Faith in Social Mobility Isn't Enough
Dear Mike,
Wow. You've raised enough hackles to start a healthy debate.
My response in short: It's not a matter of "faith in social mobility" as your title suggests, but a matter of having the political will to make it feasible.
Thanks to those who've already said much of what I'd like to say. Yes, Mike, if labor leader Al Shanker said that the answer to poverty and de-unionization was more highly educated workers he was wrong. He often was.
Yes, globalization has changed the game. We now have "international corporations of the world," rather than the left's dream of "international workers of the world." Most workers are still "stuck" in their native soil, but corporations can go where the money is—i.e. where other workers get paid in wages we Americans haven't yet imagined. (But, might have to, someday, if ...)
So producing an economy that can put most Americans to work at decent wages—so they can be self-sustaining—is a tough job. The notion that schools can be the center of the solution simply can't work; and I say that as one who would love it to be otherwise! Faith in the possibility that it can is asking of faith what it isn't designed to accomplish! It's built around a persistent American myth about how we became a middle-class nation.
You say to Leo, "I guess I'm in the dark ... when you say it's 'no great secret' how to reduce