Case
Plans
The United States federal government should end federal requirements related to the
Common Core State Standards Initiative.
The United States federal government should end surveillance in No Child Left Behind,
Race to the Top, and the Common Core State Standards Initiative.
The United States Department of Education should end surveillance in No Child Left
Behind, Race to the Top, and the Common Core State Standards Initiative.
The United States federal government should national educational tracking of
students in the United States.
The United States Department of Education should remove the surveillance and
database requirements from the Race to the Top grants.
The United States federal government should end the Common Core State Standards
Initiative.
The United States federal government should eliminate federal testing and data
collection requirements from the Common Core State Standards Initiative.
1AC
1AC — Inherency
The most dangerous form of government surveillance is the federal education
program known as “Common Core.” This program seems benign, but is actually an
institutional tracking program that allows the government to control every aspect of
the American public for decades into the future.
Cook 13 — Joshua Cook, MBA, reporter, writer for BenSwann.com whose work has appeared on
DrudgeReport, InfoWars, Breitbart.com, Daily Caller and FreedomOutpost.com, 2013 (“Common Core is
the Most Dangerous Domestic Spying Program,” Freedom Outpost, September 2nd, Available Online at
http://freedomoutpost.com/2013/09/common-core-dangerous-domestic-spyingprogram/#eBdFDCwK8D3U5h94.99, Accessed 06-22-2015)
Earlier this year, revelations about the Department of Justice spying on the Associated Press were
quickly followed by revelations that the NSA was collecting phone data on all Verizon, and then all
American cell phone users. Edward Snowden's whistleblowing drew yet more attention to the issue,
and domestic surveillance programs have remained a top issue in people's minds ever since.
While Americans focus on institutions like the CIA and NSA, though, programs are being implemented
which would lead to a much more institutional way of tracking citizens. Obamacare is one of these,
but Common Core Standards – the federal educational program – is the most eyebrow-raising.
Bill Gates was one of the leaders of Common Core, putting his personal money into its development,
implementation and promotion, so it's unsurprising that much of this data mining will occur via
Microsoft's Cloud system.
Even the Department of Education, though, admits that privacy is a concern, and that some of
the data gathered may be "of a sensitive nature." The information collected will be more than
sensitive; much of it will also be completely unrelated to education. Data collected will not only
include grades, test scores, name, date of birth and social security number, it will also include
parents' political affiliations, individual or familial mental or psychological problems, beliefs,
religious practices and income.
In addition, all activities, as well as those deemed demeaning, self-incriminating or anti-social,
will be stored in students' school records. In other words, not only will permanently stored
data reflect criminal activities, it will also reflect bullying or anything perceived as abnormal.
The mere fact that the White House notes the program can be used to "automatically
demonstrate proof of competency in a work setting" means such data is intended to affect
students' futures.
Perhaps even more alarming is the fact that data collection will also include critical appraisals
of individuals with whom students have close family relationships. The Common Core
program has been heavily scrutinized recently for the fact that its curriculum teaches young
children to use emotionally charged language to manipulate others and teaches students how to
become community organizers and experts of the U.N.'s agenda 21.
Combined with this form of data collection, it's easy to envision truly disturbing untruths and
distortions making their way into the permanent record.
Like Common Core, states were bribed with grant money from the federal government to implement
data mining, and 47 states have now implemented some form of data mining from the educational
system. Only 9 have implemented the full Common Core data mining program. Though there are
restrictions which make storing data difficult on the federal level, states can easily store the data and
allow the federal government to access it at its own discretion.
The government won't be the only organization with access to the information. School administrators
have full control over student files, and they can choose who to share information with. Theoretically,
the information could be sold, perhaps withholding identifying information. In addition, schools can
share records with any "school official" without parental consent. The term "school official," however,
includes private companies, which have contracts with the school.
NSA data mining is troubling because it could lead to intensely negative outcomes, because it opens
up new avenues for control and because it is fundamentally wrong. Common Core data mining and
tracking students with GPS devices is far, far scarier.
It gives the government the ability to completely control the futures of every student of public
education, and that will soon extend to private and home schools. It provides a way to intimidate
students – who already have a difficult time socially – into conforming to norms which are not only
social, but also political and cultural.
1AC — Plan
[Insert a plan text.]
1AC — Corporate Control
Advantage One is Corporate Control:
Common Core serves to ensure that students are ignorant of their constitutional
rights. It is fascism with a smile that ensures that future generations can be controlled
by corporations and the government.
Whitehead 13 — John W. Whitehead, constitutional and human rights lawyer, founder of The
Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties and human rights organization, winner of the Hungarian
Medal of Freedom, co-counsel in Paula Jones' sexual harassment lawsuit against President Clinton, cocounsel in several landmark Supreme Court cases and has law reviews published in Emory Law Journal,
Pepperdine Law Review, Harvard Journal on Legislation, Washington and Lee Law Review, Cumberland
Law Review, Tulsa Law Journal and the Temple University Civil Rights Law Review, 2013 (“Common Core:
A Lesson Plan for Raising Up Compliant, Non-Thinking Citizens,” The Rutherford Institute, September
23rd, Available Online at
https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/common_core_a_l
esson_plan_for_raising_up_compliant_non_thinking_citizens, Accessed 06-22-2015)
As I point out in my new book, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, there are
several methods for controlling a population. You can intimidate the citizenry into obedience through
force, relying on military strength and weaponry such as SWAT team raids, militarized police, and a vast
array of lethal and nonlethal weapons. You can manipulate them into marching in lockstep with your
dictates through the use of propaganda and carefully timed fear tactics about threats to their safety,
whether through the phantom menace of terrorist attacks or shooting sprees by solitary gunmen. Or
you can indoctrinate them into compliance from an early age through the schools, discouraging them
from thinking for themselves while rewarding them for regurgitating whatever the government,
through its so-called educational standards, dictates they should be taught.
Those who founded America believed that an educated citizenry knowledgeable about their rights
was the surest means of preserving freedom. If so, then the inverse should also hold true: that the
surest way for a government to maintain its power and keep the citizenry in line is by rendering them
ignorant of their rights and unable to think for themselves.
When viewed in light of the government’s ongoing attempts to amass power at great cost to
Americans—in terms of free speech rights, privacy, due process, etc.—the debate over Common Core
State Standards, which would transform and nationalize school curriculum from kindergarten through
12th grade, becomes that much more critical.
Essentially, these standards, which were developed through a partnership between big government
and corporations, in the absence of any real input from parents or educators with practical, hands-on
classroom experience, and are being rolled out in 45 states and the District of Columbia, will create a
generation of test-takers capable of little else, molded and shaped by the federal government and its
corporate allies into what it considers to be ideal citizens.
Moreover, as Valerie Strauss reports for the Washington Post: “The costs of the tests, which have
multiple pieces throughout the year plus the computer platforms needed to administer and score them,
will be enormous and will come at the expense of more important things. The plunging scores will be
used as an excuse to close more public schools and open more privatized charters and voucher schools,
especially in poor communities of color. If, as proposed, the Common Core’s ‘college and career ready’
performance level becomes the standard for high school graduation, it will push more kids out of high
school than it will prepare for college.”
With so much money to be made and so many questionable agendas at work, it is little wonder, then,
that attempts are being made to squelch any and all opposition to these standards. For example, at a
recent public forum to discuss the implementation of these standards in Baltimore County public
schools, one parent, 46-year-old Robert Small, found himself “pulled out of the meeting, arrested and
charged with second-degree assault of a police officer” simply for daring to voice his discontent with the
standards during a Q&A session with the superintendent.
Even calling this event a forum is disingenuous, given that attendees were not allowed to stand and ask
questions. Instead, attendees were instructed to write their questions on a piece of paper, which the
superintendent would then read and members of a panel would answer. In other words, there would be
no time or room for debate, just a one-sided discussion. And this is what life in our so-called republic of
the United States has been reduced to, a one-sided monologue by government officials who neither
care about what “we the people” have to say, nor are they inclined to hear us out, just so long as we
pay their taxes and abide by their laws.
“Don’t stand for this. You are sitting here like cattle,” shouted Robert Small to his fellow attendees as he
was being dragged out of the “forum” on the Common Core standards. “Is this America?”
No, Mr. Small, this is no longer America. This is, instead, fascism with a smile, sold to us by our socalled representatives, calculating corporations, and an educational system that is marching in
lockstep with the government’s agenda.
In this way, we are being conditioned to be slaves without knowing it. That way, we are easier to
control. “A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of
political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be
coerced, because they love their servitude,” writes Aldous Huxley. “To make them love it is the task
assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and
schoolteachers.”
The purpose of a pre-university education in early America was not to prepare young people to be
doctors or lawyers but, as Thomas Jefferson believed, to make citizens knowledgeable about “their
rights, interests, and duties as men and citizens.” As Jefferson observed, “I know no safe depository of
the ultimate powers of the society, but the people themselves: and if we think them not enlightened
enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is, not to take it from them,
but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional
power.”
Yet that’s where the problem arises for us today. Most citizens have little, if any, knowledge about
their basic rights, largely due to an educational system that does a poor job of teaching the basic
freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Many studies confirm this. For instance, when Newsweek asked 1,000 adult U.S. citizens to take
America’s official citizenship test, 29% of respondents couldn’t name the current vice president of the
United States. Seventy-three percent couldn’t correctly say why America fought the Cold War. More
critically, 44% were unable to define the Bill of Rights. And 6% couldn’t even circle Independence Day
(the Fourth of July) on a calendar.
A survey of American adults by the American Civic Literacy Program resulted in some equally
disheartening findings. Seventy-one percent failed the test. Moreover, having a college education does
very little to increase civic knowledge, as demonstrated by the abysmal 32% pass rate of people holding
not just a bachelor’s degree but some sort of graduate-level degree.
That Americans are constitutionally illiterate is not a mere oversight on the part of government
educators. And things will only get worse under Common Core, which as the Washington Post reports,
is a not-so-subtle attempt “to circumvent federal restrictions on the adoption of a national curriculum.”
One principal, a former proponent who is now leading the charge against Common Core, quickly realized
that Common Core was not about educational reform as President Obama would have us believe.
Rather, it’s about pushing a curriculum wrapped around incessant pre-testing, testing and test prep
that teaches students how to take tests but not how to think, analyze or learn.
As with most “bright ideas” coming out of the federal government, once you follow the money trail, it
all makes sense. And those who stand to profit are the companies creating both the tests that will drive
the school curriculum, as well as the preparatory test materials, the computer and software industries,
and the states, which will receive federal funds in exchange for their cooperation.
Putting aside the profit-driven motives of the corporations and the power-driven motives of the
government, there is also an inherent arrogance in the implementation of these Common Core
standards that speaks to the government’s view that parents essentially forfeit their rights when they
send their children to a public school, and should have little to no say in what their kids are taught and
how they are treated by school officials. This is evident in the transformation of the schools into
quasi-prisons, complete with metal detectors, drug-sniffing dogs, and surveillance cameras. Equally
arrogant are school zero tolerance policies that punish serious offenders of a school weapons policy the
same as a child who draws a picture of a gun, no matter what the parents or students have to say about
the matter. The result is a generation of young people browbeaten into believing that they have no
true rights, while government authorities have total power and can violate constitutional rights
whenever they see fit.
