Over the last couple of weeks I have sat down a few times to write about the ongoing public union situation in Wisconsin but each time I tried I failed to get anything good going due to a general lack of motivation to write on the issue. It is of course an important topic, but not too interesting as (in general) reducing public employee compensation isn’t going to be substantial enough to fix budgetary problems, even on the state level. I’m not suggesting that there isn’t a place for what Republicans in Wisconsin, and even here in Iowa, have purposed, but cutting compensation alone isn’t going to fix America’s massive state and federal budget problems. Since I just wrote on ways to fix the budget, I am much more interested on writing about my ideas for improving America’s education system.
The union issue raised in Wisconsin is still a major consideration for this problem too. Teachers unions, or associations as they are often called in the education context, often purport they exist to improve educational standards, that they are organizations that endeavor to help teachers bargain for the best interests of their pupils. This widely parroted mantra makes very little sense however, as unions (per the definition of the concept) exist for the benefit of their members, not for anybody else. The idea that teachers unions bargain for better conditions for students is like saying that that members of a machinist union are concerned with producing better quality products. There are of course times where teachers’ interests and students’ interests overlap, like with the case of class sizes (usually smaller classes are more favorable to both groups), but in general teachers’ unions are self-interested. That’s ok, as a former public school student, I make no demand that my teachers’ interests are always 100% the same as mine as a student.
Where teachers’ unions become a problem is when teachers’ interests are bargained for so well that school, district, and state officials effectively have their hands tied on certain issues. The quintessential example of this is when schools are forced to retain bad teachers because they don’t have sufficient grounds as per the union agreement to remove them. Other examples may relate to teacher pay: schools are forced on to a particular pay scale that prevents them awarding good teachers with merit pay or give higher pay for greater education, like having a PhD in an applicable field; or increasing salaries for positions they are having trouble filling (often in the Math or Science fields). For all these problems, teachers’ unions still provide important functions to teachers and we should find ways to make them part of the solution, whether by agreement with the unions or legal restrictions on their powers.
Aside from the problems raised by discussion of the unions, fixing education in America is quite a complex problem because there is no single, unified reason why American isn’t number one in the world for primary and secondary education. In some places, lack of sufficient funding prevents districts from being able to provide the resources students and teachers need. In others, schools have most of the resources they need but don’t have people with the right vision about how to use the resources to improve the state of affairs. In still others, such as in impoverished inner-city districts, there exists a certain strong anti-education sentiment passed from parent to child in a circular chain of disadvantage. As a commentator, I don’t know how to fix all of these problems. I’m not a teacher and I’ve only ever been a student in an upper-middle class school in Iowa so my ideas will be (obviously) be bent towards my personal experiences.
First and foremost, state governments should encourage school districts in rural areas to consolidate as much as feasible, even if that means closing schools in small towns that are figuratively (and sometimes very literally) centered around the school. Iowa Republicans made their opposition to this somewhat of a talking point during the 2010 election cycle, but I disagree with their effort to “conserve” the status quo. Small schools simply cannot offer the same number of advanced classes (“AP” or otherwise), foreign language options (Mandrain, Arabic, French – not just Spanish), and math and science classes as large schools can. Furthermore, there are potential cost savings involved from decreasing the total number of schools across the state (smaller infrastructure to maintain, fewer superintendents and principles, etc).
Though my “high school self” would disagree, the states should work to standardize their academic requirements more. For example, my district had a “track” system in place for math. Some students would take pre-algebra in sixth grade, some would take it as late as ninth (I took it in seventh). My high school (ninth-twelfth) only required that students take three years of math. The math series my district subscribes to, the Chicago Math Series (which coincidentally is a horrible series), has six books: Transition Math (pre-algebra), Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II, Functions/Statistics/Trigonometry (commonly referred to as FST), and Pre-Discrete Mathematics (commonly referred to as PDM; pre-calculus). They also offer AP Calculus (I can’t remember which one). Students who start pre-algebra in ninth grade are therefore only required to complete Geometry to graduate. Most colleges, including all three of Iowa’s public universities (University of Iowa, Iowa State University, and University of Northern Iowa) require an additional year of math to even be eligible for admission. Shouldn’t all high schools automatically set students up to be eligible for post-high school education? I would have my old high school, and all high schools, “standardize” their math program by requiring that all students (save for the mentally disabled) start pre-algebra in sixth grade and require four years of math in high school. This would have all students completing a calculus course by graduation (students should be able to choose between AP Calculus for college credit and a regular class).
