Posted on 03/09/2004 6:12:20 PM PST by LowCountryJoe
The national panic over outsourcing is driving US lawmakers to come up with new forms of protectionism. This is a shame, both for those of us who see some value in outsourcing and for those who disapprove of it. For the protectionist, panic obscures an important American reality: that outsourcing was encouraged in the first place by too much protectionism in a specific US industry: education.
We are not speaking of America's boarding schools or MBA programmes, whose waiting lists include hopefuls from Düsseldorf and Seoul. The problem lies with workaday publicly funded grammar and secondary schools, especially in cities. These are the factories that produce the national workforce. Yet, for the past quarter-century, they have had little competition and have enjoyed a lack of scrutiny that would make Parmalat blush.
The result has been predictable. Schools have blithely accepted increasing inputs - namely, funding - even as the quality of their output has decreased, to the point where students cannot handle Excel spreadsheets, or learn to, and cannot locate Indonesia, or even adopt a polite telephone manner.
Most of the time, the education sector has disguised its failings with a trick so dirty other sectors would not even try it: the open doctoring of industry standards - in this case, the measures used to assess the quality of US schooling. But the truth occasionally seeps out. In 2000, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development produced a study by its Programme for International Student Assessment. The study showed that US high-school students did not read as well as their peers in 14 other developed nations, despite the fact that the US spent more than most OECD nations educating each child. Many of these US high-school pupils go on to college, where their skills improve less than you might expect. All this helps explain why an articulate Indian gets work before a 21-year-old from Toledo, Ohio.
Of course, most Americans do not consider the education industry to be protected, or even an industry. They think about schools with the softer part of their brain that deals with home, pride and community. Still, applying a cold trade analysis to schools goes a long way towards explaining those PISA results.
The first protectionist feature of the US education business is the most obvious: public schools are a monopoly. Over the past decade, isolated voucher experiments have taken place, giving families a chance to select schools. But most families who want education for their tax dollars still have to send their children to assigned schools, or move.
Unions - another feature typical of protectionism - are one reason for the delay in expanding choice. OUS school unions are large - the National Education Association, the biggest, has 2.7m members. They funnel millions to politicians, who in turn sustain the public schools' monopoly by failing to pass reforms to open the market. These unions have never really faced what might be called an Arthur Scargill moment - the sort of threat to their existence faced by Britain's miners' union and their leader 20 years ago. They therefore always manage to convince themselves, and often others, that their work is fine. Germany's poor showing in the PISA study was such a national scandal that the phrase "PISA-Schock" entered the language. But in the US the low American score earned barely a mention.
We also find in US schools a third trait common to protected industries: management that seems to have forgotten its original mandate. Until the 1960s, schools were mostly about producing students who could read to a certain level, get as far as trigonometry in maths if possible, and recount the battle between the Merrimack and the Monitor, two civil war ironclads. In the 1960s, however, educators, courts and lawmakers turned inwards. They made schools into engines of social change: elementary schools became the nation's most important vehicle for racial desegregation.
All these changes came in the name of a good cause, civil rights. But the goal of strong outcomes was lost. The tradition of rigour moved out of the classroom and into the gym. And the promotion of pupils for social rather than academic reasons became habitual everywhere. In US suburbs and towns today, schools are better than in big cities - "pretty good" is the usual description. But even "pretty good" is no longer enough to ensure competitiveness - at least not at the price US workers now demand.
Given this context, you can see why the US education secretary went feral in February and labelled a teachers' union a "terrorist organisation", and why Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, has taken to lecturing crowds about schools. After all, domestic reforms that educators have complained about lately - President George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind programme, for example - are as nothing compared with the challenge presented by globalisation.
Not that the US will necessarily fail to confront that challenge. One of the wonderful and astounding things about America is the way sheer innovative power has always made up for lack of formal learning. This can be the case again. Besides, all efforts at protectionism collapse sooner or later. Perhaps outsourcing will accelerate the collapse of school protectionism, forcing reforms that generate stronger workers. If so, the more outsourcing, the better.
Sound's like the outsourcers are in the panic.
Worked in the past: but its a bit dicey to rely on high school dropouts and guys who fail freshman science courses to come up with the next whizbang microprocessor design.
Sound's like the outsourcers are in the panic.
Huh? Hello...are you there? I thought that she was writing that U.S. government school monopoly and the collectivist educators, soft curriculum, and no accountability are causing the future labor pool participants to not be as competitive as they once were.
Sound's like the outsourcers are in the panic.
Oh...okay...I see what you did now. You read the title but didn't even read the article. You the had a violent knee jerk reaction that was so severe that it caused your foot to jam right into your soup-cooler, basically banging out out message with a pinger to one of your fellow FReepers whom you wanted to drag into this thread. Will Dennis make the same mistake? Probably not.
Dennis, you and I have argued before and I know that your reasonable. Would you please square your "barnacle" away?
What in the wide, wide world of sports is going on around here? Is nobody paying attention when they read? Maybe it's me...I'm sober but maybe I'm out of it or something. If it is me my apologies go out to anyone whom I've criticized.
Okay. Let me get this straight. She says that by not outsourcing education we have limited the education of the nation's children? Should we send our children to other nations to be educated? This article is a puerile attempt to draw a parallel between the outsourcing of jobs and the author's notion of not protecting our education system. Only a rabid economist could even come up with this idiotic idea. And these people wonder why our eyes glass over when they speak about economic theories.
The premise of this article is linkage of the current outsourcing debate (which mostly involves service jobs and differential wages) with "education."