Common Core surveillance allows corporate access to student data to drive the
education agenda.
Rugh 13 — Peter Rugh, Brooklyn-based reporter who contributes to Vice.com and is a correspondent
for WagingNonviolence.org, 2013 (“Exposed: How Murdoch, Bill Gates and Big Corporations are Data
Mining our Schools,” Truthout, May 2nd, Available Online at http://www.truthout.org/news/item/16130-exposed-how-murdoch-bill-gates-and-big-corporations-are-data-mining-ourschools, Accessed 06-22-2015)
Last week, students across New York finished a set of tests taken over a two week period designed to
measure their proficiency at reading and math against new federal college readiness standards known
as Common Core. Some parents opted their children out of the exams in protest against what they
described as the school system's over-emphasis on testing and its use of data as the principle indicator
of their children's achievement.
Starting next year, those scores, along with students' personal information – race, economic
background, report cards, discipline records and personal addresses – will be stored in a database
designed by Wireless Generation, a subsidiary of media mogul Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.
That's right, Rupert Murdoch can read your child's report card anytime he likes and he knows where
your kid is sleeping. The database will be managed by inBloom inc, a non-profit outfit that, like Wireless
Generation, is under the domain of billionaire Bill Gates – who, together with the Carnegie Corporation
and other philanthropic organizations, set up the company via his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
inBloom is receiving $50 million for their services from the New York Education Department through a
contract awarded last fall. Data analyzing firms, educational software designers and other third-party
venders, both for and not-for-profit, will be granted access to student information.
New York is not alone in turning to student data tracking system to measure performance. Some
200,000 U.S. teachers use Wireless Generation software as part of a national trend in which education
administrators are increasingly turning to data analysis to grasp why America's pupils are flunking when
compared to the rest of the world.
“I am a deep believer in the power of data to drive our decisions,” said U.S. Education Secretary Arne
Duncan shortly after his appointment to the post in 2008. “Data gives us the roadmap to reform. It tells
us where we are, where we need to go, and who is most at risk.”
But the consolidation of individual student information has been raising eyebrows — and sparking a
backlash. The Electronic Privacy Information Center is suing Duncan's Education Department for
amending privacy regulations in 2011 that allow student data to be accessed for non-educational
objectives without informing parents — a violation, EPIC contends, of the Family Educational Rights
Privacy and Privacy Act.
According to inBloom's privacy policy, the company is not responsible for security breaches; though it
will “use reasonable administrative, technical, and physical safeguards to ensure student records are
kept private,” inBloom “cannot guarantee the security of the information stored in inBloom or that the
information will not be intercepted when it is being transmitted.”
Last week, New York parents sent a letter to the Board of Regents, which oversees the state's public
schools, decrying the “plan to share highly confidential, personally identifiable student data” with
inBloom. They expressed fear that the company intends to share their children's information “with forprofit vendors without parental notification or consent.”
After parents in Louisiana raised similar concerns, plans to hand over student data to inBloom were put
on hold two weeks ago. Contrary to statements from Louisiana Education Superintendent John White,
the state has not cancelled its contract with the company, according to a spokesperson for inBloom.
The spokesperson also said it is up to inBloom's clients, not inBloom, to determine what data the
company possesses and who is granted access. In Louisiana, that could include student social security
numbers, which double as student ID digits in most districts.
Besides New York and Louisiana, inBloom has contracts with seven other states. All are part of the
Shared Learning Collaborative, a pilot program set up by the Council of Chief State School Officers
(CCSSO) to help implement Common Core standards through the tracking of student data. The Council
of Chiefs, also a non-profit, is composed of the heads of America's state school systems who work
together with corporations to collectively design education policy, in mold of the American Legislative
Exchange Council, or ALEC.
CCSSO's corporate partners include Microsoft, Apple, Wireless Generation, IBM and Discovery Education
– a spin-off of the television channel that gave us Amish Mafia. Then there are the big publishing houses:
McGraw-Hill, Scholastic, and Pearson that design the standardized tests that produce the data which
feeds inBloom, Wireless and others. Together, these tech, media and publishing corporations work
with policymakers to integrate their products into curricula.
“I used to think there would be an uproar if I made this stuff public,” said one programmer who designs
student tracking systems, and who wished to remain anonymous in order to protect his job. “Then, I
discovered that it's all already public. They're devising extra-governmental systems to handle student
learning right before our eyes. The state is using its monopoly on education to benefit certain
corporations.”
Pearson, however, might have pushed its buddy-buddy relationship with education administrators a
little too far. The publisher, which recently received a $32 million contract to design Common Core test
prep materials for New York, is currently under investigation from the state Attorney General's office for
using its nonprofit wing, the Pearson Foundation, to finance trips abroad taken by NYSED officials.
Yet, for the most part, by cloaking its aims in the guise of philanthropy the private sector has
successfully nuzzled its way into the sphere of public education. And there are big bucks to be had.
“When it comes to K through 12 education,” Rupert Murdoch put it upon acquiring Wireless Generation
in 2010, “we see a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed by
big breakthroughs that extend the reach of great teaching.” To help ensure that News Corp. gets its
share of the education pie (translation: "to extend the reach of great teaching"), the media baron tagged
an industry insider to do his bidding, taking on former New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein as an
adviser.
“Government and for-profit education businesses are becoming ever more inextricably interconnected,” commented Michael McGill, superintendent for schools in Scarsdale, New York, upon
learning of the state's plan to house his students info with the Murdoch/Gates start-ups. “This is a
development that merits public concern and close public scrutiny."
The Common Core is a neoliberal plan to create corporate control of American public
education — deeply conservative corporations monopolize the content. This
exacerbates poverty and inculcates students in neoliberal values.
Brand 13 — Candice Brand, Assistant Editor and Reporter for Truthout, a progressive news
organization that works to broaden and diversify the political discussion by introducing independent
voices, co-writer and producer of Don't Frack With Denton, a documentary chronicling fracking in Texas.
Truthout has featured content from Paul Krugman, Henry Giroux, Bill Moyers, Andy Worthington, Kathy
Kelly, Dean Baker and Noam Chomsky, 2013 (“Flow Chart Exposes Common Core's Myriad Corporate
Connections,” Truthout, September 6th, Available Online at http://www.truthout.org/news/item/18442-flow-chart-exposes-common-cores-myr, Accessed 06-22-2015)
Morna McDermott mapped the Common Core State Standard Initiative's corporate connections in a
new flow chart, which reveals how corporations and organizations that are members of the American
Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have funded and perpetuated Common Core standards
throughout the states.
ALEC has been funded for decades in large part by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch.
According to the Center for Media and Democracy, about 98 percent of ALEC's funds come from
corporations such as Exxon Mobil and corporate foundations like the Charles G. Koch Charitable
Foundation.
The Common Core State Standard Initiative is part of the larger Race to the Top educational policy
announced by President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan in 2009. It seeks to
implement new Common Core educational benchmarks to replace varying educational standards from
state to state by awarding grants to states that comply with the initiative. The standards have been
adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia.
The chart illuminates a larger corporate agenda that seeks market-based education reforms and
increased influence over public education in the United States. With defense and security
expenditures slowing, corporations are looking to profit from new cloud-based software used to
collect and mine information from student records to create individualized education programs
designed by third-party companies.
McDermott is a teacher-educator with more than 20 years of experience working in and with public
schools. McDermott also serves as a section editor for the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy and
recently published a book titled "The Left Handed Curriculum: Creative Experiences for Empowering
Teachers" with Information Age Publishing. She is an administrator with United Opt Out National, a
nonprofit created by parents, educators and students who are dedicated to the elimination of highstakes testing in public education.
She researched and produced the information on her own, but the work is endorsed and supported by
the United Opt Out National network. McDermott told Truthout she used a systems-based approach in
her research to show the concepts in relationship to one another, and that it's just another example of a
different method of teaching and learning.
McDermott says she works to fight standards and testing because they divert funds and attention away
from the real issue in education, which is poverty. "The whole thing about better tests and if we had
better standards is like a bait-and-switch … so nobody pays attention to the real issues," she said.
McDermott mentions a number of corporations and organizations prying for influence over the
Common Core standards. Among them is Achieve Inc., a company widely funded by ALEC members,
including Boeing and State Farm, among others.
McDermott also points to peer-reviewed academic research originally published in the International
Journal of Educational Leadership Preparation by Fenwick English titled "The Ten Most Wanted Enemies
of American Public Education's School Leadership." In his research English looks at many of the players
involved in the same network that McDermott maps with clarity, writing of the Eli Broad Foundation
that:
Broad money is sloshed behind the scenes to elect or select candidates who "buy" the Broad
corporate agenda in education. ... Broad's enemies are teacher unions, school boards, and schools of
education. What all three have in common is that they eschew corporate, top-down control required
in the Broad business model.
According to McDermott, America's Choice, another part of Common Core's corporate web, originally
was founded as a program of the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE), a Washington,
D.C.-based nonprofit. But in 2004, the group was reorganized as a for-profit subsidiary of NCEE.
McDermott cites a professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas, Jay Greene, who writes:
NCEE's scheme was originally financed by a $1,500,000 pilot grant from the Gates Foundation. It will
now benefit from a sweetheart deal of $30,000,000 - all taxpayers' money. Having Gates pay for both
NCEE's start-up and the development of Common Core standards certainly helped America's Choice to
put its key people on Common Core's [English Language Arts] and mathematics standards development
and draft-writing committees to ensure that they came up with the readiness standards Gates had paid
for and wanted NCEE to use.
It's all part-and-parcel to the larger neoliberal plan to "reform" public education.
"What Race to the Top is doing to exacerbate the issues of poverty, for one thing, in terms of school
funding is it's even elevating the amount of money that is funneled right through schools, like a sieve,
and channeling it more directly into the hands of testing companies, computer companies, online
companies and other corporate interests," McDermott said. "So for a state or a district to say, 'Oh, we
need the money,' my reaction would be, 'You're not going to see a dime of it. They're going to hand you
a check that's basically a coupon to buy Pearson products.' "
Corporate control risks extinction — global warming and nuclear war.
Chomsky 14 — Noam Chomsky, Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the
American Philosophical Society, holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania 2014
(“America’s corporate doctrine of power a grave threat to humanity,” Salon — originally published on
TomDispatch, July 1st, Available Online at
http://www.salon.com/2014/07/01/noam_chomsky_americas_corporate_doctrine_of_power_a_grave_
threat_to_humanity/, Accessed 07-09-2015)
The Final Century of Human Civilization?
There are other examples too numerous to mention, facts that are well-established and would be taught
in elementary schools in free societies.
