test scores as good news. The tape was edited to try and make all of us look like idiots. None of the footage I had shot earlier was used. Only one of my many problems with the TIMSS data got mentioned. The second interview was clearly a ploy to try to elicit less-than-intelligent, less-than-articulate statements. The segment closed with Secretary of Education Richard Riley noting -- at his TIMSS press conference -- that we need "less ideology and more geometry." Later, I was able to laugh about that.
The Least Ability to Follow One's Own Logic Award goes to American Enterprise Institute fellow James K. Glassman. A Glassman column in the Washington Post pitched school vouchers and the privatization of Social Security. While arguing that "education monopolists" are part of the problem of terrible schools. Glassman also contended that "Americans can raise their own babies and drive in the rain. They can certainly figure out how to buy and hold mutual funds and pick good schools for their kids."1 Glassman must have a chauffeured limo; otherwise he'd notice that traffic slows to a crawl around Washington when the rains fall. In any case, a number of mutual fund managers haven't fared all that well even in the longest "bull market" in history, and some work by Amy Stuart Wells casts doubt on the likely success of Americans' choice of schools.2 Letter writers were quick to point out that mutual fund owners given an "Investment I.Q." test by Money magazine didn't do very well.3 Still, let's grant Glassman his contentions for a moment. Where do you suppose Americans got as smart as he thinks they are? In our monopolistic schools, perchance?
1. James K. Glassman, "The Myth
of the Ignorant American," Washington Post, 30 June 1998,
p. A-15.
2. Amy Stuart Wells, "The Sociology
of Choice: Why Some Win and Others Lose in the Education Marketplace,"
in Edith Rasell and Richard Rothstein, eds., School Choice: Examining
the Evidence (Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute, 1993), pp.
29-48.
3. See Letters to the Editor, Washington
Post, 27 July 1998, p. A-22.
The Least Valid Index of Effectiveness Award goes, for a second consecutive year, to Herbert Walberg of the University of Illinois, Chicago, though this year Professor Walberg shares it with Chester E. Finn, Jr., former assistant secretary of education. At first blush, one would think that a recipient could not lay claim to a second prize for the same performance, but perennial Rotten Apple winner Walberg manages to do so -- though he had to inveigle fellow ideologue Finn into publishing with him (the report was first published under Walberg's name on the website of Finn's foundation).1
Their joint venture, on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal, was titled "World's Least Efficient Schools." Walberg received his award in 1997 for claiming that the U.S. teaches reading least effectively. He used data from the 1992 IEA study of reading, wherein only one country of 27, Finland, outscored the U.S. at the 9-year-old level and only one country of 31, Finland again, outscored the U.S. significantly at the 14-year-old level. Some inefficient learning, huh?
Still, the American kids did make the least "progress" between the ages of 9 and 14, as measured by subtracting the scores of the 9-year-olds from those of the 14-year-olds. This is not valid in itself, but never mind. Walberg's measure of money spent said we spend a lot relative to other nations, so he claimed that, when you spend a lot and gain a little, you are the least effective. Looking at the results, I noticed that the top-ranked Finns made the second-least progress and that, in general, those nations that scored well at the younger age made the least progress, while those who scored low made the greatest strides. Such an outcome should alert a researcher with only one eye open that something statistically weird is afoot. In this case, it was mostly a matter of the age at which students start school. Countries with early starts scored well but made less progress; countries with late starts didn't look so good as 9-year-olds but caught up. (Finland was a notable exception, a late starter and number one in the world at both ages.)
Finn and Walberg repeated these findings and extended their "analysis" to include TIMSS Final Year data. One chart shows that, of 16 nations, Iceland was 16th at the eighth-grade level and fifth in the final year (12th grade for the U.S.). Finn and Walberg thus called Iceland the "most productive" country. They didn't seem to notice that between the eighth grade and the last year of secondary school American students grew older by four years, while the Icelandic "kids" aged fully seven years! The students tested by Iceland in the TIMSS Final Year study were 21.3 years old; those in the U.S. were 18.1. To get comparable results Finn and Walberg would have had to test American college students in the fall of their senior year. (There were, of course, 41 countries participating at the eighth-grade level, not 16, but Finn and Walberg compared only those nations with scores at both levels.)
1. Chester E. Finn, Jr., and Herbert J. Walberg, "The World's Least Effective Schools," Wall Street Journal, 22 June 1998, p. A-22; and Herbert J. Walberg, "Spending More While Learning Less," at http://.www.edexcellence.net/walberg.html.