The move to a more rigorous mathematics education highlights my belief that the way forward towards better schools is by expecting more from our students and by giving them the tools they need to succeed with in that high expectation. By offerring a more standardized set of “core” courses, and by improving or eliminating elective courses in agriculture, art, business, and health classes that are objectively not up to par with the difficulty of the core class areas, we would be well on the way to cleaning up the value of a American high school diploma. High schools can further alleviate this problem by requiring students take several advanced courses during their junior and senior years. Ideally, these advanced courses would give college credit (via AP or transfer) and would satisfy general elective credit. This would add a great deal of utility to students going to college after high school and perhaps incentivize students who traditionally would not be inclined to go to college by getting a significant number of their general education requirements out of the way without even stepping foot in a college.
At some point in the secondary education scheme (middle school and high school), students should also be required to take some sort of basic economics/financial literacy course. I’m not set on the exact time frame students should be required to take this class, but given how many people I know in college (and in government, obviously) who have no idea how to manage money, I think it is an extremely important and functional addition to the education system.
The final change I would make to the education system is to add a comprehensive test as a final step before receiving the high school diploma. I don’t quite know what form this would take but I think that it is a very important step because there are too many functionally illiterate students who manage to scrape by with a high school diploma. Furthermore, each state currently has their own laws on the regulation of private schools and homeschooling that may or may not set diplomas from these circumstances equal to that of children from public schools. A strong national standard would be enormously beneficial in this case.
Most politically competent spectators are willing to admit that the United States federal government is beginning to spiral out of control with the massive budgets that both parties are responsible for pushing over the last eighty years, especially in the last thirty. While Democrats and Republicans can both see the fiscal problems facing our country in the next decade, neither party seems to want to acknowledge the full extent of the problem. Neither party wants to push forward any real solutions either: Republicans want to cut taxes and decrease spending by far too little; Democrats can’t seem to decide if they want to cut or raise taxes but either way, they want to inordinately increase government spending through their social programs. As should be expected, each party rejects the other’s ideas on how to move forward.
There has to be a way out of this infinite struggle over ideas that doesn’t address the fundamental issue of our budget problem: we are spending more than we collect through taxes! Many from the Republican party have suggested the solution to our problem is in running the government like a business. I see the allure of this proposition, but I believe it makes one major error: the government is not a business. I am not saying that we can’t employ tried and true business techniques to improve efficiency or that we shouldn’t decrease the overall footprint of the government when we have fiscal problems. But the government does not produce consumer goods or services (and in cases where we do, like Amtrak, we shouldn’t). Our mandate is not to build the next great *thing* and compete in the marketplace for consumers; our mandate is to provide a common defense, to make and enforce laws to protect people, to exercise fiscal and monetary policy, to support the States, and to provide a basic standard of living that the people deem acceptable. (Undeniably people will argue about some of these assertions: “should the government control the money supply?”, “should the government provide a basic standard of living?”, etc. I include these things because I believe we should, and most people believe we should, in however limited of a way, do these things. For instance, most Republicans argue against social programs in general, but really nobody wants to end ALL social programs, just constrain the ways in which they operate.)
If we keep these things in mind, we can make changes to our government that make it more business-like. Businesses don’t immediately shutdown (and I don’t believe our government has the option of shutting down) when times get tough. And business don’t usually end the majority of their operations in one fell swoop. Instead business look for ways to eliminate waste, turn to new innovations, and consolidate programs/divisions to decrease their costs. Our government can do exactly this. An article on Politico recently highlighted what most Americans already know: the US government wastes billions in duplication overlap. According to the report, which I have not read (or been able to find on the GAO website), there are 80 separate programs for economic development. Do we need all 80? Could we accomplish the same thing more efficiently (reduce overhead, etc) with one combined program? Hell, even if we were able to narrow it down to ten that would amount to huge savings. Repeat through the entire government.