There is, in other words, ample evidence that securing state power from the domestic population and
securing concentrated private power are driving forces in policy formation. Of course, it is not quite
that simple. There are interesting cases, some quite current, where these commitments conflict, but
consider this a good first approximation and radically opposed to the received standard doctrine.
Let us turn to another question: What about the security of the population? It is easy to demonstrate
that this is a marginal concern of policy planners. Take two prominent current examples, global
warming and nuclear weapons. As any literate person is doubtless aware, these are dire threats to
the security of the population. Turning to state policy, we find that it is committed to accelerating
each of those threats — in the interests of the primary concerns, protection of state power and of the
concentrated private power that largely determines state policy.
Consider global warming. There is now much exuberance in the United States about “100 years of
energy independence” as we become “the Saudi Arabia of the next century” — perhaps the final
century of human civilization if current policies persist.
That illustrates very clearly the nature of the concern for security, certainly not for the population. It
also illustrates the moral calculus of contemporary Anglo-American state capitalism: the fate of our
grandchildren counts as nothing when compared with the imperative of higher profits tomorrow.
These conclusions are fortified by a closer look at the propaganda system. There is a huge public
relations campaign in the U.S., organized quite openly by Big Energy and the business world, to try to
convince the public that global warming is either unreal or not a result of human activity. And it has had
some impact. The U.S. ranks lower than other countries in public concern about global warming and the
results are stratified: among Republicans, the party more fully dedicated to the interests of wealth and
corporate power, it ranks far lower than the global norm.
The current issue of the premier journal of media criticism, the Columbia Journalism Review, has an
interesting article on this subject, attributing this outcome to the media doctrine of “fair and balanced.”
In other words, if a journal publishes an opinion piece reflecting the conclusions of 97% of scientists, it
must also run a counter-piece expressing the viewpoint of the energy corporations.
That indeed is what happens, but there certainly is no “fair and balanced” doctrine. Thus, if a journal
runs an opinion piece denouncing Russian President Vladimir Putin for the criminal act of taking over the
Crimea, it surely does not have to run a piece pointing out that, while the act is indeed criminal, Russia
has a far stronger case today than the U.S. did more than a century ago in taking over southeastern
Cuba, including the country’s major port — and rejecting the Cuban demand since independence to
have it returned. And the same is true of many other cases. The actual media doctrine is “fair and
balanced” when the concerns of concentrated private power are involved, but surely not elsewhere.
On the issue of nuclear weapons, the record is similarly interesting — and frightening. It reveals very
clearly that, from the earliest days, the security of the population was a non-issue, and remains so.
There is no time here to run through the shocking record, but there is little doubt that it strongly
supports the lament of General Lee Butler, the last commander of the Strategic Air Command, which
was armed with nuclear weapons. In his words, we have so far survived the nuclear age “by some
combination of skill, luck, and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion.” And
we can hardly count on continued divine intervention as policymakers play roulette with the fate of
the species in pursuit of the driving factors in policy formation.
As we are all surely aware, we now face the most ominous decisions in human history. There are
many problems that must be addressed, but two are overwhelming in their significance:
environmental destruction and nuclear war. For the first time in history, we face the possibility of
destroying the prospects for decent existence — and not in the distant future. For this reason alone,
it is imperative to sweep away the ideological clouds and face honestly and realistically the question
of how policy decisions are made, and what we can do to alter them before it is too late.
1AC — Critical Thinking
Advantage Two is Critical Thinking:
The Common Core curriculum is the root of reducing teaching and learning to
instrumental rationality divorced from critical thinking and social responsibility.
Giroux 14 — Henry A. Giroux, Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural
Studies Department & Chair in Critical Pedagogy at The McMaster Institute for Innovation & Excellence
in Teaching & Learning, Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University, member of Truthout's
Board of Directors, author of dozens of books on learning and pedagogy including Youth in Revolt:
Reclaiming a Democratic Future, America's Educational Deficit and the War on Youth, Neoliberalism's
War on Higher Education, 2014 (“Data Storms and the Tyranny of Manufactured Forgetting,” Truthout,
June 24th, Available Online at http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/24550-data-storms-and-thetyranny-of-manufactured-forgetting#/, Accessed 06-25-2015)
It does not seem unreasonable to conclude at this point that critical thinking as a mode of reasoning
is nearing extinction in both the wider society and the sphere of public schooling and higher
education in the United States. Stanley Aronowitz has written that critical thought has lost its
contemplative character and "has been debased to the level of technical intelligence, subordinate to
meeting operational problems."[27] Nowhere is this more obvious than in the reactionary reforms
being pushed on public schooling. President Obama's educational policies along with the Common
Core curriculum created by Bill Gates-funded consultants are devoid of any critical content and reduce
pedagogy to the dictates of instrumental standards alone. Education subjected to endless empirical
assessment results only in a high-stakes testing mania - a boon, of course, for the test industries, but a
devastating loss for teacher and student autonomy. In this instance, student achievement and learning
are reduced to data that are completely divorced from "the inequalities of race, class and educational
opportunity reflected in . . . test scores."[28]
Under the auspices of quality control, the cult of data and high-stakes testing becomes a signpost for
empirical madness and number crunching run amok. "Teaching to the test" more often than not
results in miseducating students while undermining any possibility of expanding their sense of
wonder, imagination, critique and social responsibility. Left unchecked, instrumental rationality
parading as educational reform will homogenize all knowledge and meaning, as it becomes a machine
for proliferating forms of civic and social death, deadening the spirit with the weight of dead time and
a graveyard of useless testing pedagogies. What does this have to do with the suppression of historical
consciousness and the death of politics in the broader culture? The answer becomes clearer when we
analyze the relationships among critical thinking, historical consciousness, and the notions of social and
self-emancipation.
When literacy becomes about test scores and history becomes about memorization,
we lose the ability to challenge the state and address social problems. No one is
immune to the reign of neoliberal ideological tyranny that pushes the marginalized
out of the social sphere. We celebrate our own authoritarian domination.
Giroux 14 — Henry A. Giroux, Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural
Studies Department & Chair in Critical Pedagogy at The McMaster Institute for Innovation & Excellence
in Teaching & Learning, Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University, member of Truthout's
Board of Directors, author of dozens of books on learning and pedagogy including Youth in Revolt:
Reclaiming a Democratic Future, America's Educational Deficit and the War on Youth, Neoliberalism's
War on Higher Education, 2014 (“Data Storms and the Tyranny of Manufactured Forgetting,” Truthout,
June 24th, Available Online at http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/24550-data-storms-and-thetyranny-of-manufactured-forgetting#/, Accessed 06-25-2015)
Clearly, the attack on reason, evidence, science and critical thought has reached perilous
proportions in the United States. A number of political, economic, social and technological forces now
work to distort reality and keep people passive, unthinking and unable to act in a critically engaged
manner. Politicians, right-wing pundits and large swaths of the American public embrace positions that
support Creationism, capital punishment, torture and the denial of human-engineered climate change,
any one of which not only defies human reason but stands in stark opposition to evidence-based
scientific arguments. Reason now collapses into opinion, as thinking itself appears to be both
dangerous and antithetical to understanding ourselves, our relations to others and the larger state of
world affairs. Under such circumstances, literacy disappears not just as the practice of learning skills,
but also as the foundation for taking informed action. Divorced from any sense of critical
understanding and agency, the meaning of literacy is narrowed to completing basic reading, writing
and numeracy tasks assigned in schools. Literacy education is similarly reduced to strictly
methodological considerations and standardized assessment, rooted in test taking and deadening
forms of memorization, and becomes far removed from forms of literacy that would impart an ability
to raise questions about historical and social contexts.
Literacy, in a critical sense, should always ask what it might mean to use knowledge and theory as a
resource to address social problems and events in ways that are meaningful and expand democratic
relations. I have commented on the decline of critical literacy elsewhere and it is worth repeating:
I don't mean illiterate in the sense of not being able to read, though we have far too many people
who are functionally illiterate in a so-called advanced democracy, a point that writers such as Chris
Hedges, Susan Jacoby, and the late Richard Hofstadter made clear in their informative books on the rise
of anti-intellectualism in American life. I am talking about a different species of ignorance and antiintellectualism. It is a form of illiteracy that points less to the lack of technical skills and the absence
of certain competencies than to a deficit in the realms of politics - one that subverts both critical
thinking and the notion of literacy as both critical interpretation and the possibility of intervention in
the world. This type of illiteracy is not only incapable of dealing with complex and contested
questions; it is also an excuse for glorifying the principle of self-interest as a paradigm for
understanding politics. This is a form of illiteracy marked by the inability to see outside of the realm of
the privatized self, an illiteracy in which the act of translation withers, reduced to a relic of another
age. The United States is a country that is increasingly defined by [an educational] deficit, a chronic
and deadly form of civic illiteracy that points to the failure of both its education-al system and the
growing ability of anti-democratic forces to use the educational force of the culture to promote the
new illiteracy. As this widespread illiteracy has come to dominate American culture, we have moved
from a culture of questioning to a culture of shouting and in doing so have restaged politics and
power in both unproductive and anti-democratic ways.[11]
Needless to say, as John Pilger has pointed out, what is at work in the death of literacy and the
promotion of ignorance as a civic virtue is a "confidence trick" in which "the powerful would like us to
believe that we live in an eternal present in which reflection is limited to Facebook, and historical
narrative is the preserve of Hollywood."[12] Among the “materialized shocks” of the ever-present
spectacles of violence, the expanding states of precarity and the production of the atomized,
repressed and disconnected individual, narcissism reigns supreme. "Personal communication tends to
all meaning," even as moral decency and the "agency of conscience" wither.[13]
How else to explain the endless celebration of an unchecked self-interest, a culture that accepts
cruelty toward others as a necessary survival strategy, a growing “economics of contempt” that
maligns and blames the poor for their condition rather than acknowledging injustices in the social
order, or the paucity of even the most rudimentary knowledge among the American public about
history, politics, civil rights, the Constitution, public affairs, politics and other cultures, countries and
political systems?[14] Political ignorance now exists in the United States on a scale that seems
inconceivable: for example, "only 40 percent of adults know that there are 100 Senators in the U.S.
Congress," and a significant number of Americans believe that the Constitution designated English as
the country’s official language and Christianity as its official religion.[15]
What is particularly disturbing is the way in which there has been a resurgence of a poisonous form of
technical rationality in American culture, or what I call the return of data storms that uncritically
amass metrics, statistics and empirical evidence at the expense of knowledge that signals the need
for contextualization and interpretation in support of public values, the common good and the ethical
imagination. Data storms make an appeal to a decontextualized and allegedly pure description of
facts, and what Herbert Marcuse called a "misplaced concreteness," one that was particularly "prevalent
in the social sciences, a pseudo-empiricism which . . . tended to make the objectivity of the social
sciences a vehicle of apologetics and defense of the status quo."[16]
This obsession with metrics feeds an insatiable desire for control and lives in an eternal present,
removed from matters of justice and historical memory. The novelist, Anne Lamott, is right in arguing
that the "headlong rush into data is overshadowing 'everything great and exciting that someone like
me would dare to call grace. What this stuff steals is our aliveness . . . Grids, spreadsheets and
algorithms take away the sensory connection to our lives, where our feet are, what we're seeing, all
the raw materials of life, which by their very nature are disorganized.' Metrics, she said, rob
individuals of the sense that they can choose their own path, 'because if you’re going by the data and
the formula, there’s only one way.'"[17]
Not only is this mode of rationality antithetical to other modes of reasoning that recognize and value
what cannot be measured as being essential to life as well as democratic values and social relations,
but it also carries the weight of a deadly form of masculine logic wedded to toxic notions of control,
violence and ideological purity.[18] It is a form of rationality that serves the interests of the rich and
obscures modes of thinking that are more capacious and reflective in their capacity to address broader
conceptions of identity, citizenship and non-market values such as love, trust and fidelity.
