Fire the Reformers! Education Should
Develop Individuals, Not Worker Bees
by Joseph W. Gauld
Accountability is a big word in educational reform. Now it needs to be applied to those responsible for creating reform that is ineffective and discriminatory.
For more than five decades, business leaders, politicians, colleges and universities sold Americans the idea that academic test-score proficiency is the key to developing our workforce. They continually emphasized the higher earnings of college graduates and the prestige of going to top-rated colleges. This put colleges in a key position to influence the curriculum and quality of the system.
Now, coming out of a major recession, there is evidence the ideas of this business-political-college triumvirate didn’t work:
- 57.5 million native-born Americans, ages 16-65, were not working in the second quarter of 2013, up 17 million from the second quarter of year 2000.
- 53.6 percent of college bachelor holders under age 25 in 2012 were jobless or underemployed.
- Only 66.8 percent of American males are currently working, the lowest figure on record.
This last figure indicates a troubling bias: boys are a year to a year and a half behind girls in reading and writing; they record 80 percent of the discipline problems and drop outs in