The Statistics from Thin Air Award is given in thirds to William Jefferson Clinton, Albert Gore, and Brett Lovejoy, executive director of the American Vocational Association. Clinton and Gore get their prizes belatedly for a letter to the editor in the 11 October 1995 edition of USA Today, claiming that by 2000, "60% of all jobs will require advanced technological skills." In a debate with me at the 1998 annual meeting of the National School Boards Association, Lovejoy claimed that the technical sector "makes up 65% of available jobs." He later repeated this assertion in an editorial in his association's house organ.1
When I asked Lovejoy by letter for a citation, he at first declined to respond. When pressed, he claimed that "the figure is a BLS projection. If you take issue with that citation, so be it." I did take issue, noting that his response was not a "citation," for it did not provide a document name, author, number, or date. Certainly this "projection" did not come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics prognostications in Employment Outlook: 1994-2005 (Bulletin 2472), which was summarized in the June 1996 Kappan Research column. Certainly, this "projection" did not come from the more recent November 1997 issue of the Monthly Labor Review, which contains forecasts from 1996 to 2006. Five categories account for about 70% of all jobs: executive (10.5%), professional specialist (15.2%), marketing (17.1%), clerical (8.7%), and service (16.7%). But "technicians" account for a mere 3.7% of the labor force. If we add "precision production, craft, and repair," the "technical" category increases by 10.2%, and putting in "operators, fabricators, and laborers" gives us another 12.8%. Even so, these three "technical" categories still account for only a quarter of all jobs.
Anthony Carnevale and Stephen Rose of Educational Testing Service provide a different view of the labor force, but theirs doesn't contain all that many technical workers either. Carnevale and Rose look at what people actually do rather than at the industries in which they work. The subtitle of their report tells the story: Education for What? The New Office Economy. Some 41% of all workers work in offices. White collars carry the day among these clerical workers, supervisors, managers, sales reps, and accountants. These researchers count some professionals -- such as lawyers, computer specialists, and editors -- as office workers. And the low-skilled service sector accounts for another 20%, which doesn't leave a lot of room for the technical types.
It is important to emphasize that the office sector is not composed solely of people doing routine office work. "It employs the decision-makers in management, supervision, coordination, promotion, and planning." The payoff for a college education comes, Carnevale and Rose contend, not so much from technical skills acquired, but from the fact that such an education is necessary to break into these types of jobs. These are the ones who are getting ahead in the current economy.
The workers who are most closely identified with specialized high-tech skills have not been the ones whose paychecks have risen. Instead, it is the managers, lawyers, doctors, and other business professionals who have caused the earnings of college-educated people to increase. In cases where these highly educated workers do not obtain elite jobs, their earnings have declined and were lower in 1995 than managers and professionals with just high school diplomas.2.
When I saw the Clinton/Gore missive, I sent letters to both, asking them for a citation for the 60% figure and for a definition of "advanced technological skills." To increase my chances of getting the info, I sent copies of the letter to Secretary of Education Richard Riley and Robert Reich, who was then still secretary of labor. My four epistles produced one response. Someone in Riley's office wrote to tell me that she was certain that someone in Reich's office could answer my questions!
1. Brett Lovejoy, "Misleading
America's Youth," Inside AVA, April 1998, p. 40.
2. Anthony P. Carnevale and Stephen
J. Rose, Education for What? The New Office Economy (Princeton,
N.J.: Educational Testing Service, 1998), p. 52.
The Back to Statistics 101 and My Arithmetic Is Shaky Too Award goes to David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute, and to R. Morris Barrett, a writer. In "What Would School Vouchers Buy? The Real Cost of Private Schools," a Cato Briefing Paper, Boaz and Barrett followed a grand tradition of conservative school critics and glommed onto the changes in SAT verbal scores as evidence of public school failure.1 (They don't mention the SAT math scores, because they can't remotely be used for their purposes.) Wrote Boaz and Barrett,
It is sometimes claimed by the education establishment that test scores have fallen because more students are taking college admissions tests these days. But the absolute number of students with outstanding scores has fallen dramatically as well: in 1972, 2,817 students scored above 750 (out of a possible 800), and another 116,630 scored above 600. By 1994 those figures had dropped to 1,438 and 79,606 respectively.
Boaz and Barrett just happened to start their analysis with the year in which the largest number of students in the history of the SAT sat for it. The boomers were passing through college, and in 1972 1,398,400 of them applied to schools requiring the SAT. In 1994, 25% fewer students -- only 1,050,386 -- took the SAT. Thus, even if the proportions of high scorers had stayed exactly the same, there would have been 25% fewer high-scoring students in 1994.
The proportions of high scorers did fall in this period, but only a bit: from 0.20% to 0.14% for those 750 and higher and from 8.34% to 7.58% for those scoring above 600. During the same period, the proportion of students scoring above 700 on the SAT math subtest (I do not have figures for above 750 on math) rose from 3.2% to 4.85%, while the proportion of students getting at least a 600 went from 16.36% to 18.90.%
Boaz and Barrett survey various cities and gather figures on tuition fees that private schools charge. This leads them to conclude that the average private school tuition is less than half of the per-pupil expenditure in the average public school. By collecting only tuition figures, they conveniently do not inquire about subsidies to the private schools from institutions, such as churches. Nor do they put their conclusions in harm's way by wondering how many people in the nation are willing to teach for what many private schools pay or by factoring into their calculations such costs as special education, transportation, food services, and so on. You get the picture.