The cult of the measurable is enthralled by instant evaluation, and fervently believes that data hold
the key to our collective fate.
It bears repeating: reality is now shaped by the culture’s infatuation with a narrow, depoliticizing
rationality, or what Frankfurt School theorist Max Horkheimer called instrumental reason. Bruce Feiler,
writing in The New York Times, argues that not only are we awash in data, but words and
"unquantifiable arenas like history, literature, religion, and the arts are receding from public life,
replaced by technology, statistics, science, and math. Even the most elemental form of
communication, the story, is being pushed aside by the list."[19] Historical memory and public space
are indeed the first casualties in this reign of ideological tyranny, which models agency only on
consumerism and value only on exchange value. The cult of the measurable is enthralled by instant
evaluation, and fervently believes that data hold the key to our collective fate. John Steppling sums up
the authoritarian nature of this ideological colonization and monopoly of the present. He writes:
Today, the erasure of space is linked to the constant hum of data information, of social networking, and
of the compulsive repetition of the same. There is no space for accumulation in narrative. Emotional or
intellectual accumulation is destroyed by the hyper-branded reality of the Spectacle. So, the poor are
stigmatized for sleep. It is a sign of laziness and sloth. Of lassitude and torpor. The ideal citizen is one at
work all the time. Industrious and attentive to the screen image or the sound of command. Diligence has
come to mean a readiness to obey. A culture of shaming and reprimand is based on a model of reality in
which there is no history to reflect upon. Today’s mass culture only reinforces this. The "real" is a never
changing present. Plots revolve around the idea of disrupting this present, and then returning to this
present. Actual tragedy, Chernobyl or Bhopal or Katrina, are simply ignored in terms of their material
consequences. What matters are events that disrupt the Empire's carefully constructed present
reality.[20]
It gets worse. Within this reality, endlessly hawked by a neoliberal brand of authoritarianism, people
are turned into nothing more than "statistical units." Individuals and marginalized groups are all but
stripped of their humanity, thereby clearing the way for the growth of a formative culture that allows
individuals to ignore the suffering of others and to "escape from unbearable human dilemmas . . . .
Statistics become more important than real human life."[21]
Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyons have connected the philosophical implications of experiencing a
reality defined by constant measurement to how most people now allow their private expressions and
activities to be monitored by the authoritarian security-surveillance state.[22] No one is left
unscathed. In the current historical conjuncture, neoliberalism’s theater of cruelty joins forces with
new technologies that can easily "colonize the private" even as it holds sacrosanct the notion that any
"refusal to participate in the technological innovations and social networks (so indispensable for the
exercise of social and political control) . . . becomes sufficient grounds to remove all those who lag
behind in the globalization process (or have disavowed its sanctified idea) to the margins of
society."[23] Inured to data gathering and number crunching, the country’s slide into
authoritarianism has become not only permissible, but participatory - bolstered by a general
ignorance of how a market-driven culture induces all of us to sacrifice our secrets, private lives and very
identities to social media, corporations and the surveillance state.[24]
This aggression toward critical thinking in schools enables the deadly combination of
anti-intellectualism and historical amnesia that produced terrorism, the war in Iraq,
and the modern authoritarian state.
Giroux 14 — Henry A. Giroux, Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural
Studies Department & Chair in Critical Pedagogy at The McMaster Institute for Innovation & Excellence
in Teaching & Learning, Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University, member of Truthout's
Board of Directors, author of dozens of books on learning and pedagogy including Youth in Revolt:
Reclaiming a Democratic Future, America's Educational Deficit and the War on Youth, Neoliberalism's
War on Higher Education, 2014 (“Data Storms and the Tyranny of Manufactured Forgetting,” Truthout,
June 24th, Available Online at http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/24550-data-storms-and-thetyranny-of-manufactured-forgetting#/, Accessed 06-25-2015)
The current mainstream debate regarding the crisis in Iraq and Syria offers a near perfect example of
both the death of historical memory and the collapse of critical thinking in the United States. It also
signifies the emergence of a profoundly anti-democratic culture of manufactured ignorance and
social indifference. Surely, historical memory is under assault when the dominant media give airtime to
the incessant war mongering of politicians such as Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham and retro
pundits such as Bill Kristol, Douglas Feith, Condoleezza Rice and Paul Wolfowitz - not one of whom has
any credibility given how they have worked to legitimate the unremitting web of lies and deceit that
provided cover for the disastrous US invasion of Iraq under the Bush/Cheney administration.
History repeats itself in the recent resurgence of calls for US military interventions in Syria and Iraq.
Such repetitions of history undoubtedly shift from tragedy to farce as former Vice President Dick Cheney
once again becomes a leading pundit calling for military solutions to the current crises in the Middle
East, in spite of his established reputation for hypocrisy, lies, corporate cronyism, defending torture
and abysmal policymaking under the Bush administration. The resurrection of Dick Cheney, the Darth
Vader of the 21st century, as a legitimate source on the current crisis in Syria and Iraq is a truly
monumental display of historical amnesia and moral dissipation. As Thom Hartman observes, Cheney
bears a large responsibility for the Iraq War, which "was the single biggest foreign policy disaster in
recent - or maybe even all - of American history. It cost the country around $4 trillion, killed hundreds
of thousands of innocent civilians, left 4,500 Americans dead, and turned what was once one of the
more developed countries in the Arab World into a slaughterhouse.[3] What room is there for
historical memory in an age "when the twin presiding deities are irony and violence"?[4]
A resurrection of historical memory in this moment could provide important lessons regarding the
present crisis.
Missing from the commentaries by the mainstream media regarding the current situation in Iraq is any
historical context that would offer a critical account of the disorder plaguing the Middle East. A
resurrection of historical memory in this moment could provide important lessons regarding the present
crisis. What is clear in this case is that a widespread avoidance of the past has become not only a sign of
the appalling lack of historical knowledge in contemporary American culture, but a deliberate political
weapon used by the powerful to keep people passive and blind to the truth. Of course, there are many
factors currently contributing to this production of ignorance and the lobotomizing of individual and
collective agency.
Such factors extend from the idiocy of celebrity and popular culture and the dumbing down of
American schools to the transformation of the mainstream media into a deadly mix of propaganda,
violence and entertainment. The latter is particularly crucial as the collapse of journalistic standards
that could inform the onslaught of information finds its counterpart in an unrelenting rise of political
and civic illiteracy. The knowledge and value deficits that produce such detrimental forms of
ignorance not only crush the imagination, critical modes of social interaction, and political dissent,
but also destroy those public spheres and spaces that promote thoughtfulness, thinking, critical
dialogue and serve as "guardians of truths as facts," as Hannah Arendt once put it.[5]
The blight of rampant consumerism, unregulated finance capital and weakened communal bonds is
directly related to the culture’s production of atomized, isolated and utterly privatized individuals
who have lost sight of the fact that "humanity is never acquired in solitude."[6] This retreat into private
silos has resulted in the inability of individuals to connect their personal suffering with larger public
issues. Thus detached from any concept of the common good or viable vestige of the public realm, they
are left to face alone a world of increasing precarity and uncertainty in which it becomes difficult to
imagine anything other than how to survive. Under such circumstances, there is little room for thinking
critically and acting collectively in ways that are imaginative and courageous.
Surely, the celebration and widespread prevalence of ignorance in American culture does more than
merely testify "to human backwardness or stupidity"; it also "indicates human weakness and the fear
that it is unbearably difficult to live beset by continuous doubts."[7] Yet, what is often missed in analysis
of political and civic illiteracy as the new normal is the degree to which these new forms of illiteracy not
only result in an unconscious flight from politics, but also produce a moral coma that supports
modern systems of terror and authoritarianism. Civic illiteracy is about more than the glorification and
manufacture of ignorance on an individual scale: it is producing a nationwide crisis of agency, memory
and thinking itself.
The future depends on the ability of today’s students to solve problems like endless
war, mass incarceration and climate change — the Common Core curriculum
guarantees they’ll be unprepared. This is the civil rights issue of our time.
Rugh 13 — Peter Rugh, Brooklyn-based reporter who contributes to Vice.com and is a correspondent
for WagingNonviolence.org, 2013 (“Exposed: How Murdoch, Bill Gates and Big Corporations are Data
Mining our Schools,” Truthout, May 2nd, Available Online at http://www.truthout.org/news/item/16130-exposed-how-murdoch-bill-gates-and-big-corporations-are-data-mining-ourschools, Accessed 06-22-2015)
What some critics find most troubling is not simply that corporate interests are collecting student
personal information, but how that information is being used. As the anonymous programmer put it, “I
don't think a lot these products are going to work. Teachers aren't going to like them, but that doesn't
matter. These are essentially accountability systems.”
Some school districts have released statistical teacher evaluations as a way of holding teachers' feet to
the fire and to justify layoffs. In Los Angeles, one teacher committed suicide after the city paper
published his score. In New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and elsewhere, data standardized tests results
have been used to shutter schools and replace them with charters, often sponsored by hedge funds.
There are other ways, of course, to improve schools, says the programmer. Rather than shutting them
down, giving teachers the slip and hiring corporate data tracking firms, policy makers could invest in
improving the quality of life in the neighborhoods surrounding schools. Also, “they could just hire
more teachers.” He insisted on anonymity for fear of retaliation from his employer, because such
comments could cripple the programmer's entire profession, if heeded.
Increasingly, parents are refusing to feed the statistical machine. Over the last two weeks, several
hundred in New York opted their children out of Common Core tests. In Chicago last week, parents also
refused to allow their children to be tested. These boycotts were inspired by a school-wide refusal by
teachers at Garfield High School in Seattle, Washington, to administer standardized exams to students.
“Arne Duncan has called education in America today 'the civil rights issue of our time',” said Jesse
Hagopian, a Garfield teacher who helped initiate the school-wide test refusal last fall. “And I agree
with him. Only I think his methodology is flawed. Because I know what the actual Civil Rights
Movement was built on.”
Just as a bus boycott helped launch the Civil Right's Movement, Hagopian hopes that a test boycott will
help launch a grassroots education reform movement.
