In his first his first address to a joint session of Congress, President Obama borrowed stale rhetoric from the Business Roundtable to explain his education policy. It is the same bombast IBM's Lou Gerstner used when he joined hands with Arkansas governor Bill Clinton to get a national test--fear mongering in the name of reform.

Obama said, "Right now, three quarters of the fastest-growing occupations require more than a high school diploma, and yet just over half our citizens have that level of education." 

"Fastest-growing" is  a weasel term favored by education reform jingoists. Growth doesn't equal quantity.  For every systems engineer, we need about 15 people working in the service industry. For every new job for scientists and engineers, we have three applicants. We need to ask our corporate politicos why they want schools to produce scientists and engineers  faster than corporate America can ship those jobs overseas--or eliminate them entirely.

Hello, America. The public schoolteacher didn't create this economic meltdown, and she's not going to solve it.

Just take a look at the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for information about jobs over the next ten years:

• 22% of jobs will require four years of college
• 9% of jobs will require an AA degree--or some technical training.

That leaves a whole lot of jobs requiring only a high school diploma. The travesty is not that people take these very necessary jobs. The travesty is that more than 60% of new jobs don't pay a living wage.

When parents cannot provide adequately for their families, their children are much less likely to be successful in school. For example, as Richard Rothstein's research has shown, at any given time, about 1/3 of the children in a classroom are likely to have a toothache. If raising standardized test scores is our goal, then a cheap and effective solution would be to put dental clinics in the schools.

But no matter how many 4th graders do well on  the standardized test, it still won't raise the minimum wage.

Rather than to push for better standardized tests and more highly qualified teachers, our corporate politicos should consider these statistics from the Center on Hunger and Poverty. Among industrialized countries, the United States ranks:

• first in the number of millionaires and billionaires
• first in defense expenditures
• 12th in living standards among our poorest one-fifth
• 13th in the gap between rich and poor
• 14th in efforts to lift children out of poverty
• 16th in low-birthweight rates
• 18th in the percent of children in poverty
• 23rd in infant mortality

http://www.centeronhunger.org