The new economy is awash in contradictions, but few are more troubling than this one: At the very moment that brainpower is more important than ever, education seems more backward than ever. We have a new economy but outdated schools.
Out of this disconnect has emerged a quiet grassroots rebellion aimed at reinventing both the form and the function of American education. Charter schools – publicly funded startup schools that operate mostly free of regulation – have boomed. In 1992, there was one charter school in the United States. Today, there are more than 2,000. The fastest-growing education movement is homeschooling. Today, roughly 1.5 million children learn at home. Just as Internet startups and free agents rattled big business, charter schools and homeschooling are shaking up "big schoolhouse."
I bet we have some school board directors fainting over this one. I wonder when the office memo requesting the removal of all Daniel H. Pink Post It notes will be issued.
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"Traditional" public school education is in the beginnings of its death throes. Those of us who were teaching back in the early '90's saw this coming - those of us who would admit it, anyway.
The facts are clear: This country (and our Commonwealth) cannot sustain its current level of debt, let alone the new pile of debt which will be foist upon the hapless taxpayer in the next few years. The cost of public education, with its teachers unions, opulent buildings (designed more to assuage the tender egos of school directors than contribute to educating our young), and huge pension costs associated with retiring teachers, will contribute to an economic catastrophe that will make the Great Depression look like a party.
The maddening thing is that most political leaders know these things. Even the most leftest of Democratic politicians, such as California governor Jerry Brown and ousted California governor Gray Davis, have recognized that public debt is the nation's and states' single biggest problem, and that public sector unions can no longer have their way; we cannot spend our way into a bright future.
Here in Mt. Lebanon the fact that a large portion of our residents are civil servants has masked the precarious economic situation we are in, due to the fact that these high salaried people have "contributed" a large portion of the $1.3 billion dollars in earned income and profits reported by our residents in calendar year 2011(source: The Municipality's Comprehensive Annual Financial Report for 2011 - $10.38 million in EIT @ a 0.8% rate applied to incomes and net profits). This level of economic activity gives the illusion that Mt. Lebanon is somehow insulated from economic shocks when in actual fact a very high percentage of this income is transfer payments from produces to the civil servant class, and comes from outside Mt. Lebanon. It is this high "paper" income that likely sustains our school board in its belief that the current high school rebuild is easily absorbed by the community.
Charter schools - where the money is attached to the child and not a bureaucracy - and home schools detach a large portion of the public debt from needless buildings and programs. Defined contribution plans bring some semblance of reality to pensions paid to charter school teachers.
The Federal Reserve is likely to dump another trillion dollars or more into the economy soon. This will buoy the stock market - briefly - and likely give the polity "hope." But it's nothing but a fix for a junkie. The $16 trillion dollar (and growing) national debt, and the now $120 trillion dollar unfunded (and unfundable) entitlement obligations, are the dirtiest tricks that one generation has every played on another, and Mt. Lebanon will not escape a national financial meltdown.
God help the kids coming up - they'll need it!
Since my last post the Federal Reserve did indeed buy a new round of government bonds, thus dumping more paper fiat money into the economy. As predicted, the stock market responded with euphoria to this "Quantitative Easing" - a response based more on emotion than logic. (A better indicator of the health of the economy is the price of gold.)
On the heels of this action comes news from the Labor Department that the Consumer Price Index increased 0.6 percent last month, after being flat in July. This equates to an annual rate of inflation of 7.2%. Although previous months had seen low monthly rates of inflation, if the CPI were calculated as it once had been - using a full basket of consumer products instead of cherry-picking those things that will return a more favorable result - the real rate of inflation would be seen running around 12% to 13% per year.
If all of this is not enough to get your attention, in Pennsylvania spending is outpacing revenues by $28 billion dollars, with a per capita debt load of over $10,000. We have nearly half a million unemployed people in the Commonwealth, and just south of 2 million people on food stamps.
Given all of this information, and with the year 2014 being the "crunch year" in my opinion, I am disappointed in the attitudes of some members of our commission and school board, who seem to think that none of this stuff matters, and seem to have confused the citizens of Mt. Lebanon with the Treasury Department. By the time those people learn some basic economics it will be too late for the hapless local taxpayer.
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