“Parents, students and teachers need to band together,” he says, “and boycott tests that are designed
to rank and sort our children and label them failures rather than provide them educational equity. These
tests can't measure leadership, civic courage, creativity, the things we're going to need to solve the
problems in the world today like endless war, mass incarceration and climate change.”
2AC — Corporate Control
2AC — Common Core Causes Corporate Control
Common Core builds workers, not thinkers — in an attempt to drive “21st Century
Skills” it is creating a generation of bored, apathetic automotons.
Natale 14 — Elizabeth Natale, English and language arts teacher for more than 15 years, 2014 (“Why I
Want To Give Up Teaching,” Hartford Courant, January 17th, Available Online at
http://www.courant.com/opinion/hc-op-natale-teacher-ready-to-quit-over-common-cor-20140117story.html, Accessed 06-23-2015)
Surrounded by piles of student work to grade, lessons to plan and laundry to do, I have but one hope
for the new year: that the Common Core State Standards, their related Smarter Balanced Assessment
Consortium testing and the new teacher evaluation program will become extinct.
I have been a middle school English teacher for 15 years. I entered teaching after 19 years as a
newspaper reporter and college public relations professional. I changed careers to contribute to
society; shape young minds; create good and productive citizens; and spend time with youngsters
lacking adults at home with time, energy and resources to teach them.
Although the tasks ahead of me are no different from those of the last 14 years, today is different.
Today, I am considering ending my teaching career.
When I started teaching, I learned that dealing with demanding college presidents and cantankerous
newspaper editors was nothing. While those jobs allowed me time to drink tea and read the newspaper,
teaching deprived me of an opportunity to use the restroom. And when I did, I was often the Pied Piper,
followed by children intent on speaking with me through the bathroom door.
Unfortunately, government attempts to improve education are stripping the joy out of teaching and
doing nothing to help children. The Common Core standards require teachers to march lockstep in
arming students with "21st-century skills." In English, emphasis on technology and nonfiction reading
makes it more important for students to prepare an electronic presentation on how to make a paper
airplane than to learn about moral dilemmas from Natalie Babbitt's beloved novel "Tuck Everlasting."
The Smarter Balance program assumes my students are comfortable taking tests on a computer, even
if they do not own one. My value as a teacher is now reduced to how successful I am in getting a
student who has eaten no breakfast and is a pawn in her parents' divorce to score well enough to meet
my teacher evaluation goals.
I am a professional. My mission is to help students progress academically, but there is much more to
my job than ensuring students can answer multiple-choice questions on a computer. Unlike my
engineer husband who runs tests to rate the functionality of instruments, I cannot assess students by
plugging them into a computer. They are not machines. They are humans who are not fazed by a D
but are undone when their goldfish dies, who struggle with composing a coherent paragraph but draw
brilliantly, who read on a third-grade level but generously hold the door for others.
My most important contributions to students are not addressed by the Common Core, Smarter Balance
and teacher evaluations. I come in early, work through lunch and stay late to help children who ask for
assistance but clearly crave the attention of a caring adult. At intramurals, I voluntarily coach a ragtag
team of volleyball players to ensure good sportsmanship. I "ooh" and "ah" over comments made by a
student who finally raises his hand or earns a C on a test she insisted she would fail.
Those moments mean the most to my students and me, but they are not valued by a system that
focuses on preparing workers rather than thinkers, collecting data rather than teaching and treating
teachers as less than professionals.
Until this year, I was a highly regarded certified teacher. Now, I must prove myself with data that holds
little meaning to me. I no longer have the luxury of teaching literature, with all of its life lessons, or
teaching writing to students who long to be creative. My success is measured by my ability to bring 85
percent of struggling students to "mastery," without regard for those with advanced skills. Instead of
fostering love of reading and writing, I am killing children's passions — committing "readicide," as
Kelly Gallagher called it in his book of that title.
Teaching is the most difficult — but most rewarding — work I have ever done. It is, however, art, not
science. A student's learning will never be measured by any test, and I do not believe the current
trend in education will lead to adults better prepared for the workforce, or to better citizens. For the
sake of students, our legislators must reach this same conclusion before good teachers give up the
profession — and the children — they love.
2AC — Corporate Control Impacts
Training students to become corporate careerists threatens extinction.
Hedges 12 — Chris Hedges, Fellow at The Nation Institute, F. Ross Johnson-Connaught Distinguished
Visitor in American Studies at the Centre for the Study of the United States at The University of Toronto,
long-time foreign correspondent for the New York Times where he was part of a team of reporters that
won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the war on terrorism, recipient of the Amnesty International
Global Award for Human Rights Journalism, holds a B.A. in English Literature from Colgate University and
a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, 2012 (“The Careerists,” Truthdig—A Progressive
Journal of News and Opinion, July 23rd, Available Online at
http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/the_careerists_20120723, Accessed 07-09-2015)
The greatest crimes of human history are made possible by the most colorless human beings. They are
the careerists. The bureaucrats. The cynics. They do the little chores that make vast, complicated
systems of exploitation and death a reality. They collect and read the personal data gathered on tens
of millions of us by the security and surveillance state. They keep the accounts of ExxonMobil, BP and
Goldman Sachs. They build or pilot aerial drones. They work in corporate advertising and public
relations. They issue the forms. They process the papers. They deny food stamps to some and
unemployment benefits or medical coverage to others. They enforce the laws and the regulations. And
they do not ask questions.
Good. Evil. These words do not mean anything to them. They are beyond morality. They are there to
make corporate systems function. If insurance companies abandon tens of millions of sick to suffer
and die, so be it. If banks and sheriff departments toss families out of their homes, so be it. If
financial firms rob citizens of their savings, so be it. If the government shuts down schools and
libraries, so be it. If the military murders children in Pakistan or Afghanistan, so be it. If commodity
speculators drive up the cost of rice and corn and wheat so that they are unaffordable for hundreds of
millions of poor across the planet, so be it. If Congress and the courts strip citizens of basic civil
liberties, so be it. If the fossil fuel industry turns the earth into a broiler of greenhouse gases that
doom us, so be it. They serve the system. The god of profit and exploitation. The most dangerous
force in the industrialized world does not come from those who wield radical creeds, whether Islamic
radicalism or Christian fundamentalism, but from legions of faceless bureaucrats who claw their way
up layered corporate and governmental machines. They serve any system that meets their pathetic
quota of needs.
These systems managers believe nothing. They have no loyalty. They are rootless. They do not think
beyond their tiny, insignificant roles. They are blind and deaf. They are, at least regarding the great ideas
and patterns of human civilization and history, utterly illiterate. And we churn them out of universities.
Lawyers. Technocrats. Business majors. Financial managers. IT specialists. Consultants. Petroleum
engineers. “Positive psychologists.” Communications majors. Cadets. Sales representatives. Computer
programmers. Men and women who know no history, know no ideas. They live and think in an
intellectual vacuum, a world of stultifying minutia. They are T.S. Eliot’s “the hollow men,” “the stuffed
men.” “Shape without form, shade without colour,” the poet wrote. “Paralysed force, gesture without
motion.”
It was the careerists who made possible the genocides, from the extermination of Native Americans
to the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians to the Nazi Holocaust to Stalin’s liquidations. They were
the ones who kept the trains running. They filled out the forms and presided over the property
confiscations. They rationed the food while children starved. They manufactured the guns. They ran
the prisons. They enforced travel bans, confiscated passports, seized bank accounts and carried out
segregation. They enforced the law. They did their jobs.
Political and military careerists, backed by war profiteers, have led us into useless wars, including
World War I, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. And millions followed them. Duty. Honor. Country.
Carnivals of death. They sacrifice us all. In the futile battles of Verdun and the Somme in World War I,
1.8 million on both sides were killed, wounded or never found. In July of 1917 British Field Marshal
Douglas Haig, despite the seas of dead, doomed even more in the mud of Passchendaele. By November,
when it was clear his promised breakthrough at Passchendaele had failed, he jettisoned the initial goal—
as we did in Iraq when it turned out there were no weapons of mass destruction and in Afghanistan
when al-Qaida left the country—and opted for a simple war of attrition. Haig “won” if more Germans
than allied troops died. Death as score card. Passchendaele took 600,000 more lives on both sides of the
line before it ended. It is not a new story. Generals are almost always buffoons. Soldiers followed John
the Blind, who had lost his eyesight a decade earlier, to resounding defeat at the Battle of Crécy in 1337
during the Hundred Years War. We discover that leaders are mediocrities only when it is too late.
David Lloyd George, who was the British prime minister during the Passchendaele campaign, wrote in
his memoirs: “[Before the battle of Passchendaele] the Tanks Corps Staff prepared maps to show how a
bombardment which obliterated the drainage would inevitably lead to a series of pools, and they
located the exact spots where the waters would gather. The only reply was a peremptory order that
they were to ‘Send no more of these ridiculous maps.’ Maps must conform to plans and not plans to
maps. Facts that interfered with plans were impertinencies.”
Here you have the explanation of why our ruling elites do nothing about climate change, refuse to
respond rationally to economic meltdown and are incapable of coping with the collapse of globalization
and empire. These are circumstances that interfere with the very viability and sustainability of the
system. And bureaucrats know only how to serve the system. They know only the managerial skills
they ingested at West Point or Harvard Business School. They cannot think on their own. They cannot
challenge assumptions or structures. They cannot intellectually or emotionally recognize that the
system might implode. And so they do what Napoleon warned was the worst mistake a general could
make—paint an imaginary picture of a situation and accept it as real. But we blithely ignore reality
along with them. The mania for a happy ending blinds us. We do not want to believe what we see. It is
too depressing. So we all retreat into collective self-delusion.
In Claude Lanzmann’s monumental documentary film “Shoah,” on the Holocaust, he interviews Filip
Müller, a Czech Jew who survived the liquidations in Auschwitz as a member of the “special detail.”
Müller relates this story:
“One day in 1943 when I was already in Crematorium 5, a train from Bialystok arrived. A prisoner on the
‘special detail’ saw a woman in the ‘undressing room’ who was the wife of a friend of his. He came right
out and told her: ‘You are going to be exterminated. In three hours you’ll be ashes.’ The woman
believed him because she knew him. She ran all over and warned to the other women. ‘We’re going to
be killed. We’re going to be gassed.’ Mothers carrying their children on their shoulders didn’t want to
hear that. They decided the woman was crazy. They chased her away. So she went to the men. To no
avail. Not that they didn’t believe her. They’d heard rumors in the Bialystok ghetto, or in Grodno, and
elsewhere. But who wanted to hear that? When she saw that no one would listen, she scratched her
whole face. Out of despair. In shock. And she started to scream.”
Blaise Pascal wrote in “Pensées,” “We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of
us to stop us from seeing it.”
Hannah Arendt, in writing “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” noted that Adolf Eichmann was primarily motivated
by “an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement.” He joined the Nazi Party
because it was a good career move. “The trouble with Eichmann,” she wrote, “was precisely that so
many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are,
terribly and terrifyingly normal.”
“The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely
connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else,” Arendt
wrote. “No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded
by the most reliable of all safeguards against words and the presence of others, and hence against
reality as such.”
