The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama [75]
In other words, we should be guided by what works.
WHAT MIGHT SUCH a new economic consensus look like? I won’t pretend to have all the answers, and a detailed discussion of U.S. economic policy would fill up several volumes. But I can offer a few examples of where we can break free of our current political stalemate; places where, in the tradition of Hamilton and Lincoln, we can invest in our infrastructure and our people; ways that we can begin to modernize and rebuild the social contract that FDR first stitched together in the middle of the last century.
Let’s start with those investments that can make America more competitive in the global economy: investments in education, science and technology, and energy independence.
Throughout our history, education has been at the heart of a bargain this nation makes with its citizens: If you work hard and take responsibility, you’ll have a chance for a better life. And in a world where knowledge determines value in the job market, where a child in Los Angeles has to compete not just with a child in Boston but also with millions of children in Bangalore and Beijing, too many of America’s schools are not holding up their end of the bargain.
In 2005 I paid a visit to Thornton Township High School, a predominantly black high school in Chicago’s southern suburbs. My staff had worked with teachers there to organize a youth town hall meeting—representatives of each class spent weeks conducting surveys to find out what issues their fellow students were concerned about and then presented the results in a series of questions to me. At the meeting they talked about violence in the neighborhoods and a shortage of computers in their classrooms. But their number one issue was this: Because the school district couldn’t afford to keep teachers for a full school day, Thornton let out every day at 1:30 in the afternoon. With the abbreviated schedule, there was no time for students to take science lab or foreign language classes.
How come we’re getting shortchanged? they asked me. Seems like nobody even expects us to go to college, they said.
They wanted more school.
We’ve become accustomed to such stories, of poor black and Latino children languishing in schools that can’t prepare them for the old industrial economy, much less the information age. But the problems with our educational system aren’t restricted to the inner city. America now has one of the highest high school dropout rates in the industrialized world. By their senior year, American high school students score lower on math and science tests than most of their foreign peers. Half of all teenagers can’t understand basic fractions, half of all nine-year-olds can’t perform basic multiplication or division, and although more American students than ever are taking college entrance exams, only 22 percent are prepared to take college-level classes in English, math, and science.
I don’t believe government alone can turn these statistics around. Parents have the primary responsibility for instilling an ethic of hard work and educational achievement in their children. But parents rightly expect their government, through the public schools, to serve as full partners in the educational process—just as it has for earlier generations of Americans.
Unfortunately, instead of innovation and bold reform of our schools—the reforms that would allow the kids at Thornton to compete for the jobs at Google—what we’ve seen from government for close to two decades has been tinkering around the edges and a tolerance for mediocrity. Partly this is a result