Exporting of Manufacturing Jobs the Smoking Gun Behind Achievement Gap
Last week, the embarrassing but true headline was that Wisconsin is far and away the national leader in the so-called achievement gap—the difference between average test scores of African American and white students. What wasn't reported and is equally embarrassing is that Wisconsin also leads in the poverty gap: 50% of Wisconsin’s African American children live below the poverty line, compared to 11% of white children.
Without question, any group of poor students isn't going to perform as well as a group non-poor students, but there's more to the story of the plight of African Americans in Wisconsin. African Americans came to Wisconsinmostly between 1940 and 1960 seeking manufacturing jobs and they found them in Wisconsin’s larger cities—primarily Milwaukee (70%), Madison (7%) and Racine (6%). While there has always been an achievement gap, through unionization and the good- paying jobs that went with it, and the crumbling of the American apartheid, theachievement gap began to narrow noticeably in the 1970s.But in the 1980s, the United States began to experience what would begin a long steady loss of manufacturing jobs. While certainly part of this was due to increased efficiency in manufacturing that required fewer people, the elephant in the room is that our ballooning trade deficit has resulted in us exporting millions of jobs to foreign countries. A long line of free trade agreements, starting with NAFTA in 1993, made outsourcing labor to foreign countries much easier and opened the flood gates so much that finding the "Made in the USA" label has gone from being the norm in the