Gitta Sereny makes the same point in her book “Into That Darkness,” about Franz Stangl, the
commandant of Treblinka. The assignment to the SS was a promotion for the Austrian policeman. Stangl
was not a sadist. He was soft-spoken and polite. He loved his wife and children very much. Unlike most
Nazi camp officers, he did not take Jewish women as concubines. He was efficient and highly organized.
He took pride in having received an official commendation as the “best camp commander in Poland.”
Prisoners were simply objects. Goods. “That was my profession,” he said. “I enjoyed it. It fulfilled me.
And yes, I was ambitious about that, I won’t deny it.” When Sereny asked Stangl how as a father he
could kill children, he answered that he “rarely saw them as individuals. It was always a huge mass. …
[T]hey were naked, packed together, running, being driven with whips. …” He later told Sereny that
when he read about lemmings it reminded him of Treblinka.
Christopher Browning’s collection of essays, “The Path to Genocide,” notes that it was the “moderate,”
“normal” bureaucrats, not the zealots, who made the Holocaust possible. Germaine Tillion pointed out
“the tragic easiness [during the Holocaust] with which ‘decent’ people could become the most callous
executioners without seeming to notice what was happening to them.” The Russian novelist Vasily
Grossman in his book “Forever Flowing” observed that “the new state did not require holy apostles,
fanatic, inspired builders, faithful, devout disciples. The new state did not even require servants—just
clerks.”
“The most nauseating type of S.S. were to me personally the cynics who no longer genuinely believed in
their cause, but went on collecting blood guilt for its own sake,” wrote Dr. Ella Lingens-Reiner in
“Prisoners of Fear,” her searing memoir of Auschwitz. “Those cynics were not always brutal to the
prisoners, their behavior changed with their mood. They took nothing seriously—neither themselves nor
their cause, neither us nor our situation. One of the worst among them was Dr. Mengele, the Camp
Doctor I have mentioned before. When a batch of newly arrived Jews was being classified into those fit
for work and those fit for death, he would whistle a melody and rhythmically jerk his thumb over his
right or his left shoulder—which meant ‘gas’ or ‘work.’ He thought conditions in the camp rotten, and
even did a few things to improve them, but at the same time he committed murder callously, without
any qualms.”
These armies of bureaucrats serve a corporate system that will quite literally kill us. They are as cold
and disconnected as Mengele. They carry out minute tasks. They are docile. Compliant. They obey.
They find their self-worth in the prestige and power of the corporation, in the status of their positions
and in their career promotions. They assure themselves of their own goodness through their private
acts as husbands, wives, mothers and fathers. They sit on school boards. They go to Rotary. They attend
church. It is moral schizophrenia. They erect walls to create an isolated consciousness. They make the
lethal goals of ExxonMobil or Goldman Sachs or Raytheon or insurance companies possible. They
destroy the ecosystem, the economy and the body politic and turn workingmen and -women into
impoverished serfs. They feel nothing. Metaphysical naiveté always ends in murder. It fragments the
world. Little acts of kindness and charity mask the monstrous evil they abet. And the system rolls
forward. The polar ice caps melt. The droughts rage over cropland. The drones deliver death from the
sky. The state moves inexorably forward to place us in chains. The sick die. The poor starve. The
prisons fill. And the careerist, plodding forward, does his or her job.
Corporate Control and influence in academic spheres leads to an inverted
totalitarianism which precludes any concern for morality.
Seybold 14 — Peter Seybold is an associate professor at Indiana University/Purdue UniversityIndianapolis (IUPUI), Department of Sociology,2014 ("Servants of Power: Higher Education in an Era of
Corporate Control," Truthout, 6-22-2014, Available Online at http://www.truthout.org/news/item/24305-servants-of-power-higher-education-in-an-era-of-corporate-control,
Accessed 7-16-2015)//CM
Over the last 40 years, we have witnessed a dramatic change in the structure of power in the United States .
Since the mid-1970s, a one-sided class war has taken place and the ruling class has been winning. It has
altered the relationship between capitalism and democracy, and in turn has subjugated a variety of
institutions to the logic of capitalism. Douglas Frazier, former head of the United Auto Workers (UAW), took note of this class
war early on, and more recently super-rich investor Warren Buffet has also commented on how his class has waged a very successful class war
against the rest of the American population. Academia has really been slow to assess the changing dynamics of capitalism and the erosion of
democracy in the United States. Those who have written about this tidal wave of change have been marginalized by being labeled conspiracy
theorists or radicals with an axe to grind - or professors who have not been able to climb the ladder to academic stardom. One sees little
discussion in mainstream academic publications of the profound influence that the Powell Memorandum (1971) has had on key institutions
that make up the US cultural apparatus. Powell, who later became a Supreme Court justice, argued in his memo that business had to wage a
counterattack against the left in American society. He urged the business community to mobilize and to finance conservative foundations, think
tanks, media organizations and endowed professorships in order to advance a cultural war carried out by elites. Powell argued in his memo to
the US Chamber of Commerce that business had to retake control over the media and the university as part of an orchestrated campaign to
alter social and political discourse in America. Powell's proposal was certainly ambitious and involved a long battle to bend institutions in the
direction of the interests of the business community. This campaign was in direct response to gains made by the social movements of the 1960s
and early 1970s and the legislation that was passed in response to these movements. In Powell's vision, the goal was not just to blunt the
influence of left and progressive forces in the United States; it was to fundamentally shift the country in a conservative direction by weakening
labor unions, attacking the social wage, repressing social movements and recapturing the media and higher education. What was to transpire
over the course of the next 40 years largely followed the outlines of Powell's proposal and dramatically altered the balance of power in the
country by eroding democratic institutions and restricting public spaces. It is not an exaggeration to say that during this period, conservatives
completely out-organized left and progressive social forces and changed the landscape of social and political discourse. Business
ultimately benefited the most from this cultural war, although its major concern was - as always commodifying more and more areas of life, expanding profitability and reconstituting ideological control, rather
than engaging in the politics of morality. The long-term consequences of this orchestrated campaign
have resulted in the degradation of life in the United States as the institutions which previously
undergirded the social safety net have come under fierce attack. In the process, the opportunity for
the American people to hold the powerful accountable has been reduced to rituals of democracy
which are more about form than substance. As Sheldon Wolin has eloquently argued in his book, Democracy Inc. (2008), the
net result of this extended campaign by elites is a managed democracy with a demobilized public that
blurs the lines between corporations and government and eviscerates concerns about the public
good. Wolin maintains that the present social and political formation in the United States might best
be described as "inverted totalitarianism." The political arena is structurally incapable of addressing the major problems facing
the American people. Taking the Powell Memorandum seriously and understanding what Wolin has asserted about the US political system does
not involve embracing conspiracy theory. It is not the case that elites in the United States developed a plan to recapture major institutions and
bend them toward the interests of business and did so without encountering resistance. As Marx was so fond of reminding us, capitalism
always generates its own opposition and in the period from the mid-1970s to the present, there has been considerable resistance bubbling
underneath the surface of American society. The long-term consequences of a successful cultural war by the right have been to shift the
balance of social forces and institutions in the direction of business and to marginalize social justice movements. As the Occupy Movement
illustrated, efforts by elites were unable to stamp out the opposition or contain the outrage generated by running the country solely for the
interests of mega corporations. As Antonio Gramsci argued, hegemony
is never completely successful; it has to be
constantly defended, revised and reproduced, and this involves a struggle between different social
classes. However, probably the most insidious effect which hegemony has had on American society is
that it has shifted the range of debate to the right and redefined the acceptable policy options
available to the major political parties. The Democrats now represent center/right policy alternatives and the Republicans now
represent right/extreme right policy prescriptions. Consequently, the political arena is structurally incapable of addressing the major problems
facing the American people. The
height of hegemony is when even the form and content of the opposition has
been affected by the institutionalized thought structure. This is exactly what has happened in the United States when
social movements have been marginalized or repressed, and when critics of society have been effectively contained. Consequently, the
range of debate has been narrowed and the institutions that previously were independent and served
as the conscience of society have been integrated into the social order. Wolin's nightmare of inverted
totalitarianism no longer seems far-fetched.
Without changing educational institutions and resisting neoliberal control, we risk a
fundamental erosion of democracy and social justice movements, especially those
centered in academia
Seybold 14 — Peter Seybold is an associate professor at Indiana University/Purdue UniversityIndianapolis (IUPUI), Department of Sociology,2014 ("Servants of Power: Higher Education in an Era of
Corporate Control," Truthout, 6-22-2014, Available Online at http://www.truthout.org/news/item/24305-servants-of-power-higher-education-in-an-era-of-corporate-control,
Accessed 7-16-2015)//CM
So how does academia fit into the grim picture painted above? Higher education, I would argue, has mimicked the trends in
the larger society and can often be seen as a microcosm of this larger struggle. More and more
universities and colleges in the United States have fallen into line and have functioned as servants of power.
Fittingly, in 1984, I was asked to make a presentation at another university. I entitled my talk "Toward a Corporate Service Station." I believed at
the time that the university was being pushed and pulled in a direction that threatened its goals and ideals. Thirty years later, I believe even
more strongly that the university has lost its soul and has auctioned off its services to the highest bidder.
There is no better example of this trend than the growth of for-profit universities that make bundles of money from desperate students while
strangling them with incredible levels of debt in pursuit of dubious credentials. However, it is too easy to just put this at the doorstep of forprofit educational institutions, because they are doing what they were created to do - make money and commodify education. Even more
disturbing is that universities and colleges are aligning themselves with corporate America. In 2008, I published a
short essay called "The Struggle Against Corporate Takeover of the University" in Socialism and Democracy. I continue to be interested in the
university as a microcosm of the larger struggle in American society involving the commodification of culture and the attack on the commons. I
am also interested in linking what is happening in higher education to the attack on the middle and working classes: the growing polarization of
American society, and the weakening connection between education, the American Dream and the promotion of democratic principles. As
Henry Giroux has so aptly put it, we
are experiencing "the near death of the university as a democratic sphere."