Recall that Money magazine editors concluded that, if you live in a suburb and send your kids to private school, you're probably wasting your money.2
1. David Boaz and R. Morris Barrett,
"What Would School Vouchers Buy: The Real Cost of Private Schools"
is available on the Cato Institute website at www.cato.org.
2. Denise M. Topolnicki, "Private
Schools Are Rarely Worth the Money," Money, October 1994,
pp. 94-112.
The Dumb and Dumber Award goes to the Florida legislature. After making some scholarship funds contingent on SAT scores, the Florida lawmakers found that they didn't have enough money to pay for all the budding scholars. "No one really believed that many kids would make that score on the SAT, and we are overwhelmed by the performance of our young people," said Betty Holzendorf, a Democratic legislator from Jacksonville.1 In fairness, the criterion score for eligibility was not very high, but the legislature should have known in advance approximately how many Florida students would qualify. (Hint: use data from prior years.) I wonder what the average SAT score for the lawmakers would be?
1. Ryan Gravatt, "Scholars Too Costly for State," Florida Times Union, 3 April 1998, p. A-1.
The Maybe American Schools Do Teach Reading Least Efficiently Award goes to unknown New York Times headline writers (who will probably want to remain incognito) for the following: "I.Q.s Are Up. SATs Are Down. Americans Flunk Math and Prosper. Somebody with Brains Should Figure This Out."1 Actually, the article under the headline reported that SAT math scores had just hit a 26-year high. For the record, verbal scores are at a nine-year high, but there has been so little variability in the SAT verbal over the last 20 years that most people would probably call the scores "stable" or "static" (depending on one's ideology). Both "highs" are calculated with the recentered scale only.
1. George Johnson, "Tests Show Nobody's Smart About Intelligence," New York Times, 1 March 1998, sect. 4, p. 1.
The We Don't Have to Check for Accuracy 'Cause We All Know It's True Award goes to the Florida Times Union of Jacksonville. This paper opened its 7 July 1998 editorial, headlined "Allowing Choice," with these words: "Here's a Jeopardy-type puzzle: the president, vice president, half the U.S. Senate, a third of the House, and about 40% of the public school teachers. The question is, who sends their children to private schools?"1 I can't vouch for the accuracy of the other figures, but the Times Union inflated the proportion of public school teachers who use private schools for their children by more than 330%.
Denis Doyle's 1995 analysis of 1990 census figures (Where Do Connoisseurs Send Their Children to School?) showed that 12.1% of public school teachers had children in private schools.2 Doyle's analysis was published by fellow choice zealot Jeanne Allen's Center for Education Reform, and perhaps both Allen and Doyle would have preferred to have found a higher proportion. But they didn't, and they didn't claim that they did. The percentage was actually lower than the general public's rate of 13.1%. (Interested readers will find a longer discussion of this topic in the Fifth Bracey Report in the October 1995 Kappan.) By the way, Doyle's report also revealed that only one-third of private school teachers send their children to private schools.
1. "Allowing Choice,"
Florida Times Union, 7 July 1998, p. A-10.
2. Denis Doyle, Where Do Connoisseurs
Send Their Children to School? An Analysis of 1990 Census Data to Determine
Where School Teachers Send Their Children to School (Washington, D.C.:
Center for Education Reform, 1995).
The Sam Goldwyn/Mark Twain 'It's Dangerous to Make Predictions, Especially About the Future' Award goes to Richard Judy and Carol D'Amico, the authors of Workforce 2020. I often note in speeches that the data presented in the Hudson Institute's 1987 publication Workforce 2000 did not always say what the text claimed they said. The situation with the sequel, Workforce 2020, is simpler: assertions therein are contradicted by daily events that everyone already knows about.
Completely ignoring the seven-year recession in Japan (by now, it has reached eight years), Judy and D'Amico write, "Today Asia is the most dynamic continent in terms of economic trade expansion. . . . The Asian economic expansion is likely to continue for decades, because the labor 'reserves' of the largest and most rapidly growing Asian countries will persist into the twenty-first century."1 No comment.
Judy and D'Amico also reiterate the contention from Workforce 2000 that the nation faces an imminent skilled labor crisis (a contention refuted by 2000's own data). "Unless the education and skill levels of the American workforce are upgraded, America's productivity and prosperity will grow less quickly than is desirable" (p. 85). Sounds ominous, but note that they make no argument for a decline, only for growth less rapid than "desirable." (One might ask, For whom? Surely not Alan Greenspan?)
They rightly observe that the proportion of jobs requiring skilled labor is increasing. And they cite figures from the Department of Labor's Dictionary of Occupational Titles, which categorizes jobs by the levels of skill they demand in language, mathematics, and reasoning, and point out that the jobs being lost are almost all classified as "low skilled." But so are most of the jobs being created: 71% of new jobs will require only low or moderate levels of skill in language, 67% will require only low or moderate levels of skill in reasoning, and fully 84% will require only low or moderate levels of skill in math. These data come from pages 81-84 of Workforce 2020.
1. Richard W. Judy and Carol D'Amico, Workforce 2020 (Indianapolis: Hudson Institute, 1997), pp. 31-32.
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