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Make the school day longer, and then cut access to a free educational opportunity?
(We'll return to the world of movies later this week.)
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel caused a furor recently by pressing legislation to lengthen the school day in Chicago Public Schools. A typical school day had been from 9:00am-2:45pm, or 5 hours and 45 minutes. Emanuel sought to add about 90 minutes of additional instruction time per day.
Emanuel's primary concern, in an era when a well-trained workforce is crucial to a vastly changing job market, was that children would receive the additional instruction needed to prepare them for advanced study, or to qualify them for positions as skilled workers.
Then, I heard something that made me pause:
Today, Emanuel's first annual budget for the city was unveiled. One of the many measures, proposed to close a multi-million-dollar deficit, was to shorten the hours at many Public Libraries.
That sounded to me like a mixed message.
Is Emanuel paying lip service to increased instruction and competitive education? Why keep kids in school longer and then restrict citizens' access to materials that may help them learn and improve their lives?
As reported in the Tribune, libraries will be closed during their "least-used" hours. But why not encourage heavier usage? Why not turn the libraries into centers of workforce development and community education? It makes no sense to decrease access to a center of free inquiry and self-improvement and education.
Libraries should not be relegated to the dustbin of history. There are a lot of materials, archived preserved, that are still useful, especially reference materials, that can still be used, to maintain a depth of knowledge, and a more complete worldview.
I think it is dangerous to rely on the Intenet for all of one's information and instruction. It's as absurd to think that the Internet is a reliable and objective source of all reference material, history, culture, and news, as it was assumed at one time that Television was all one needed for one's information and education.
Search engines are sponsored; search results as a result can be filtered. Material on the internet is unfettered, much of it lacking the "antiquated" principles of accuracy and objectivity. It's a wild frontier in many ways.
All of this feeds into my reaction to a surprising and disturbing story I have heard a lot recently, summarized well in the Huffington Post:
While 14 million people in the US are looking for work, 52 percent of U.S. employers have difficulty filling critical positions within their organizations -- up from 14 percent in 2010.
Many of the manufacturing jobs going unfilled require skills and knowledge in math and sciences. In 1980 these disciplines accounted for 11.1 percent of college graduates. In 2009, it fell to 8.9 percent.
Older workers are retiring, and younger workers have either not applied to fill these vacancies, or else lack the proper background and training. Many vocational training programs have been cut, or else are out of date.
We need to reinforce all opportunities to educate its citizens and potential workers, within the schools and within the community. Make a case for extended schooldays (and, maybe, consider compensating teachers proportionately). Also, don't close a community center of free inquiry and exploration--the Public Library--but find ways to make it more active in workforce training.
American culture has to commit wholeheartedly to the idea of lifelong education, in all of its forms...and that means, not restricting access to educational materials, just to close a budget deficit.
Read the article to get an idea of the gravity of the situation in which thousands of jobs are going unfilled in this time of alarming long-term unemployment (which you can find on this link).
Many Americans, concerned that essential programs will be cut to reduce the deficit, reasonably expect that America's wealthiest citizens and corporations be taxed at a higher rate, and contribute a more equitable share to the common good of the country. Under such extraordinary economic circumstances as we see today, tax breaks that were extended to the wealthy, under former President George W. Bush, should be rescinded.
The monetary amounts raised by this requirement would help the country's financial health, and would hardly be felt as a dent in the pocketbooks of these enormously wealthy citizens and corporations
Yet, in an effort to block this reasonable requirement, many political figures, most of them among the country's wealthiest citizens, fight tooth and nail against this idea, stating that it is bad policy in a weak economy to tax "job creators".
The term "job creators" is rarely debated or questioned, neither in Congress nor in the White House. But it is such a bald-faced misdirection that it cries out for immediate scrutiny from intelligent journalists, concerned citizens, and political leaders. The protection given "job creators" should be a leading topic on the news, covered relentlessly. So-called "job creators" should be made to justify the misleading title they seem to embrace. I wondered why this concept was rarely challenged over the airwaves.
Based on a large number of writers in the blogosphere addressing this topic, I am not alone, which was a comfort, albeit a small one.
The lack of calling-out of these "job creators", who are getting rich on the backs of a dwindling workforce, is especially irksome in light of the recent bleak U.S. employment news, and the discouraging haggle over Mr. Obama's upcoming speech to address the jobs crisis (as though either the Republican presidential debate, or the season premiere of the National Football League, were the ONLY two nights available to discuss a topic that should have been done two years ago--or whether these two competing events should have had any bearing on this address in the first place).
By the way, Mr. Obama acquiesced to the Republicans and their Presidential debate, and will now compete with a season-opener football game. Bad judgement on the President's part; unnerving, almost laughable disrespect from the Republicans. All political theater, on every side. No matter. My instinct suggests that a majority of football fans would not have tuned in to the speech, nor supported Obama's plan, no matter when the speech was scheduled to be given.
Lila Shapiro's Huffington Post article on Friday, September 2, nicely summarized the alarming news that continues to bode ill for our economic recovery. Americans, meanwhile, remain either too scared or too complacent to take to the streets, preferring instead to retreat to their football games, or to their paternalistic Republican despots (who they naively think represent them), or to the two or three jobs (if they can find work at all) they must work to make ends meet:
The number of those out of a job for six months or more remained above 6.0 million in August and accounted for 42.9 percent of the unemployed. A total of 2.04 million were out of work for 99 weeks -- the limit for jobless benefits in some states -- or longer, a slight rise from 2.01 million last month, according to BLS figures not in the report.
"Their horizon for a brighter day is moving away from them," said Carl E. Van Horn, a labor economist at Rutgers University and co-author of a recent report focusing on the long-term unemployed. "Their optimism has been crushed by reality: They are still not working, or if they are working they're making a lot less money. You're either devastated or you're hurting, that's the range."
Meanwhile, corporate profits remain at pre-recession levels of strength. Many experts say that robust corporate profits alongside stagnant wages and declining workweeks points to a grim future for America's workforce.
"Many companies have simply come to the conclusion that labor is just too expensive," said Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist at The Economic Outlook Group. "We are moving increasingly into a labor-less society."
Perhaps there should be a requirement that tax breaks be extended to those who can demonstrate that they have created new American jobs each year, for Americans on American soil, whether they be a wealthy individuals, corporations, or small entrepreneurs who nevertheless have successfully grown to the need to hire workers. Make it a simple process to account for added jobs; make loopholes difficult to create, or easy to dispense with.
Every one else on the highest end of society would have to ante up.