Things have become considerably worse for universities and colleges since 2008, and the
attack on these institutions has
further degraded campus life and has put the traditional mission of higher education in peril. Faced with
budget cuts, hostile legislatures, university administrators who increasingly identify themselves with corporate CEOs, and communities which
have been buffeted by the forces unleashed by the economic crash, universities are increasingly being run like mega corporations. In Giroux's
words, "Casino
capitalism does more than infuse market values into every aspect of higher education; it
wages a full-fledged assault on public goods, democratic public spheres, and the role of education in
creating an informed and enlightened citizenry." We don't have to accept the assault on university ideals and programs as
inevitable or as another example of "there is no alternative." Instead we need to forge a common understanding across
sectors of the university community to resist corporate takeover of academe. To be successful in this project will
require going beyond the academic community and reaching out to students, parents, workers and community members who have been
adversely affected by the direction the university has taken. We
must indeed see the university as an arena for struggle
in order to revive higher education and its ideals and to contribute to the larger struggle for
democracy and social justice. As someone who has worked in higher education for his entire career, I sense a tremendous unease
and decline in morale in academe. Some would say that this is normal because the university has been subject to the same technological forces
as any other institution and inevitably this leads to changing the way people work. Surely, there is an element of faculty grumbling about having
to do things differently and being subjected to increased scrutiny. But there is more than just this going on in higher education. Running a
university like a business degrades all aspects of university life and negatively affects administrators, faculty, professional staff, workers,
students, parents and the community. Commodifying
education alienates people from each other, from the
institution, from their work, and diminishes people's expectations. Corporate logic changes priorities
and changes the allocation of resources for the institution. To argue against the corporatization of the university is not
to harken back to the "good old days" in academe because, as Noam Chomsky has argued, "we should put aside any idea that
there was once a 'golden age.'" As Chomsky describes it, "things were different and in some ways better in the past, but far from
perfect." (Chomsky, 2014). He goes on to say that "traditional universities were for example, extremely hierarchical, with very little democratic
participation in decision-making." While his description is accurate, academe still maintained relative autonomy from society, and also paid lip
service to ideals that go back to the Enlightenment. The
university did provide a rather unique public space to think,
debate and criticize, and at least at one time, tried to teach students to be better, more engaged,
public citizens. It was also generally the case that those who worked in academe believed that the institution was exempt from some of
the pressures which affected other institutions, and that the university, despite what was happening in the larger society, would be successful
in protecting itself from the corrosive effects of capitalist society. To be sure, in a previous era, many sought work in academe to maintain their
independence, escape the restrictions imposed by capitalist society and work in a more humane and less commodified workplace. All of this has
changed in the last 30 years or so as universities
have had to adapt to a rapidly changing social, political and
economic environment. Instead of leading the fight against the decline of the public sphere and the erosion of democracy,
universities have accepted the conditions imposed on them by neoliberalism and have adjusted to the
new status quo. Instead of speaking truth to power they have more often become servants of power. The
consequences for academe have been catastrophic for the institution and its mission, for the general
public, and for the wellbeing of democracy. If the university fails to perform its functions to teach
students to think critically and to serve as the conscience of society, what other institution in
American society will assume these responsibilities? As Giroux suggests, "Critical thinking and a literate
public have become dangerous to those who want to celebrate orthodoxy over dialogue, emotion
over reason, and ideological certainty over thoughtfulness."Wider Implications of Corporate Cooptation of Academia
The wider implications of the corporate cooptation of higher education and the success of the cultural war waged by elites since the 1970s are
clearly explained by Sheldon Wolin: Inverted
totalitarianism, although at times capable of harassing or discrediting critics, has
instead cultivated a loyal intelligentsia of its own. Through a combination of government contracts, corporate and
foundation funds, joint projects involving university and corporate researchers, and wealthy individual donors, universities (especially research
universities), intellectuals, scholars and researchers have been seamlessly integrated into the system… During
the months leading
up to and following the invasion of Iraq, university and college campuses, which had been such notorious centers
of opposition to the Vietnam War that politicians and publicists spoke seriously of the need to 'pacify the campuses,' hardly stirred. The
Academy had become self-pacifying (Wolin, 2008:68). College has become "the great unleveler." The seamless
integration of higher education into the logic of corporate capitalism has created a new natural order
of things where critics of the new social arrangements are chastised for not keeping up with the
requirements of the post-modern economy and holding on to the past as the world passes them by.
The university, it has been argued, had to reinvent itself to adjust to the current circumstances or it would
lose out in the competition. The market would now dictate what the best practices would be in higher
education and the guidelines for leading the institution would be adapted from the corporate world.
What follows is an account of the corrosive effects of embracing corporate logic on higher education.
Corporatization of higher education has taken its toll on an institution, which previously was
considered one of the great triumphs of the American system. Combined with rampant inequality, a college education
is now more the province of the privileged and, as The New York Times recently pointed out, college has become "the great unleveler."
The corporatization of education has serious implications for teaching, innovation, and
social justice movements – these all spill over into society
Seybold 14 — Peter Seybold is an associate professor at Indiana University/Purdue UniversityIndianapolis (IUPUI), Department of Sociology,2014 ("Servants of Power: Higher Education in an Era of
Corporate Control," Truthout, 6-22-2014, Available Online at http://www.truthout.org/news/item/24305-servants-of-power-higher-education-in-an-era-of-corporate-control,
Accessed 7-16-2015)//CM
For those from the richest fifth, the annual cost of attending a four-year college has inched up from 6 percent of family income in 1971 to 9
percent in 2011. For everyone else, the change is formidable. For those in the poorest fifth, costs at State U have skyrocketed from 42 percent
of family income to 114 percent. A tiered system has evolved where the top 20 percent of the population is able to afford a university
education. The bottom 80 percent is increasingly burdened with debt if they pursue post-secondary education, and they are consigned to
schools in which the college experience often resembles vocational education. These trends are consistent with the imposition of a neoliberal
agenda on a variety of American institutions. The
impact of corporatization distorts and reshapes the university,
which in turn affects American society. I will focus on four areas which come to mind when examining the corrosive effects of
corporatization on the university: 1) the way in which universities are administered in this corporate age, 2) the state of academic labor and
how it has changed over time, 3) the redefinition of university education and the alteration of the curriculum to meet corporate influences, and
4) the decline of public intellectuals and the diminished role of universities as independent centers of thought and debate. Henry Giroux, in his
piece entitled "Beyond Neoliberal Miseducation," cites Debra Leigh Scott who points out that "administrators
now outnumber
faculty on every campus across the country." The top-down control of university governance by
administrators has severely compromised faculty governance. Universities now recruit former CEOs of major
companies or former prominent politicians to run complex university systems. Many of these recruits have no prior experience in academe and
are not steeped in the traditions of the university community which they seek to lead. At Purdue University, the former governor of Indiana,
Mitch Daniels, now serves as president of the university. Almost immediately after Daniels took over at Purdue, a firestorm of protest by faculty
and students ensued. This is just one example, but the
time-tested way of doing things in a university system has
been systematically dismantled. Like the larger society, an illusion of democratic participation in
decision-making has replaced actual participation in university decisions and dissenters have been
threatened with sanctions for questioning the current institutional arrangements. Governor Pat
McCrory of North Carolina illustrates clearly the mentality of conservative politicians and their
attitudes toward university education. McCrory has argued: "If you want to take gender studies, that's fine, go
to a private school. But I don't want to subsidize that if that's not going to get someone a job." As I
mentioned earlier, university administrators have largely adopted business management principles, and units within a university are now
evaluated as stand-alone units responsible for paying for themselves. This practice has seriously affected cooperation between departments
and interaction with service units on campus, and has set off a wave of competition between schools within a university. Running a university
like a business is relatively easy to institutionalize, but its intended and unintended consequences degrade the university environment and
negatively impact the morale of everyone on campus. Under
this system, the university runs more efficiently within a
very narrowly conceived understanding of efficiency, but over time it tends to distort the allocation of
resources on campus by shifting money and personnel to segments of campus that generate profits,
attract grants and embrace neoliberal orthodoxy. An illusion of democratic participation in decision-making has replaced
actual participation in university decisions and dissenters have been threatened with sanctions for questioning the current institutional
arrangements. The area of campus in which the harshest effects of corporatization can be seen is the organization of academic labor. More and
more faculty these days are hired off tenure-track in order to cut costs and establish greater control over academic labor. In 2007, according to
the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), 70 percent of the faculty on college campuses were adjuncts and other contingent
employees. These trends continue as tenure-track faculty who retire are replaced by adjunct faculty. The pay of adjunct faculty is deplorable
and their working conditions are just as bad as they travel between part-time teaching jobs and have little time - or even an office in which - to
talk with their students. As James Hoff and other critics of the current practices of utilizing adjuncts assert, the system of low pay creates a
hierarchy within academia and creates even more tiers within the system (Hoff, 2014). Ever mindful of the threat to their economic livelihood,
contingent faculty have to toe the line and are not accorded the common courtesies extended to fulltime faculty because their job security is at risk. Hoff goes on to argue that universities now spend more on
administration than they do on teachers. According to Benjamin Ginsberg's book The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the AllAdministrative University and Why It Matters, between 1985 and 2005 administrative spending increased by 85
percent and the number of administrative support staff increased by a whopping 240 percent. At the
same time spending on faculty increased by only around 50 percent. Hoff also goes on to make the important point that
students who are most in need, poor and working class students, first generation students and students of color are most
frequently taught by adjunct faculty. The casualization of academic labor thus affects the quality of
instruction by restricting the time that faculty can spend with students and the possibilities for
mentoring opportunities. In addition, low pay for contingent faculty also calls into question whether
someone can maintain an adequate standard of living by teaching in college or junior college. Mirroring the
inequality in the larger society, the average administrative salary, for instance, at the University of Vermont was $210,851 per year. This was
more than seven times the annual salary of maintenance workers at the university (Jacobs, Counterpunch, Feb. 21-23, 2014). As tuition and
other fees on campus skyrocket, the money generated is disproportionately allocated to the most privileged segments of campus, while the
lowest wage workers on campus often qualify for food stamps. In a piece in Salon, Keith Heller has called the current practices at US colleges
and universities "the Wal-Mart-ization of higher education." He argues that more and more faculty are underpaid and undervalued. The
casualization of academic labor is gaining increased attention nationwide as parents, students and the university
community come to grips with the skewed priorities of University, Inc. Some of the basic principles underlying effective
pedagogy, such as small class size, individual attention and the importance of mentoring, are being
sacrificed in order to increase head count, limit labor costs and create a one-size-fits-all educational
experience. Some of the basic principles underlying effective pedagogy, such as small class size, individual attention and the importance of
mentoring, are being sacrificed in order to increase head count, limit labor costs and create a one-size-fits-all educational experience. A key
aspect of the movement to reorder the priorities of higher education is the redefinition of the
university experience in line with neoliberal principles. Reflecting the inequality in the larger society, the college
experience is being segmented by the kind of school that students are able to afford. Students from the top tier continue to enjoy the benefits
of practices which are now increasingly only found at elite universities and colleges. In other tiers, for instance, a liberal arts education is
devalued and in public universities that are not in the top tier, the educational experience emphasizes finding an area of study that will yield a
job. Training
has often been substituted for a broad liberal arts experience and students influenced by
the difficult job market also question why they need to take subjects that are not directly related to
what they will do when they leave college.
Education remains open to corporate control and abuse – this precludes critical
thinking and questioning the world around us.
