Education

Education is the greatest economic development tool known to man. It is not social welfare and it is not political fodder. It is much more important than that. No country can stay at the forefront of the world’s economy with an illiterate citizenry. And literacy can no longer be mistaken for basic reading skills. In the 21st Century, literacy has to be measured in the hunger for and pursuit of knowing more. 

The Department of Education proposed new rules last week which, under the guise of “avoiding wasteful spending” on higher education loans, will close the door to a better life for hundreds of thousands of needy students.  The rule mainly applies to proprietary colleges, also known as for-profit schools, and will bar or limit many programs based on a complex formula that compares a student’s debt to his or her prospects in the current job market.  According to the Department’s own estimates, this proposed rule would eliminate or put at risk 307,000 students who are currently enrolled in these programs.   

In this volatile political season, every new poll threatens congressional incumbents with mounting public discontent. The conventional wisdom is that that the economy and jobs are the top issues on every voter’s mind this fall. But, as a national poll of 1000 registered voters revealed last month, paying attention this year to education—and high schools in particular—is one way to appeal to voters of all political stripes and colors.

After setting September 15 as the date for a Senate Foreign Relations Committee vote on the New START nuclear reductions agreement with Russia, Chairman John Kerry wrote in a letter to his colleagues.  “The coming six weeks,” Kerry said, “will provide members ample opportunity to review the materials related to New START.”

It’s not To Kill a Mockingbird, but here are the top five items that should be on each Senator’s reading list to prepare for a floor vote after August recess.

Nearly a third of all public high school students — and roughly half of all those who live in low-income communities — fail to graduate with their class. Those staggering statistics add up to more than a million American high school dropouts every year.

We know that young people who leave high school without a diploma, for whatever reason, are very likely to be unemployed and mired in poverty; but this long, hard recession is exacerbating their already bleak employment prospects. Today, many young people from low-income families are experiencing Depression-level joblessness with nearly 40 percent of African-American youth and 36 percent of Hispanic youth, ages 16 to 19, unemployed in June. Rural white and Native American youth face the same challenges.

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Hunger and obesity. It might seem odd to find these epidemics mentioned together, but they are two of the greatest threats to the health of America's children and the future of our nation.

And Congress is running out of time to do something about it. Read more...

What’s wrong with this picture? A congressional committee is holding a hearing about a sector that is preparing underemployed and unemployed workers to get jobs, the number one priority for America. And the star witness is a hedge fund manager who’s short selling the sector.

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Almost 12 years have gone by since I entered the world of education reform and with every passing day I am more and more amazed at how unreal that world has become. Despite the dysfunction of our educational system and the financial precipice it faces, those who have been working for two decades to bring about change are blithely congratulating themselves on their marginal victories while Rome burns.  Admittedly, they recognize that they have a long way to go, but they still persist in thinking that the road they have followed thus far will get them there.  Here are some of the paths they have pursued:

Rarely do education-related lawsuits hit so close to home for me personally and professionally.  But the lawsuit filed last week by over 60 students and several education organizations (Robles-Wong v CA) against the State of California and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is one that strikes a particularly resounding chord.
 
As a former California educator for nearly 30 years, it is inspiring to witness the newfound courage among students of my state in challenging California’s inequitable education system. Their goal is to compel California to study the actual costs of providing education services to “all children with all needs”.
 
On the need for this, I couldn’t agree more.  California is falling far short of providing each child with the education he/she deserves.  The lawsuit calls for the complete transformation of California’s finance system – a reform effort similar to the one I championed in this Congress when I created the Educational Opportunity and Equity Commission, now housed within the U.S. Department of Education and readying its rollout.
 
The Commission’s intent, by initiating a national dialogue on the topic of educational equity, is to ferret out a fix for the Californias of our country.  I fought hard to establish it because our education finance structure is outdated and relies on factors like average daily attendance, average costs for “regular” students, and concentrations of low-income, special-education and English-language-learner students.  Outdated systems like California’s are inexcusable in an economically recessed nation falling behind globally.

With immigration back in the news, proponents of the DREAM Act are again peddling arguments for a massive amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants.
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