Meet the New Boss / Same as the Old Boss

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I won’t mince words. I think that the Tea Party is, in essence, David Duke’s KKK reborn. It’s anti-intellectual, sexist, xenophobic, and racist. It’s the ugliest side of U.S. culture and politics, and it could only have arisen to such prominence because of profound American paranoia about the decline of white patriarchal culture. All that said, it’s hard to figure out if they are going to have any impact on education. There’s an interesting pair of articles in the Washington Post (here and here) that illustrates the dilemma nicely.

I think that the future of education is very much up in the air, not least because the Obama administration has long embraced a very conservative agenda rooted in a reactionary Cerberusian program: a desire to break the teachers’ unions, to force pedagogy into the narrow box of the standardized test, and to privatize huge swaths of the public education system. If this were simply a matter of the Republicans gaining power, then the old No Child Left coalition would simply keep thing going in the same direction they’ve been going.

The Tea Party, though, is a wild card. To start, at least in theory they are against any federal intervention in the public school system. Will they vote for an expensive program like “Race to the Top“? They are also in favor of cuts in government programs in general, which is likely going to lead to mass lay offs, particularly in education. They want tax cuts, even for the very wealthy, which could lead to calls for more program cuts and more lay offs. It’s a recipe for disaster for conservatives. Republicans have got some thinking to do.

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Union

The Coming Zombie Apocalypse

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The Tea Party people aren’t really Zombies (at least, I don’t think they are) and yesterday’s election, as this Chronicle of Higher Education piece suggests, isn’t apocalyptic, at least in terms of any immediate changes in personnel on key higher education committees. The newly empowered Republicans will likely try to chip away at gains in money for student loans– pushing to give the banks back their share, no doubt- and the Democrats will surely continue pushing for a more tightly regulated proprietary education system, perhaps with a few Republican allies. Or perhaps they will back off a bit.

The real worry, though, is that the Tea Part’s ideology faces an sharp internal contradiction that could lead to either chaos or to the sorts of lay-off s that are happening in Louisiana. On the one hand, there’s this notion that government is too big, and that the budget needs to be cut. On the other hand is high unemployment. On the face of it, it sounds like Reaganomics all over again: somehow, if we help the rich, their wealth will ‘”trickle down” to the rest of us. It didn’t work the first time, and it won’t work now. In fact, just the opposite. The Tea Party blames high taxes but the real problem is low wages.

Next spring the Tea Party will be faced with the current Congress’ dilemma. Where do you cut? Do you go after the health care reforms when repealing them will have little immediate impact on the budget or on employment, which is your main interest? Will they really tell people that their kids won’t be covered by their health insurance after college? If you go after education, you make schools less effective or you lay off teachers or perhaps you make college less affordable. Will those things keep them in office? This might be an apocalypse for the Zombies. I just hope our education system doesn’t suffer too much collateral damage.

Posted in: Economics, Professional

The Tortoise Stirs

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I have said more than once that the higher education distance system is a mix of fast private enterprise rabbits, where I work, and slow public tortoises, where I would like to work one day. I love my job but I miss the job security, among other things. Especially here in Illinois, for example, the public retirement system, in which I am already invested, is much stronger, recalling the good old pre-Reagan days when pension funds meant something. The Illinois constitution has a section that prevents the state from touching already existing pension plans. I doubt that any private school is going to protect my retirement so well.

I love my matching-funds IRA plan becuase it forces me to save, but it can’t match a guaranteed benefits plan that’s constitutionally protected (see section 5). So it’s great to see the ACTA, nemesis of most things humane and reasonable, supporting the California commission’s idea that distance education programs, becuase they don’t need buildings and parking lots and so on, could be a way to increase access and decrease costs. What tends to hold back progress, though, is a rigid free market notion that these programs have to be either budget neutral (possible but not likely) or profitable (not in a million years).

No one asks the interstate highway system to make a profit, but for some reason we expect the postal infrastructure, just as much a public service, to make a profit. In fact, the argument over the profitability of public services, including education, has only served to facilitate privatization. The profit motive, as the modern mercenary-based military shows, is no guarantee of efficiency or effectiveness. The public tortoise won’t have a chance if we force college level distance education into the same private box. We just have to figure out how to stop them from using this to make us work more…

Posted in: Autobiographical, Economics, Professional

E-Textbooks: Half-Measures Save Profits

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There should be some sort of capitalist aphorism that says, “half-measures save profits.” That’s how I feel about my cable company. If they really took advantage of the technology available, I’d be able to create my own cable channel subscription, skipping things like those sports channels, and saving myself a lot of time and money. It’s so simple that it’s hard to see anyone doing it.

It’s be even better if I could change my line-up whenever I wished. If I realized that I didn’t like a channel mid-month I could unsubscribe and not be charged the rest of the month; if I wanted to save money, I could cut down the number of channels temporarily. The same might go for phone service if I had a cell and didn’t want to pay for the land line for a particular month.

“Half-measures save profits,” means the cable companies will use technology but that it will take them years to get to the point where I can take full advantage of the new possibilities. This is exactly what I was thinking about when I read “The End of the Textbook as We Know It.” Universities should be switching to Wiki-based textbooks, not helping textbook companies.

It’s not the end of the textbook, it’s the start of the end of one profit system and the attempt to create an equally profitable alternative before someone realizes we don’t need either. It’s all enormously wasteful and unnecessary. We should just skip this step and instead invest the money in a new non-profit network of shared online textbooks. It’s simple and cheap.

Posted in: Economics, Language, Professional