Of course the problem is more severe than just individual initiatives repeated throughout the government. Whole agencies and departments routinely step on each others’ loosely defined mandates and create a mess of overlapping actors where there needn’t be. One of the best possible examples of this is our security arrangement:
We have the Department of Defense (DOD) which overseas the military forces: including the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and the Coast Guard. For brevity, we’ll have to excuse things like the fact that the Army has aircraft, the Navy has aircraft and ground forces, etc. Next, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) seems to be the primary intelligence agency responsible for gathering the majority of foreign intelligence, but the National Security Agency (NSA) also gathers foreign intelligence, in the form of foreign communications. The NSA is also responsible for protecting US government communications and information systems, and who knows what else they get up to. Officially, the CIA and the NSA aren’t supposed to gather intelligence domestically, but it is publicly available information that both have in the past, and I don’t think it is unreasonable to suggest they may also currently have active programs on American soil. The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) is a part of the Department of Justice (DOJ), and serves as a sort of “national police force” of sorts. They also have an internal intelligence agency responsible for counter-intelligence efforts, but as you can imagine they get into other intelligence operations as well, including doing translation work for other elements of the “intelligence community”. The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), also in the DOJ, augment the FBI’s law enforcement mandate by providing more bureaucracy to the mix. And finally, the new kid on the block, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), was added after 9/11 to improve domestic security and cohesion between the bureaucracies but it seems like the DHS simply absorbed a few existing agencies (like Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)) and created a whole lot of more duplicated bureaucracy.
I’ve added 302 words to this blog post in that “simple” description of the US security apparatus and I am not even close to capturing all of the complexity of the system. If I had time, I could spend days researching all the agencies, joint task-forces, bureaus, etc, that form the entire system and still not be able to enumerate them all (I’m sure it is a finite number though). How does this setup make sense? How can one not believe that we are spending billions too much by having so much bureaucracy to deal with one objective (security)? Security is the single most important thing our government does, I’m certainly not advocating that we skimp on it, but would we really lose anything if we consolidated and shrunk the size of this portion of government?
The answer is that we would not only not lose anything, we would gain an incredible amount of security in the process of making the system more efficient. Rivalry between the CIA and the FBI alone has accounted for cases of documented withholding of vital information; who knows what we’ve missed in having the two administered completely separately (could we have stopped 9/11?). Why can’t we roll all of this into the DOD (I accept that we will need to create a few joint task-forces with the DOJ), and use the combined savings and gain in efficiency to cut the defense budget without cutting any actual capabilities? Furthermore, with these programs repackaged and streamlined under a unified Defense Department, who is to say what innovations we will make in our system?
This concept of consolidation and optimization should be repeated throughout the entire government. I strongly feel that we can do this without losing many of our capabilities as a government – leaving us as Republicans and Democrats to continue to have our debates over the role of government and what social benefits we should provide. Making our government efficient again (or perhaps for the first time), will go a long way towards fixing our deficits and paying off our debts but I do not claim that it will get us all of the way there. But why should we use that as a reason not to make our government work more efficiently?
Almost a week into the protests and riots in Egypt, I would love to give an in-depth analysis about the political upheaval occurring there right now. I must however admit that I simply do not know enough about the state and regional actors to write with substantive fact. I can say though that governments that behave as the Mubarak regime has, excluding parties from elections, violently cracking down on protests, shutting off information services, roughing up domestic and foreign journalists, have some serious human rights inadequacies. I also feel doubt that the primary organization thought to be behind the unrest in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, would govern much differently than Mubarak has and I have the suspicion they would be much less receptive to US interests than the current administration.
My hope for Egypt is that they can peacefully replace the Mubarak regime with a peaceful and fair democracy. It seems that many Egyptians agree with that goal, but with top Muslim Brotherhood leaders not opposed to conflict with Israel or shutting down the Suez Canal, I worry for that this may not be possible. I will undoubtably write more on this issue later this week as more comes to light.
In the intrim, here are a few videos on Egypt to hopefully lighten the mood:
On Tuesday night in his State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama told the American people that the old world economic rules have changed: “In a single generation, revolutions in technology have transformed the way we live, work and do business.” Without a doubt this is true, but President Obama seems to have a different view of the new world than I do. Where the President seeks to warn that we must now compete in a global marketplace for jobs and ideas, I seek to sing its praises. Says Obama, “We need to out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world.” It’s easy to fall into an “America-versus-China” or “America-versus-India” game but the reality of our new global economy is that it isn’t a zero-sum game, at least not between countries.
