A Prognostication of our drop out NATION

My cousins can consider this a sales pitch. My cousins are in some ways my target audience. One's a lawyer (of sorts, not exactly doing legal work right now) and one's an investment banker (last time I checked). They aren't your average americans, but they are the white males of privilege and means (upper middle class) that so often insulate themselves from the less fortunate in our society. (This shouldn't come across as an accusation. I may not be insulated now, but that's more a consequence of circumstances, not a statement of my values or what "should be". I have major concerns that my level of familiarity with the less fortunate is breeding more contempt than anything else.)

Note to others: Normally not a good idea to start a sales pitch with a stereotype of your target audience. They probably won't want to read further. I just happen to have a lot of trust in the patience and/or curiosity of my cousins, and anyone else who might find themselves reading this thing.

If anything, upper middle class white males of privilege and means (like myself) are my target audience because I don't believe Paulo Freire's societal concepts regarding how oppression ceases. In Freire's book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire talks about how those being oppressed must be the ones who realize their oppression, and be the ones to demand just treatment by the oppressors. It can't come from the oppressors themselves. (Not to Freireans and others: my summary may not be exactly right. It's been a few years since I read Freire. So world: I'm proclaiming this as possibly inaccurate but still close, as close as a broad generalization from three years ago can and/or should be) Some part of me theoretically agrees with this, but the larger part of me doesn't think the oppressed of our country are ever going to get it together to the point where they will realize what is being done to them and demand change. Upper middle class white males are are also my target audience because I feel a certain similarity in thinking since that is where I come from. It is who I am.

The sales pitch:

First things first, much of the following will come from the book The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman. If you already have certain arguments against this book, the following probably will not hold much water for you....so....let me know ahead of time. (meh, letting me know won't make a difference, but I guess you COULD stop reading now.....come on...don't give up on this yet!)

America is pretty nice for people like us right now.

The U.S. is an economic and military power. Our military power is derived from our economic power. We've got tons of job opportunities. Our kids will likely have tons of job opportunities. We'll be able to buy fenced in suburban properties. We'll be able to go to upscale restaurants and drink our wine.

Our country is the Disneyland of the world.

I'm just not sure that's going to continue. Sure we've got the freedom of the press, the freedom of speech, and the freedom of religion. But I don't think we really have the freedom of mind.

Our Dropouts and Education
We are a nation of dropouts, to make reference to the cover of Time magazine about a year and a half ago. The speaker at our teacher training the other day quoted our graduation rate across the nation being about 64%. The Time magazine quoted our high school graduation rate at about 70%. This puts our drop out rate at between 30-36%. One in three Americans is a high school drop out. That's a lot, huh? It's a depressing number, but here's another depressing number. 1 in 3 of the students who make it to college have to take remedial writing and math classes. As for our equal access, I'm sure you guys are familiar with the achievement gap that No Child Left Behind was supposed to erase. To put it succinctly, the average black and latino student is scoring 3 to 4 years behind the average white or asian student on standardized tests. White 9th grader = Black 12th grader. Further, our country used to rank #1 in education. We've since gone down below 20th among industrialized nations. We're also low in graduation rate of high schools as discussed above. But just as we've gone from 1st in to 20th in education overall, we've done about the same in overall high school graduation rate. Some will argue that because we "educate everybody" for upward mobility while other european nations only educate some, that you can't compare our scores. Well, that doesn't seem to hold much validity for me unless they've changed the way they calculate those rankings. Cause if they haven't changed the way they calculate those rankings, then we've simply gotten worse, a LOT worse.

I know none of these facts are touching you yet (in a real physical place, like your wallet or body, not in an emotional way...can't speak to that), but I'll get there sometime soon.

Now let's talk about birthrates. I'm lazy, otherwise I'd look them all up. I'll do that later but I'm pretty sure we can agree on the following.

Birth rates among the affluent are low and going down over time. (We're kind of like Europe that way.)

Birth rates among the uneducated and poor are high.

The logic here should be obvious. As bad as our graduation rate is now, I'm willing to bet (quite a lot actually, if there are any bookies that track this kind of thing) that should no significant education policy changes be made, this trend will only get worse.

