Fwd: [LiteracyForAll] Attack! Before it's too late.

[Susan Harman <susanharman@igc.org>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: "GERALD BRACEY" <gbracey1@verizon.net>
> Date: Wed Jan 23, 2008  10:36:52 AM US/Pacific
> To: <LiteracyForAll@yahoogroups.com>,	<ARN-state@yahoogroups.com>
> Subject: [LiteracyForAll] Attack! Before it's too late.
> Reply-To: LiteracyForAll@yahoogroups.com
>
> Musings on the latest crisis.
>
> ----------------------------------------
> We Didn’t Do It!
>
> American educators are, by and large, a passive bunch.  Comes the 
> lashing over our alleged failures and we mostly take a “this, too will 
> pass,” or an “I will work harder” attitude (the latter after the horse 
> in Animal Farm and we know what happened to him).  Educators were 
> blamed for letting the Russians get into space first (Eisenhower 
> wanted them to do that), for the urban riots of the 60’s, for the SAT 
> decline (mostly due to changes in the demographics of who was taking 
> the SAT), for letting us become threatened by “a rising tide of 
> mediocrity” and therefore “A Nation at Risk.”  Lately myriad reports 
> have exhorted teachers to do more lest we be felled economically by 
> China or India (enter “Believing the Worst” and “Bracey” into Google 
> to get a chronicle of these events that appeared in Stanford Magazine 
> summer of 2006).
>
> Well, right now we have a chance to blow some reality onto the fog of 
> how education is perceived.  Make a sign that sits above your head 
> strapped comfortably around your chest or waste proclaiming some 
> version of “We Didn’t Make This Mess!”  “This Mess” being the global 
> economic crisis brought on by the subprime mortgage debacle whose full 
> scope even now is not yet known.
>
> So far, no one has figured out how to lay this one on the schools 
> although I’m sure Bush and Spellings have Carl Rove locked in an 
> office to construct some scenario for blame.  (The schools will likely 
> be involved in some way.  On Tuesday, January 22, Bush appeared with 
> Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, and financial guru Charles Schwab 
> to announce the formation of an advisory committee on “financial 
> literacy.”)
>
> In the meantime, when someone at a dinner party says, “You idiot 
> educators have really done it this time,” you have some comebacks:
>
> 1. Schools didn’t produce the cheap credit which financed the housing 
> bubble.  Cheap credit was available because we were borrowing $2 
> billion a day, mostly from China (boy, if they ever cash in their 
> chits…).
>
> 2. Greenspan kept rates low as a matter of policy and denied the 
> existence of the bubble (just some “froth”).
>
> 3. Unchecked Financial “Innovation.”  Shoddy products such as 
> “Collateralized Debt Obligations” and “Structured Investment Vehicles” 
> were packaged by banks and sold on Wall Street, and not by high 
> schoolers trying to raise money for their class trip.
>
> 4. The ratings agencies—Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s, etc.—were asleep 
> at the wheel.  At best.  They might have known all along what was 
> happening but looked the other way or winked in order to maintain good 
> relations with the banks issuing the garbage noted in #3.  Because of 
> this, not only has personal credit tightened, but banks are skittish 
> about lending to each other because they don’t know how much of an 
> institution is just a straw house.
>
> 5. Predatory lending.  American high schoolers might be middling at 
> math, but I bet most of them would have seen the flaw in a dominant 
> sales strategy:  Home values will rise forever!  So it doesn’t matter 
> what the terms of the loan are because you’re sure to get rich from 
> rising equity and prices.  I am not a mortgage maven, but I’m not a 
> novice either, but when one outfit offered me one of these 
> interest-only-option deals, it took some very close reading of the 
> fine print to see that I would be in a negative amortization situation 
> (the principal of my loan would grow over time; I would owe more money 
> than I borrowed) and that the interest rate could jump from 5.5% to 
> 10.5% in a single year.  No thanks.
>
> In the meantime, the military wants to expand by 92,000 troops with an 
> estimated annual cost of $1.2 billion per 10,000.  As of 2005 the 
> Pentagon’s Base Structure Report—the government’s own official 
> count--listed 737 bases around the world not counting those in Kosovo, 
> Israel, Kyrgistan, Qatar, Uzbekistan or Iraq (106 by itself).  Some 
> peace-loving nation, huh?  At the height of their power, the Roman 
> Empire in 117 A. D. had 37 bases, Great Britain in 1898, 36.  And, of 
> course, the Pentagon’s list doesn’t include “black” sites.
>
> So, educators, take the initiative (but don’t be “pro-active,” perhaps 
> the ugliest word in the English language).  Show people what’s 
> happening in Japan and Hong Kong and other nations where high scores 
> allegedly produce prosperity.  You might remind anyone you’re speaking 
> with that in the 1990’s once the Japanese discovered that the 
> Emperor’s palace and grounds were not worth more than the state of 
> California, Japan’s economy tanked, but its kids continued to ace 
> tests.
>
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
>
>
>
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