For centuries, American and Western European ideas and innovations have shaped the world. The incandescent lightbulb, the automobile, the airplane, the computer; the list is vast and nearly unending. Ideas and technologies have spread between countries and jumped ‘across-the-pond’ many times. For instance, the technology behind the US military’s ARPANET crossed the ocean and became the modern Internet in the hands of Tim Berners-Lee, a British citizen working at CERN in Switzerland. New surgeries, new medicines, and approaches spread like wildfire across borders. And innovative ideas aren’t just limited to technology and science; where would literature and philosophy be without the free flow of ideas between nations? Our lives are all enriched by these connections and many people have been made very wealthy by them too.
What we are approaching now in the ’10s is no different, except on a world scale. Surely voices from Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and South America have something to add to the powerhouse we’ve built the last few hundred years. Their absence from the forefront of this grand stage thus far hasn’t been inferiority, but geography, ideology, and in most cases, bad luck. The populous countries of BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) are in the middle of transition to a modern economy, yet they already bring promise of new ideas and further progress for all.
Advocating for the status quo and fighting against the new countries at the ‘adult table’ may seem both warranted and tempting. After all, the traditional American middle class, the blue-collar family, is seemingly disappearing; the manufacturing jobs many of our parents and grandparents held most of their adult lives are being shipped overseas in favor of foreign workers who are willing to accept lower wages. But folks, working behind a drill or physically assembling goods isn’t the American dream! The American dream is a much broader concept; it’s the possibility of prosperity and upward mobility that stems from our guaranteed freedoms. And this dream holds true today: however the job market changes, this dream isn’t going away unless it ceases to exist in the hearts of the people.
Yes, as surely as the world has changed, our country’s economy has changed as well. Our manufacturing sector will no more disappear with the service/skill-based economy then agriculture disappeared when manufacturing became the most important sector. The average person in the US is far more educated than people in, say China, and our greater education enables us to be far more productive at skill-based tasks. Forcing tariffs and other forms of protectionism may immediately hurt our upstart rivals, but in the long term, they hurt us more as we lose “economic surplus”, efficiency, and as our higher skills go to waste.
The reality of a more connected and smaller world is that it increasingly doesn’t make sense to look at a country’s economy as distinct from the rest of the world. Using GDP as a measure of the size of the economy, we force goods to be listed under a single country, ignoring the fact that people from all over the world contribute to the creation of goods. Taking the Forbes example of the production of the iPhone, forcing the iPhone to be listed under one country, China, has incredible consequences to how we view the second largest economy… to the tune of the $1.9 billion that is credited towards China’s GDP. Nevermind that Apple’s “global production line” for the iPhone starts in the United States with the design of the device and creation of the iOS operating system, and then travels all over the world, concluding in China, where the phone is actually assembled. This value is all counted in China’s GDP, even the arguably most of the value of the device should be credited to the United States, where the steps that add the most value to the device happen. The $1.9 billion attributed to China maybe sounds small when we are talking about economies the size of trillions of dollars until you consider that thousands, if not millions, of US-based product-lines are produced in China alone.
Taking this notion of a shared global economy into account, we needn’t be afraid “our jobs” are going to disappear for we still need to design the “iPhones” before somebody else can build them. Our future is not in jeopardy, at least not on this front.
I know I am several years late for a review of “V for Vendetta”, but I only just recently saw the film for the first time so I feel that somewhat helps my cause. In other words, “it’s new to me” so I’m going to publish a review anyway. The film was very irritating to me but really the only reason I feel compelled to write a review of the movie is because it has such a following: every fifth of November people quote the “Remember, Remember” poem and lines from the movie without really understanding the major political issues the film misunderstands or intentionally gets wrong.
I certainly can understand why so many people like this movie; its story is one most people of any political persuasion can understand and sympathize with: a government gone too far. The superficial elements are certainly easy to like, but I’m afraid the movie’s creators got the rest very wrong.
