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by Stephen Stollmack, Ph.D.

My life now seems to be on Fast-Track – so much more to learn about what’s going on in the world each day and more and more suspicion that the government has been hiding important things from us for years. Now that I am back to living alone, no longer having the responsibility of supporting a family, I am shocked at what I see. My sense of shame — for failing to follow and speak out against this trend towards less transparency and rampant secrecy – is what has motivated me to write this article.

President Obama’s 2008 primary fight against Hillary coincided with my coming out of the fog of married life and 2-3 years of drug abuse that dulled the pain and disappointment of separation and divorce. I began to recover my sense of responsibility to myself and the world by reading President Obama’s books and trying to figure out who this man was, while I struggled to understand his oppressive and inhuman education ‘reform’ policies with their emphasis on accountability, standardization and privatization. I read about and watched him in public appearances with his family and concluded that, while he seemed exceptionally smart and competent, he was also a well-meaning person.

I continued to support him, in the face of accusations that he was continuing his predecessor’s policies and wars. I have been profoundly disappointed about that and I am also disturbed at his failure to keep his promise to maintain a ‘transparent’ administration (among other things). I can see how he could have underestimated how difficult this would be given the fact that the functionality of all bureaucracies rests on the efficiency with which they withhold information from the public as well as from lower levels of management. Having worked for and contractually consulted to a number of federal agencies for 30-years, I knew first hand that information — what each bureaucrat knows about the ‘higher-up’s marching orders — determines his/her ability to survive and grow in his/her job.

I watched the President sign the TPA — a law that will assure passage of TPP, a trade agreement that will have profound and irreversible impacts on today’s and future generations with barely a squeak from the “free press.”

So, does TPA becoming law essentially mean TPP is a done deal? This internet article suggests not. It makes the point that Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) does not prevent Congress from debating TPP provisions but it limits such debates and public comments to within 90-days of seeing it for the first time. At or before the 90-day limit, Congress MUST give the bill a straight up-or-down vote.

TPA was first codified into law by the Trade Act of 1974 (P.L. 93-618) to give the president more leeway to conduct negotiations, while assuring other participants that their negotiations could be to no avail if the US Congress decides to not ratify the agreement.

The main objections to TPA (and fears about TPP) have stemmed from the fact that past trade agreements, which have come with the same promises of more jobs for Americans, have, in fact, devastated our job market. NAFTA, for example, had a double-barreled impact which, 20 plus years after its implementation, is continuing to depress our job market as well as the prevailing wages of workers in South and Central American countries.

First, NAFTA facilitated highly financed USA corporations to move their production operations into these countries. Backed by hedge-fund investments, these companies were able to buy up or otherwise ‘bankrupt’ local operators while hiring their workers at reduced wages. Further, having computerized and robotized operations, these corporations were able to reduce their need for manual laborers, causing ever increasing rates of unemployment in these countries. Resulting economically depressed communities (in these countries) forced people to attempt to cross borders into the USA – in search of employment – regardless of the likelihood of arrest and indefinite incarceration. Many of those who managed to avoid border guards were then hired, at below minimum wages, by companies willing to accept the risks of hiring ‘illegals’. This, in turn, reduced the demand for ‘legal’ workers at higher wages and, hence, the resolve for increasing the USA minimum wage.

So, with this in mind, let’s review what President Obama had to say in defense of TPA (FastTrack)? To his credit, President Obama’s remarks — at the TPA signing ceremony — did not ignore the unrealized promises of NAFTA and other recent trade agreements. He said:

I think when you look at the numbers, (the argument) that global competition has contributed to some of that wage stagnation … although appealing … (is) actually an incorrect argument (in) that over time, growth, investment, exports all have increased the capacity for working families to improve their economic standing. But I say it’s a half-truth because there’s no doubt that some manufacturing moved offshore in the wake of China entering the WTO and as a consequence of NAFTA (but) more of those jobs were lost because of automation and capital investment.

I say: ‘What?’ But then, I think, ‘he must surely have access to government studies that back him up.’ So, I turned to the USDOL and its Bureau of Labor statistics (BLS). According to the BLS.gov site, their mission, in addition to being “the collectors, keepers and reporters of data from the USA job market”, is “to collect, analyze, and disseminate essential economic information to support public and private decision-making. So, I searched through BLS products and reports to see what it had to say about the causes of job losses and the failure of real wages to rise along with steady increased productivity gains from 1970 to the present time? Would you believe, the answer to that question is: ‘next-to-nothing’?

This can be verified by Googling phrases like BLS “causes for job losses”. Search results indicate that the USDOL/BLS has not focused on producing analyses of the different causes of jobs lost since 1991 or for any period since 1970, when the number of jobs and the possibilities for upward mobility — to higher ‘real-income’ jobs – began to disappear. There are some exceptions such as the BLS study of the IT job market, which, though qualifying as a ‘scientific’ study, did not receive substantial distribution (perhaps attributable to lack of interest coming from the press).[1]

So, what does this lack of overlap or concurrence between President Obama’s ‘beliefs’ and USDOL’s research (or lack of research) amount to? Is it an oversight? That is, did President Obama merely forget to tell USDOL about the research it should be doing and the conclusions such research should be reaching or has it failed to report to him that it has actually not been doing any research on the subject? Is President Obama being thwarted — in his attempts to maintain a high level of ‘transparency’ – by an agency, the USDOL that has been operating with a set of blinders — from one Administration to the next — towards any research on job-loss/wage-stagnation or is his statement yet another indication of an agenda he chooses not to share with the public? [2]

To answer these questions, I fell back on some research I had done on Obama’s use of discretionary funds (and new legislation) to support the Education Reform, Job Training and Workforce Development part of his flagship domestic program:

  • Education Reform — Common Core Standards, incessant standardized testing pointed towards discouraging creative thinking, and privatization associated with expansion of charter schools and the use of vouchers orchestrated by the US Department of Education; and
  • Job-Training, Qualifications Tracking and Matching of Federal Training Programs with and within States — systems to track children from pre-school through eventual employment; State Longitudinal Tracking Systems (SLDS) and the Administration’s “Ready to Work: Job-Driven Training and American Opportunity” program.

It would be difficult to deny the need for these programs to improve the development of job-skills and the efficiency with which potential employers are connecting with graduates with the requisite skills to fill their job openings, if that is the way you view the solutions needed to improve the lives of our children, whom the government seems to view as having been born mainly to fulfill job-openings.

Many educators and parents believe otherwise: that schools should serve other developmental needs of children as well as or even more than preparing them for yet to be developed jobs. But, putting aside this huge issue about the relative merits of NCLB and RttT (the Administration’s education reform program), let’s consider the role, both active and passive, that the USDOL Department of Labor Statistics (and the US Department of Education) played in seeking of public support for these hugely important initiatives (so we can compare such efforts with what BLS did to analyze the reasons for job losses over the past 30 to 50-years and, thus, shed some light on the need for TPP).

First, the Department of Education and President Obama both trumpeted flawed arguments (see below) that the PISA international tests showed that, out of 34 OECD countries, USA students ranked 27th in Math, 20th in Science and 17th in reading. These rankings were used to substantiate cries from the private sector (and the US Department of Education, and the President, himself) that our Public Schools were failing our nation. It has nonetheless been shown by several sources that these ‘low’ scores are more an artifact of the percentage of our nation’s school-age children who are from poverty-ridden families than an indication of the quality of teachers struggling to educate them. For example, a December 5, 2013 report by Diane Ravitch[3], cited that “25% (of USA students taking the tests) were considered poor by OECD standards” to be compared with “5% of Finland’s students, by (the same) OECD standards”.

Digging deeper, let’s look at the role USDOL and BLS played (by its silence) during the first few years of Obama’s education reform initiative, when reform advocates – like Michelle Rhee, Achieve Inc. (the company that was the prime mover in creating the Common Core), prominent members of the Business Roundtable and large newspapers like the Cleveland Plain Dealer — made outlandish claims that 3.4 million jobs were being lost every month because our high school graduates did not have the skills needed by American Companies (what they called “skills mismatch”). Since the USA workforce stood at approximately 143 million around 2009, this attrition rate implied that all jobs would have already been lost by 2 or 3-years ago — an incredibly outlandish assumption that should have been obvious to anyone working with labor statistics.

As familiar as BLS analysts are with their data, they must have immediately understood that those bandying about the 3.4 million jobs-lost per month were obviously misinterpreting the statistical reports they were putting out. It had to be clear to many BLS analysts as well as to users of their data that this number — that education reform enthusiasts took to represent jobs lost due to ‘skills mismatch’ — actually represented the total number of jobs waiting to be filled at the end of the particular reporting-month (including jobs waiting to be filled for 1-day, 2-days, 3-days, etc., up to those waiting 1-month or more) and not the number of jobs forever lost.[4]

This misrepresentation of the facts, which began in 2009, is still going on — as recently as 3-4 months ago, Michelle Rhee cited this phantom ‘skills-mismatch phenomena (attributable to the poor quality of teachers in America) — unchallenged by either Chris Hayes or Melissa Harris Perry, on their MSNBC shows – as being a primary factor causing job losses in the country.

While all this misinformation was being bandied about, USDOL/BLS was not completely inactive. They actually monitored industry-based surveys that it should have done itself to guarantee impartiality. The most recent significant survey report — titled “Are They Really Ready To Work?” — was fielded by The Conference Board, Corporate Voices for Working Families, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, and the Society for Human Resource Management and funded by a group of irrefutably ‘un-biased’ organizations including the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Dell Inc., the Ford Foundation, Microsoft, Pearson Education, Philip Morris USA Youth Smoking Prevention, SAP (the world’s leading provider of business software), and State Farm.[5] As biased as this group is, they chose not to make the stretch to blame the failure of HS graduates to find jobs on a ‘skills mismatch’ concept.

