The American Dream Is Leaving America

A column in the New York Times addresses a theme I have hit on before: "Old Europe" as the far right derisively call it has more upward social mobility than America and now is poised to have a higher percentage of colleges graduates than America.  One of the favorite targets of today's GOP when it comes to budget cuts is public education followed, of course, by cuts to the social safety net.  Why the antipathy towards education?  I would argue greed/selfishness among the GOP base that pushes adherents to not give a damn about others - despite the professions of respect for Christian values - and the Christofascist/Tea party's embrace of ignorance and aversion to any science and modern knowledge that challenges their increasing indefensible religious beliefs.  Then too, there is the way public education is funded in America: real estate taxes which put poor neighborhoods behind the eight ball even those these neighborhoods need education more than any where.  Here are column highlights:

THE best escalator to opportunity in America is education. But a new study underscores that the escalator is broken.

We expect each generation to do better, but, currently, more young American men have less education (29 percent) than their parents than have more education (20 percent).

Among young Americans whose parents didn’t graduate from high school, only 5 percent make it through college themselves. In other rich countries, the figure is 23 percent.

The United States is devoting billions of dollars to compete with Russia militarily, but maybe we should try to compete educationally. Russia now has the largest percentage of adults with a university education of any industrialized country — a position once held by the United States, although we’re plunging in that roster.

A basic element of the American dream is equal access to education as the lubricant of social and economic mobility. But the American dream seems to have emigrated because many countries do better than the United States in educational mobility, according to the O.E.C.D. study.

As recently as 2000, the United States still ranked second in the share of the population with a college degree. Now we have dropped to fifth. Among 25-to-34-year-olds — a glimpse of how we will rank in the future — we rank 12th, while once-impoverished South Korea tops the list.

A new Pew survey finds that Americans consider the greatest threat to our country to be the growing gap between the rich and poor. Yet we have constructed an education system, dependent on local property taxes, that provides great schools for the rich kids in the suburbs who need the least help, and broken, dangerous schools for inner-city children who desperately need a helping hand. Too often, America’s education system amplifies not opportunity but inequality.

[E]galitarian education used to be America’s strong suit. European countries excelled at first-rate education for the elites, but the United States led the way in mass education.

In effect, the United States has become 19th-century Britain: We provide superb education for elites, but we falter at mass education.

In particular, we fail at early education. Across the O.E.C.D., an average of 70 percent of 3-year-olds are enrolled in education programs. In the United States, it’s 38 percent.

In some quarters, there’s a perception that American teachers are lazy. But the O.E.C.D. report indicates that American teachers work far longer hours than their counterparts abroad. Yet American teachers earn 68 percent as much as the average American college-educated worker, while the O.E.C.D. average is 88 percent.

All of this is fine with the GOP which is striving hard to recreate the Gilded Age and its shocking wealth disparities.