Most seriously, the movie misrepresents the history of Guy Fawkes. The movie opens with Natalie Portman’s character of Evey reciting the traditional cautionary nursery rhyme, “Remember, Remember the fifth of November…” and a brief introduction to the historical figure of Guy Fawkes. Fawkes is portrayed as a hero, and though his motivations are not explicitly shown, the viewers are left to imagine Fawkes wanted to destroy Parliament as some sort of freedom fighter. Indeed, the character of V, who wears a Guy Fawkes mask in almost every scene in the movie due to some sort of facial disfigurement, makes numerous statements about (and apparently fights for) a social contract between the people and their government, freedom of speech and expression, and separation of church and state.
But this is not quite a true representation of Guy Fawkes. Certainly, the Gunpowder Plot he was a part of sought to end the oppression against Catholics in England by King James I of England (and more notably, Queen Elizabeth I before him), but the idea wasn’t to establish some sort of more perfect state, it was to destroy the Protestant line to the throne and install James’ daughter as a nominal monarch so Catholics could control England once more. It is hard to say what would have happened if the Gunpowder Plot had been successful, but my feeling is that the Protestant Tyranny of the Catholics would have just been replaced by Catholic Tyranny of the Protestants. How would that result have been better?
“V for Vendetta” also distorts the notion of the Social Contract. Though Thomas Jefferson borrowed many phrases from earlier thinkers such as John Locke, a line of the Declaration of Independence sums up the idea of the Social Contract:
“That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
V however has his own view of the Social Contract, stating that people shouldn’t be afraid of their governments but rather that governments should be afraid of their people. Perhaps this statement follows from thinkers like Jefferson and Locke, but my position is that nobody should have to be afraid of anybody else. The objective ought to be to form a government that protects the rights of the people, and does the other numerous things that governments do (provide for a common defense or negotiate treaties, among others). Certainly I don’t think Jefferson was saying that political leaders ought to be afraid vigilantes will pull them out of their homes and arrange for them to be shot.
Finally I feel the way the Conservative party of England was portrayed was deliberately misleading. When the entire story is revealed to the viewer, the Conservative party is shown to have gained power by playing off the fears of Islamic terrorists and political instability, like the “former colonies”. I’ll let the Brits make their own decisions about their governance, though it would be a drastic mistake to associate the current Conservative Prime Minister or even notable past Conservative Prime Ministers with the type of reactionary governance shown in the film. The real reason that the Conservative party is shown as the evil here has nothing to do with the Conservatives in Britain. After all, the graphic novel that “V for Vendetta” is based on has a made up party filling that role. No, the reason why the Conservative party is shown as the oppressive party is because this film was created by American directors who just wished to use the word “conservative” to catch people’s attention. The film of course had to be based in Britain for the Guy Fawkes reference to make any sense, but arguably it is more for American viewers.
Of course the film does make good points about tolerance and acceptance for homosexual people, moderate Muslims, and other misunderstood minorities and I agree it would be advisable for all parties to watch how the authoritarian government destroys their rights and their lives. But persistent intolerance for these minority groups in America, Britain, and most of the Western world does not mean that the majority of people want minorities to be rounded up and executed; I believe that most people would never support such round-ups. Conservative parties, like the Republican party in the United States, are currently caught in a very confused political/social situation at the present, especially when it comes to homosexuality. Suggesting that this lack of tolerance would realistically lead to Holocaust style executions seems to be extremely misguided. This idea is however is far more realistic in Africa and the Middle-East where this kind of stuff is already happening.
“V for Vendetta” is definitely an intriguing movie, and I certainly recommend people watch it, but I don’t think its political message is as well-crafted and well-thought out message that it deserves as much attention as it gets every November 5th.
Will Gries is the sole author and editor of Common Sense. Will
was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa and graduated from Linn-Mar High School in Marion, Iowa. He started Common Sense in 2006 after
friends recommended he move his regular Facebook Notes over to a more independent platform. Will is currently a student at the
University of Iowa, majoring in Political Science and Economics, and minoring in Computer Science. In addition to being an occasional
blogger, Will, an independent Republican, has volunteered with several political campaigns. He is also a huge technology geek with a
soft spot for Apple products, Open Source, web development, and programming.
Since the 2008 election, Will has become somewhat disillusioned in the Republican party and the resulting Tea Party movement.
Will believes that both parties could do better in representing the fundamental interests of the American people, and, in addition to
more personal posts, he hopes to continue to use Common Sense to highlight his ideas for the United States and the world.
"We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire...Give us the tools and we will finish the job." - Sir Winston Churchill