Further, the Gates Foundation estimates that only 6% of individuals that come from lower income neighborhoods and families will graduate from college four years after high school.

So America is set for an increase in high school drop outs. Now we get to the World Is Flat part of our discussion.

When Friedman says that the world is flat, he's referring to the fact that whereas previously jobs were only available according to geographic location, the advent of the internet has allowed companies to hire people all over the world so long as their skills were at a level necessary to complete the work. As one example, hundreds of thousands of people's (read U.S. citizens) tax returns were completed by accountants in India the past couple of years, and every year that number goes up. Some jobs won't be impacted. I'll never have a dentist located in Bangladesh. Neither will I receive chiropractic care from a Russian chiropractor. But engineers, accountants, architects, graphic artists, and many other jobs can and are being outsourced. So as long as a person has access to the internet and the skills necessary to provide a valuable service, then they can get a job that pays well. The implications on the U.S. should be obvious. Our standard of living is high here. There are few reasons to employ an engineer from the U.S. when they cost $120,000 a year and an engineer in Russia would cost $30,000 a year.

As Friedman tells it (by my memory), "It used to be parents would tell their kids, 'eat all your food. There are people starving in the world.' Now I tell my kids, 'Do your homework kids, there are people all over the world starving for your jobs'."

And here is how it begins to hit us, here, at home.

If the number of drop outs goes up, then our number of skilled workers is going down. Where before this may not have been a problem since our jobs were geographically limited, U.S. companies can just hire other, better skilled workers across the world. Less jobs here equals less people being paid well. Less people being paid well equals less GDP or GNP or some acronym. Less G?P equals less money for the government to play with and less money for the American consumer to spend. This equals a drop in both economic and militaristic power. This equals the beginning of the end since our country has made a lot of enemies....(well, maybe. I'm just spitting BS with that last beginning of the end line....sort of)

The E.U., I recently read, is already beating us in overall G?P. (I promise to clarify my terms, but I'm hoping the meat of the message is getting through.)

So that's bad news. For all of us. But I think it gets worse.

Let's imagine for a second that those birth rates are staying as they logically would stay (an object in motion stays in motion), and other factors (such as educational policy) remains where and what they are, then we see a movement towards the ends of a continuum, and the absorption of the middle class by those ends of the continuum. We have the service industry, and those being served. We have the "haves" and the "have-nots". We have the hopeful and those lacking hope. Up until now America has avoided a lot of civil unrest due to the myth of meritocracy that we live under that keeps people thinking that if they mess up it must be their fault, but once you're hopeless enough you'll start to fault other people for your problems, no matter what, I think.

The point being this: an uneducated populace with no hope has little to no reason to act ethically, particularly when they see unethical companies and politicians all around them. I think violent crime is going to start going back up, because people who can't earn nice things, take nice things. In addition, history teaches us that every time a civilization/society has had the the haves and have nots, it ends up having the "have a revolutions". You know, lots of angry people, little to no ethics, Los Angeles in 1992. France in whatever year they had their revolutions. Russia whenever they had the Bolsheviks and Lenins. One could even say back in our very own American Revolution. Having power versus not having power. Does it really matter that people do have a vote if they feel like it doesn't matter? Perception is reality, isn't it?

Time limit on this prophecy? I don't know.....eighty years from now? 100? We won't be alive, but our kids will.

Now, this is all supposing that nothing drastic changes. But our country always changes incrementally. This is all well and good, but what if it changes so incrementally that no one notices, then it is possible that we could incrementally dig ourselves out of a livelihood, a prosperihood, a futurehood, a chance of back tracking in time.

What am I proposing? It's nothing original, nor extreme, but it requires a coordinated changing of priorities amongst you, my target audience. We'd all have to agree and care about something that really, immediately, won't effect us at all. Check out www.edin08.com. It's the best first step. Vote for the candidate in 08 that gives us the best chance of being competitive in the future by putting the emphasis on both the haves and have-nots, educationally, in our country. Then we'll be able to compete globally, not destroy the middle class domestically, and maintain this myth of a meritocracy that keeps people focused on their own failure instead of the government's.

www.edin08.com