I see no linkage at all, rather a rhetorical deflection to link concerns about the education system to outsourcing.
Outsourcing has nothing to do with our education system. It has to do with differential wages, and externalized costs of training (externalized to the foreign country wheretofor the outsourcer paid no taxes).
It's clear to me this writer has nothing to say but shibboleths and diversions. A reasonable debate can be made about free flow of capital, but such isn't in vogue today among the free traders. Hence, diversions.
And I don't mind dragging other people into threads. :)
Oh no? I think that that is somewhat naive. But let's assume that you're right. What about the attitudes of some? Could lack of drive from some Americans and the drive of hungry foreigners be the cause of outsourcing? Would you like to see a case in point [post#51] from a fellow FReeper?
I remember 30 years ago when I was just entering the workforce. We were all told that new technologies and better education for everyone would make our live easier almost to the point that we would be able to work less and be wealthier. What happened?
Americans are putting more hours into their work week than ever before - couple that with the fact that most families have both parents working - we are working harder than ever before. Where does all the profit go? It is no longer passed on to the employee. It goes right into the pockets of the officers of the company. Now, you might say that they deserve whatever they can get. I agree. Just think how much better off the entire economy would be if that money was distributed among the employees as wage increases. I am not for the redistribution of wealth. I am for the equitable growth of wages commensurate with the increased productivity and profit that any company experiences. It is commonly held that Americans are the most productive people in the world. What happens when a corporation shows large profits. Do they give raises to the people that made those profits possible. Hell no, just the opposite. They may lay-off some to keep the profits high or they say they don't need as many people to maintain productivity. Do they ever lay-off the management? NO they get bonuses.
Then people like you wonder why there is mass apathy. Where I work they are taking things away from us left and right and the guys who produce now couldn't care less if they produce the numbers anymore. It's sad. We used to have a good company till they started cutting back in the name of profit. I understand the company should make money. However, they were boosting profit numbers simply by cutting the size of the labor pool. Not by doing things more profitably. There is zero maintenance of the machinery and no investment into new stuff. From the vendors that come in we hear the same story all around the nation. American companies don't want to spend money to make money. The expect the same high profit from old antiquated equipment and less employees.
Blaming the education system (which is highly flawed) for the current outsourcing trend is absolutely ludicrous. And, blaming workers for the ineptitude and greed of management is disingenuous at best.
Thirty years ago, the education we received in High school was the equivalent of a college education today. That is how far education has fallen. It certainly can take its place as ONE of the causes of oursourcing.
But consider the fact that workers in India do roughly one fifth of the work per hour that Americans do and you will see that the so called greedy corporations must make a very calculated decision before moving work offshore. It is not always best for the corporation and where it fails, the corporation will reverse itself and the management who are responsible for the mistake will find their careers in the toilet.
You and I are witnessing capitalism at its best. It is looking for the best way to make a proffit but at the same time corporations know that their investment in human capital is more important than their investment in machines and foreign produce. You need to let this thing go for a while before drawing conclusions about what is going on.
Where outsourcing is successful, like simple software jobs going to India, it will stay. But for years Americans have passed on the harder math courses that would support a computer software career. Software specialists who can make complex communication systems work, or missiles fly are not losing their jobs. Thirty years ago, HP was hiring history majors and turning them into programmers, but the work was repetative and tedious, and could also be done in a foreign place where english was the spoken languane.
In manufacturing, like making complex hardware in Mexico, corporations have already pulled jobs back, because complex hardware that does not work is hardly worth it, even if it were free. The problem for Americans is to have the education and flexibility to react to change. Since our education system has failed a generation so badly, we can expect that a generation will have trouble in the changing job market.
What!? Then ever before, you're kidding right?
I remember 30 years ago when I was just entering the workforce. We were all told that new technologies and better education for everyone would make our live easier almost to the point that we would be able to work less and be wealthier. What happened?
I don't know and quit asking me. As I am sure that you are busy at work right now you're not really shooting the s--t with someone whom you've never met on an Internet forum. Yep, I with you. I think that we should go back 30 years and when times were easier.
Where does all the profit go? It is no longer passed on to the employee.
I know what you mean...hold on a sec will you...okay I'm back. Damn if the S&P isn't down 2 points right now; my investments have been taking it on the chin for the last two weeks - afraid of Kerry I guess. Anyway you were discussing the plight of the workers. Yeah I've got to agree with you on this point too. I mean Krugman is always writing about the compensation of CEO being 50 times more than the average worker than what it was back 30 years ago. I'm starting to come around to your way of thinking. I know it's off topic but don't you hate it when you see people who are obviously poor yakking on their cell phones. It bugs me to no end.
Then people like you wonder why there is mass apathy. Where I work they are taking things away from us left and right and the guys who produce now couldn't care less if they produce the numbers anymore. It's sad. We used to have a good company till they started cutting back in the name of profit. I understand the company should make money. However, they were boosting profit numbers simply by cutting the size of the labor pool. Not by doing things more profitably.
It sounds like the company that you are working for is experiencing diseconomies of scale...never mind...forget I wrote that. That is just one of those silly words that economist use to twist an argument because they know no one will actually seek to understand its meaning.
Hey, you wouldn't be posting from work would you?
There is zero maintenance of the machinery
Why? are the maintenance guys surfing the net too!
Blaming the education system (which is highly flawed) for the current outsourcing trend is absolutely ludicrous. And, blaming workers for the ineptitude and greed of management is disingenuous at best.
You're right, I'm sorry for sharing this article. Forget I wrote anything.
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