Stop Blaming Public Schools for Jobless Economy | janresseger

Stop Blaming Public Schools for Jobless Economy | janresseger:

Stop Blaming Public Schools for Jobless Economy

In recent weeks Fortune Magazine in Business Gets Schooled and the NY Times in The Counterfeit High School Diploma blame public schools for turning out workers ill-equipped for today’s jobs.  Both articles allege that public school failure is causing our nation’s economic problems and the loss of our edge in the global marketplace. This is, of course, an old story, but according to economists, this story line may not describe our economic reality at all.

Robert Kuttner explains in a detailed and very readable piece, “The New Inequality Debate,” in the Winter 2016 issue of The American Prospect, that although the consensus among economists used to be that economic inequality derives from a skills gap—between what employers need and job seekers present—the problem is instead about power on all kinds of levels—the power of employers over workers in these days of weakened unions—the power of wealth influencing the political system and so on.

Kuttner describes recent work by the British economist Anthony Atkinson and a new, more popular book by Robert Reich, who describes, “all the ways that political power by economic elites rigs the rules of how markets work—in favor not of efficiency, but of the rich and the powerful—increasing both inefficiency and inequality.  With increased market power comes increased concentration of wealth, and still more concentration of both political and economic Stop Blaming Public Schools for Jobless Economy | janresseger: