Fixing America (alternate title: Reinventions): Bolder approaches to job creation, health care, education, and our election system
Before enacting national policy, we require broad buy-in: public
hearings, smoke-filled-room negotiations, media massaging and
messaging. Too often, that results in tepid policy that few could
argue with, lowest common denominator.
In this article, not shackled by the constraints of consensus
creation, I can be bolder: I propose reinventions of four linchpins
of the thriving society.
Creating Many Good, Sustainable Jobs
Jobs are Job One. I believe these two ideas would create
millions of enduring, pro-social, offshore-resistant jobs.
Entrepreneurship Nation
Both sides of the aisle agree that government stimulus spending,
at best, is a jump-start., that permanent job creation must come
from the private sector. Most people also agree that entrepreneurs,
while providing better, faster, cheaper goods and services, also
create jobs.
So why not replace just a fraction of our arcana-larded K-16
curriculum with entrepreneurship education? For example, most high
school students spend many hours deriving geometric theorems. Could
it be reasonably be argued that that is more important for all
students than learning how to start an ethical yet successful
business?
While some entrepreneurs are born not made, much is learnable,
especially if taught not by academics but by successful, ethical
businesspeople. I imagine that many, especially the retired, would
be willing to do that,evenas a volunteer.
America Assists
It’s widely agreed that buying non-essential “stuff” is unlikely
to lead to happiness. Don’t we all know unhappy people who live in
a capacious, la-di-dah-coiffed home, who replace their perfectly
good used car with a new one, go on costly vacations, and buy lots
of au courant clothes and jewelry, yet after a brief “shopper’s
high,” are no happier, let alone kinder? Yet America remains
addicted to trying to shop our way into bliss.
But what if the government launched a public service campaign
like its successful anti-smoking initiative to encourage the public
to buy less stuff and more services, which hold greater promise of
improving life’s quality. For example, hire a part-time:
- assistant to help care for your newborn
- a homework helper for your older child.
- a personal assistant to do errands, laundry, wait for the
repairperson, etc. - a personal geek to teach you the technology you’re afraid
of - a health care advocate to help you get the care you need,
affordably, in our labyrinthine, scary system - a companion for your aging relative.
Those would improve the hirer’s life as well as the employee’s,
certainlymore sothan yet another pair of shoes. The
worker, piecing together a few such part-time jobs can make a
reasonable living doing work that’s clearly beneficial and ethical.
Importantly, most of those jobs require only a modest skill set.
Even many high school dropouts could likely find such work they
could do well enough.
How would hirers and employees match up? Just as they do for
other jobs: hirers would place ads, for example, on Craigslist. If
hirers want a professional to do the screening and payroll, they
could turn to employment agencies. That would create yet more
jobs.
A Reinvented Health Care System We Can Live
With
You and I are about to get our health care in a very different
system, defined in a 2400-page document that even the legislators
who passed it didn’t read. Can that be implemented effectively
enough that when we desperately need it, we’ll get timely health
care?
Additionally, our health care providers are already overwhelmed:
Already, there are over 100,000 health-care-provider-caused deaths
and many times that in excess morbidity every year. And
now, that same number of doctors, nurses, MRIs, operating rooms,
etc., will have to care for 40,000,000 more people, who as a group,
have high health care needs and will be paying little into the
system.
And the cost? Perhaps businesses are just playing the violin,
but they claim that the new system, which will require employers to
provide health care not only for all its 30+-hour a week employees
but a surcharge to pay for the health care of part-timers, the
unemployed. and poor people, will force businesses to eliminate yet
more jobs or even go out of business.
I’m scared that when I need it, I won’t get good and timely
health care. I’d place greater faith in what I believe is a simpler
but better plan. I call it FreedomCare:
1. Except for the indigent and
for catastrophic health care, health care would be paid directly by
the consumer. If consumers had most of the money at stake, 300
million Americans would be exerting the power of the free market’s
invisible hand to drive down costs and improve quality. The good
quality, cost-effective providers would succeed, the bad ones
driven out of business.
2. To ensure that consumers have the
information to choose health care providers and procedures wisely,
all doctors, nurses, hospitals, etc., would be required to make key
consumer information available, for example, patient satisfaction
(disaggregated by condition,) the provider’s risk-adjusted success
rates for different procedures, etc.
3. Shorten and make more
practical the training of health care providers. That would improve
quality while reducing cost and increasing the supply of providers.
Currently, our health care providers are trained primarily by
professors, who value the theoretical over the practical. Those
professors are usually hired and promoted mainly on how much
research they crank out (almost always in a
"apple-style-span">narrow area, e.g., plantar
fasciatis)not their ability as a clinician, let alone
their effectiveness in training excellent clinicians.
Having spoken with a number of
physicians, I’ve become convinced that the status quo, which
requires pre-med students to complete courses in organic chemistry,
inorganic chemistry, physics, and calculus followed by four years
of theory- and arcana-larded medical school (particularly absurd
today when so much information is available instantly on the
Internet), should be replaced by a two-year practical program
taught by master physicians. That would improve patient care while
greatly reducing the cost of training a doctor, currently over
$ 200,000 per.
Elections Reinvented
More and more money pours into election campaigns, heavily from
special interests. That enables ever-more sophisticated
Madison-Avenue types to concoct truth-obfuscating, manipulative
messaging. Today, nearly every word spoken by major politicians are
dial focus-group tested. As troubling, those special interests
wouldn’t be pouring billions into campaigns unless it increased
chances of politicians doing their bidding rather than what’s best
for all of us.
I believe the following would ensure we elect far better and
less-corrupted leaders:
- All campaigns would be 100% publicly-funded. That has been
proposed and rejected in the past as a denial of free speech. I
believe that abridgment is far outweighed by the benefit to
society. - All campaigns would be just two weeks long. That would control
cost while minimally reduce voter knowledge: Most voters have long
forgotten what they heard about the candidates months earlier. - The campaigns would consist only of one or two broadcast
debates, which would be followed by a job simulation: running a
meeting. A neutral body such as C-Span or Consumers Union would
post each major candidate’s biographical highlights, voting record,
and platform on key issues.
Such a system would reduce candidates’ corruptibility while
increasing the quality of information voters would have about the
candidates. As important, better candidates would run, knowing they
needn’t run a long, expensive, press-the-flesh,
beholding-to-special-interests campaign.
Here is an even more radical approach to reinventing the way we
choose our leaders: Our government
officials would be selected, not by voting, but using passive
criteria: for example, the Senate might consist of the most newly
retired of the 10 largest nonprofits, a randomly selected CEO of
the Russell 2000, the Police Officer of America’s Cop of the Year,
the Teacher of the Year, the most award-winning scientist under age
30, etc., plus random citizens.
Of course, both of those
reinventions of our electoral system are subject to the criticism,
“The incumbent politicians would never allow it–the foxes are
guarding the hen house.” I’d address that by working with the media
to urge the electorate to support candidates that would vote for a
fairer electoral system.
Helping Education Live Up to Its Promise
Education is widely viewed as our best hope for competing in the
global economy and for reducing the racial/socio-economic
achievement gap.Alas, education hasn’t turned out to be the magic
pill we’ve hoped it would be.
And that doesn’t appear to be a matter of spending. Some readers
may be surprised to learn that for decades, the U.S. has ranked #1
or #2 in per capita education spending yet, in international
comparisons, America ranks 23rd, tied with Poland. And despite
disproportionate spending on compensatory education for a half
century now, the racial achievement gap remains as wide as ever.
Perhaps most dispiriting has been the research on Head Start, which
had long been seen as the best hope for reducing the achievement
gap. Just released is the definitive evaluation of three decades of
research on Head Start. It finds the same as have nearly all
previous studies: Head Start yields no significant, enduring
positive effects.
The most frequently proposals for improvement are-reduced class
size and increased expectations. But the research on those suggests
that the key to unlocking education’s promise doesn’t fully reside
there.
The following admittedly radical ideas would seem to have a
greater chance of making education the magic pill we wish it
were.
Dream-Team-Taught Courses Taught on Video
Imagine that every student–rich and poor, urban and
rural–would, for every course, be taught be a dream team of the
world’s most effective, transformational teachers. If anything
could be expected to increase education’s potency, that would seem
to be it. Each class session, presented on video and viewable on
the Internet, would consist of the teachers’ presentations abetted
by world-class visuals, immersive demonstrations, etc. A live
paraprofessional or teacher would be on-site to provide the human
touch: answer questions, keep kids focused,give
attaboys/girls,etc.
A First-Things-First Curriculum
In the abstract, most people would agree that it’s better for
students to graduate high school able to analyze a newspaper’s
editorial even if they don’t understand Shakespeare’s intricacies.
Most people would agree that kids should graduate high school able
to think probabilistically even if they can’t solve simultaneous
equations. Most would agree that students should graduate fully
understanding the scientific method even if they can’t manipulate
chemical reactions. Even more would agree that it’s wrong that
interpersonal communication, parenting, and financial literacy
should be absent from the curriculum.
Yet our curriculum demands the opposite. Indeed, do we all not
know people with even advanced degrees who lack the ability to
negotiate life’s basics? Defenders of our arcana-first curriculum
argue that practical matters should be taught at home. Nice ideal
but far from real, and less realistic all the time. Schools should
first teach what’s most important so, by the time students
graduate, students have learned what’s most crucial to the life
well-led.
High-Quality College-Prep and
Direct-to-Career Paths
One of education’s ironies is that diversity is a core
principles yet ever more of its leaders insist on one-size-fits-all
education. Today’s mantra is “College for all!”
But let’s step back and look at it dispassionately. Imagine that
after nine years of school (K-8,) you were still struggling with
fifth-grade-level reading and math, and indeed, millions of
students are. Now you’re starting the 9th grade and required to do
yet four more years of yet more difficult academic work: While
you’re still trying to figure out long division, you’re asked to
solve quadratic equations. While you’re still struggling with that
fifth-grade level reading book, you’re asked to write essays
explaining the themes and symbolism in Wuthering Heights. Unless
you are an unusually “good” kid, mightn’t you become dispirited,
feel hopeless, and view your ever poorer grades as a sign that
society deems you a failure, a loser, and so you give up, drop out
and feel you have little to lose by abusing drugs, joining a gang,
and/or getting pregnant?
One is often called an elitist or even a racist if asserting
that some students would be wiser to reject a college-preparatory
curriculum in favor of a direct-to-career curriculum. In such a
curriculum, students would improve their reading, math, etc., not
with history, algebra, and foreign-language textbooks but while
preparing for a career after high school as, for example, a
robotics technician, chef, or entrepreneur.
The irony is that those calling for a one-size-fits-all
education are the ones who are being elitist. They believe that,
for all people, white-collar jobs are simply better than
blue-collar jobs and so, even if a student’s abilities and
limitations suggest a blue-collar direction is a better fit, that
student should be forced onto a white-collar path to–in another
irony–”to keep their options open.”
But fact is, such students usually find the college path far
less beneficial than a direct-to-career path would have been. Even
if a student who was reading on a fifth grade level in the eighth
grade manages to graduate from high school having taken a college
preparatory curriculum (often the result of grade inflation) and
even if that student went on to college, and even if that student
defied the 3:1 odds against such students earning their bachelor’s
degree even if given 8 1/2 years, they’re likely to be less
employable than if they had pursued a direct-to-career path to
become, for example, the aforementioned robotics technician, chef,
or entrepreneur. Today, even strong college graduates are
struggling to land white-collar jobs while many skilled blue-collar
jobs go wanting.
Others object that a direct-to-career program can become a
dumping ground. There’s no reason they need be. They can and should
be of as high quality as a college-preparatory curriculum, just as
they are in , for example, Japan, Germany, and Scandinavia.
It seems obvious that students should have a choice and not be
forced into a one-size-fits-all education, and many teachers agree.
But educrats and politicians get more votes with such slogans as,
“High standards for all students! “No soft bigotry of low
expectations!” Such slogans have apple-pie appeal but in practice,
ruin countless lives.
Require each college to post a report card on
itself
Despite college being one of our largest and most important
purchases, the government provides us with less consumer
information than we get before buying tires, which have a “report
card” molded into each sidewall, or packaged food, which must bear
a label of its contents from Vitamin A to zinc. Especially with the
spate of reports demonstrating that college graduates grow
frighteningly little in learning and employability, each college
should be required, on its website, to post a Report Card on
itself. It need include just six items:
- The projected four- and five-year full cost of attendance,
including cash financial aid, broken down by family income and
assets. - Freshman-to-senior average growth in critical thinking,
writing, quantitative reasoning, etc., broken down by high school
record. - The results of the most recent student satisfaction survey
- Four-, five-, and six-year graduation rates, broken down by
high school record - The accreditation team’s most recent report on the
college. - The percentage of graduates professionally employed, including
average salary, broken down by high school record and by
major. - To reduce cheating, the
report cards would be externally audited.
Mandating such a report card would, of course, help students
select a college wisely or even decide that, given their academic
record, motivation, and finances, a non-college option, for
example, an apprenticeship program, would be wiser. As important,
making transparent the poor value-added most colleges provide would
embarrass them into improving their quality of education. They’d
likely replace some of their many unimportant-research-focused
professors with outstanding teachers. They’d reallocate some of
their athletic and shrub budget to providing peer and adult mentors
for students as well as to a career center that actually got its
graduates jobs.
Marty Nemko holds a Ph.D.
from the University of California, Berkeley specializing in the
evaluation of innovative programs and subsequently taught in
Berkeley’s graduate school. He is in his 24th year hosting Work
with Marty Nemko on KALW-FM, a National Public Radio affiliate in
San Francisco. The archive of that program plus 1,000 of his
published writings are free on www.martynemko.com.