This phony “skills mismatch” theory was used to justify the Administration’s insistence that low-performing teachers were causing high school students to graduate without the skills needed to get a job and that we needed teacher-accountability measures that only scores from standardized tests — manipulated by what is known as the ‘Value Added Methodology’ (VAM) — could provide. Further, both USDOL, the POTUS and the US Department of Education have continued to support the VAM methodology (roundly rejected as invalid by members of the American Statistical Society)[6] to process high-stakes testing scores into measures of Teacher accountability. All this testing along with the visible threats to their teacher’s job-security depending on performance of their students has harmed children’s morale and interest in learning while the Common Core’s requirement that they all use the same pre-scripted lessons has devastated teacher morale.

The attack on teachers has been accompanied by a push to privatize public schools and replace them with privately-run charter schools and vouchers that can be used by families to send their children to private/parochial schools existing in and around their residential areas.

As further proof that, without public knowledge, much less its consent, President Obama is leading the charge to privatize all public services, consider TISA, the Trade in Services Agreement. According to Wikipedia, [7] TISA “is a proposed international trade treaty between 24 Parties, including the European Union and the United States. The process of forming the agreement “was an initiative of the United States”.[8] As it stands now, the aim of the proposed agreement is to privatize (services that people need to survive) worldwide or rather among those countries who are part of the agreement. Such services cover “about 70% of the global services economy. …The Public Services International (PSI) organization described TISA as

a treaty that … would essentially change the regulation of many public and privatized or commercial services from serving the public interest to serving the profit interests of private, foreign corporations. [9]

Dr. Patricia Ranald, a research associate at the University of Sydney, said:

Amendments from the US are seeking to end publicly provided services (and) to allow the (redesign and) conversion to the Private Sector of all Public Services (including Health, Child Protective Services, Prisons, Education, etc.).

This is huge. It could convert public schools, healthcare clinics, and other public services — created to serve the families in the communities in which they are located – into privately run businesses.

Regarding the secrecy of the draft, prominent free trade critic Professor Jane Kelsey, Faculty of Law, University of Aukland, commented that the:

secrecy of negotiating documents exceeds even the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) and runs counter to moves in the WTO towards greater openness.

So, in conclusion, when President Obama says that “exports (associated with NAFTA and other trade agreements) all have increased the capacity for working families to improve their economic standing”, I am definitely watching for his tongue moving inside his cheek.

Footnotes:

[1]http://www.docstoc.com/docs/41518823/IMPACT_OF_OFFSHORE_OUTSOURCING_OF_IT_SERVICES_ON_THE_US_ECONOMYpdf.

[2] For example see http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20150605/PC1002/150609641/1022/obama-x2019-s-transparency-failure or http://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/diaz/article/Obama-failing-to-run-most-transparent-6222936.php or http://www.nationalreview.com/article/419500/obama-administrations-newly-political-approach-foias-eliana-johnson

[3] http://dianeravitch.net/2013/12/05/daniel-wydo-disaggregates-pisa-scores-by-income/

[4] Most jobs take at least a month to be filled — even when viable candidates are sitting in the office’s waiting room – because the ‘time-to-be-filled’ includes time to revise and post the opening, time for candidates to find and respond to the opening, time to review candidates’ qualifications and choose the ‘best’ candidate, time to communicate an offer and receive an acceptance and time for successful candidates to inform current employers and arrange to relocate (if necessary).

[5] http://www.p21.org/storage/documents/FINAL_REPORT_PDF09-29-06.pdf

[6] https://www.amstat.org/policy/pdfs/ASA_VAM_Statement.pdf, http://dianeravitch.net/2014/04/12/breaking-news-american-statistical-association-issues-caution-on-use-of-vam/, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/04/13/statisticians-slam-popular-teacher-evaluation-method/, and http://vamboozled.com/american-statistical-association-asa-position-statement-on-vams/

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_in_Services_Agreement#Origin

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_in_Services_Agreement#Origin

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_in_Services_Agreement#Origin

Author

Anthony Cody

Anthony Cody worked in the high poverty schools of Oakland, California, for 24 years, 18 of them as a middle school science teacher. He was one of the organizers of the Save Our Schools March in Washington, DC in 2011 and he is a founding member of The Network for Public Education. A graduate of UC Berkeley and San Jose State University, he now lives in Mendocino County, California.

Comments

  1. howardat58    

    “while the Common Core’s requirement that they all use the same pre-scripted lessons has devastated teacher morale.”
    This is a mis-reading of the situation. It is true that many areas have developed their own ways of implementing the Common Core, which often include detailed lesson plans, but this is not a Common Core requirement.

    Otherwise it’s 1984 31 years late.

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