Seybold 14 — Peter Seybold is an associate professor at Indiana University/Purdue UniversityIndianapolis (IUPUI), Department of Sociology,2014 ("Servants of Power: Higher Education in an Era of
Corporate Control," Truthout, 6-22-2014, Available Online at http://www.truthout.org/news/item/24305-servants-of-power-higher-education-in-an-era-of-corporate-control,
Accessed 7-16-2015)//CM
The promise of the university has been subverted by corporate power. The orchestrated attack on the university
has taken its toll. The university used to be a place where critical thinking was encouraged, where the
imagination was expanded, and democratic practices were extended. Corporate influence over the
university has fundamentally changed the trajectory of the institution. Of course, universities bolstered the
status quo in the past, as well, but they did provide opportunities for radical thinkers and they were not as dependent on
corporate funding in the past. The struggle against the corporate university is part of a larger struggle
for social justice in American society. As I have argued in this paper, higher education is not exempt from the social and political
forces that impacted other key institutions in American society. However, the fate of higher education has not been
decided and the corporate restructuring of the academy is being resisted. Higher education and its professoriate
have been targeted because they represent a major reservoir of resistance to corporate control and the erosion of democracy. As Antonio
Gramsci reminded us, hegemony is not easily accomplished. It involves social, political and cultural struggle to produce and reproduce the
dominant order. According to Gramsci, hegemony is never complete - it is constantly resisted even if only in a fragmented way. Just
as
there has been a war waged on women and the poor in the United States, there is a cultural war being
waged on the ideals of the American university. Higher education and its professoriate have been
targeted because they represent a major reservoir of resistance to corporate control and the erosion
of democracy. The last thing that elites want to encourage is a space in which critical thinking is
nourished and a liberal arts education is valued. Universities naturally are places where one might find
people who are trained to "think big," and who have developed an understanding of the inherent
contradictions of capitalism. It is for this reason that a campaign to restructure the academy into a
corporate service station has taken place. In the struggle for hegemony in American society, the university as traditionally
understood is contradictory in nature. On the one hand, it has the potential to be a very unique commodity - one which makes bundles of
money and one which helps elite ideas and elite ideology become hegemonic. On the other hand, it can play a crucial role in questioning the
dominant ideology and producing critical thinkers. The contradictory role played by universities in American society has made higher education
an arena for struggle over the last 30 years. Corporate
elites seek to enlist the university in its battle to impose its
will on the rest of society. They seek to blunt the critical impulses of the university and reinforce its
role as a defender of neoliberalism. The challenge to everyone in academia is to resist corporatization of higher education. We
still have the capacity to imagine a different university that contributes to the fight to create a different, more peaceful and more democratic
society. The goal should be to build a broader coalition for social justice, to reimagine the future and to create a counter hegemony. To do
these things we must firmly reject the current path. We must be clear that the
more humane than simply being a servant to power.
university stands for something greater and
They Say: “Citizens United”
Citizens United did nothing to change the politics or increase Corporate Control –
Corporations aren’t asserting control by spending money now
Bai 12 – Matt Bai is the Chief Political Correspondent for the New York Times, 2012 (“How Much Has
Citizens United Changed the Political Game?,” New York Times, 7-17-2012, available via
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/magazine/how-much-has-citizens-united-changed-the-politicalgame.html, accessed on 7-10-2015)//CM
“A hundred million dollars is nothing,” the venture capitalist Andy Rappaport told me back in the
summer of 2004. This was at a moment when wealthy liberals like George Soros and Peter Lewis were
looking to influence national politics by financing their own voter-turnout machine and TV ads and by
creating an investment fund for start-ups. Rappaport’s statement struck me as an expression of
supreme hubris. In American politics at that time, $100 million really meant something. Eight years later,
of course, his pronouncement seems quaint. Conservative groups alone, including a super PAC led by
Karl Rove and another group backed by the brothers Charles and David Koch, will likely spend more than
a billion dollars trying to take down Barack Obama by the time November rolls around. The reason for
this exponential leap in political spending, if you talk to most Democrats or read most news reports,
comes down to two words: Citizens United. The term is shorthand for a Supreme Court decision that
gave corporations much of the same right to political speech as individuals have, thus removing virtually
any restriction on corporate money in politics. The oft-repeated narrative of 2012 goes like this:
Citizens United unleashed a torrent of money from businesses and the multimillionaires who run
them, and as a result we are now seeing the corporate takeover of American politics. As a matter of
political strategy, this is a useful story to tell, appealing to liberals and independent voters who aren’t
necessarily enthusiastic about the administration but who are concerned about societal inequality,
which is why President Obama has made it a rallying cry almost from the moment the Citizens United
ruling was made. But if you’re trying to understand what’s really going on with politics and money, the
accepted narrative around Citizens United is, at best, overly simplistic. And in some respects, it’s just
plain wrong. It helps first to understand what Citizens United did and didn’t do to change the opaque
rules governing outside money. Go back to, say, 2007, and pretend you’re a conservative donor. At this
moment, you would still have been free to write a check for any amount to a 527 — so named because
of the shadowy provision in the tax code that made such groups legal. (America Coming Together and
the infamous Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were both 527s.) Even corporations, though they couldn’t
contribute to a candidate or a party, were free to write unlimited checks to something called a socialwelfare group, whose principal purpose, ostensibly, is issue advocacy rather than political activity. The
anti-tax Club for Growth, for instance, is a social-welfare group. So, remarkably, is the Koch brothers’
Americans for Prosperity and Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS. Photo There were, however, a few caveats
when it came to the way these groups could spend their money. Neither a 527 nor a social-welfare
group could engage in “express advocacy” — that is, overtly making the case for one candidate over
another. Nor could they use corporate money for “electioneering communications” — a category
defined as radio or television advertising that even mentions a candidate’s name within 30 days of a
primary or 60 days of a general election. So under the old rules, the Club for Growth couldn’t broadcast
an ad that said “Vote Against Barack Obama,” but it could spend that money on as many ads as it
wanted that said “Barack Obama has ruined America — call and tell him to stop!” as long as it did so
more than 60 days before an election. (The distinction between those two ads may sound silly and
arcane to you, but that’s why you don’t sit on the Federal Election Commission.) Citizens United and a
couple of related court decisions changed all of this in two essential ways, and each of them was more
incremental than transformational. First, the Supreme Court wiped away much of the rigmarole about
“express advocacy” and “electioneering.” Now any outside group can use corporate money to make a
direct case for who deserves your vote and why, and they can do so right up to Election Day. The second
change is that the old 527s have now been made effectively obsolete, replaced by the super PAC. The
main difference between a super PAC and a social-welfare group, practically speaking, is that a super
PAC has to disclose the identity of its donors, while social-welfare groups generally do not. Those who
criticize the effect of Citizens United look at these very technical changes and see an obvious causal
relationship. The high court says outside groups are allowed to use corporate dollars to expressly
support candidates, and suddenly we have this tidal wave of money threatening to overwhelm the
airways. One must have led to the other, right? Well, not necessarily. Legally speaking, zillionaires were
no less able to write fat checks four years ago than they are today. And while it is true that
corporations can now give money for specific purposes that were prohibited before, it seems they
aren’t, or at least not at a level that accounts for anything like the sudden influx of money into the
system. According to a brief filed by Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, and Floyd Abrams,
the First Amendment lawyer, in a Montana case on which the Supreme Court ruled last month, not a
single Fortune 100 company contributed to a candidate’s super PAC during this year’s Republican
primaries. Of the $96 million or more raised by these super PACs, only about 13 percent came from
privately held corporations, and less than 1 percent came from publicly traded corporations. This only
tells part of the story. The general election has just begun, and big energy and health care companies
may still be pouring money into social-welfare groups that don’t have to disclose their donors. The
watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington reported last month, for instance,
that Aetna anonymously contributed more than $7 million to two such groups. We may never know
precisely how much money is coming from similar companies, which should alarm anyone who cares
about the integrity and transparency of government. But the best anecdotal evidence suggests that this
kind of thing isn’t happening in nearly the proportions you might expect. Kenneth Gross, an election
lawyer who represents an array of large corporations, told me that few of his clients have contributed to
the social-welfare groups engaged in political activity this year. They know those contributions might
become public at some point, and no company that sells a product wants to risk the kind of consumer
reaction that engulfed Target in 2010, after it contributed $150,000 to a Minnesota group backing a
conservative candidate opposing gay marriage. “If you’ve got a bank on every corner, if you’ve got
stores in every strip mall, you don’t want to be associated with a social cause,” Gross told me. None of
this is to say that Citizens United hasn’t had an impact. Gross and others point out that in the era before
Citizens United, while individuals and companies could still contribute huge sums to outside groups,
they were to some extent deterred by the confusing web of rules and the liability they might incur for
violations. What the new rulings did, as the experts like to put it, was to “lift the cloud of uncertainty”
that hung over such expenditures, and the effect of this psychological shift should not be
underestimated. It almost certainly accounts for some rise in political money this year, both from
individuals and companies. Even so, the Supreme Court’s ruling really wasn’t the sort of tectonic event
that Obama and his allies would have you believe it was. “I’d go so far as to call it a liberal delusion,”
Ira Glasser, the former executive director of the A.C.L.U. and a liberal dissenter on Citizens United, told
me. Which leads to an obvious question: If Citizens United doesn’t explain this billion-dollar blast of
outside money, then what does?
There’s no impact to Citizens United – it’s mostly felt on a state instead of nation-wide
level, and has no real effect on Corporate Control.
Bai 12 – Matt Bai is the Chief Political Correspondent for the New York Times, 2012 (“How Much Has
Citizens United Changed the Political Game?,” New York Times, 7-17-2012, available via
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/magazine/how-much-has-citizens-united-changed-the-politicalgame.html, accessed on 7-10-2015)//CM
If you’re a Democrat, there’s some good news here. One persistent fear you hear from liberals is that
Citizens United altered the balance between the parties in a permanent way — that corporate money
will give Republicans a structural advantage that can never be overcome. What’s more likely is that the
boom in outside money will prove to be cyclical, with the momentum swinging toward whoever feels
shut out and persecuted at the moment. Liberals dominated outside spending in 2004 and 2006. And
should Romney become president, they’ll most likely do so again. It’s worth asking just how much an
advantage all of this outside money actually confers. The greatest impact of this year’s imbalance in
outside money will be felt on the state level, where a lot of House seats and control of the Senate hang
in the balance, and where a sharp gust of advertising can often blow the results in one direction or
another. But a presidential campaign is different, focusing as it does on a dozen or so pivotal states and
a limited number of advertising markets. There’s probably a limit to how many 30-second spots all of
these groups can cram onto cable stations during late-night showings of “Turner & Hooch.” I recently
called Carter Eskew, a longtime Democratic adman and strategist whose clients included Al Gore in
2000, and asked him a simple question: How much did he think he would really need for a candidate
today, if he could have an unlimited budget to run a national ad campaign, including all the outside
money? Eskew paused before giving a declarative answer: $500 million. Anything beyond that, he said,
was probably overkill. In other words, there’s a threshold below which a presidential candidate can’t
really compete effectively, and that number — whether it’s $500 million or something less — is
outlandish enough that it should give us pause. But beyond that number, it’s not clear that spending
an extra $200 million or $500 million will really make all that much of a difference on Election Day.
More likely, the two ideological factions are now like rivals of the nuclear age, stockpiling enough bombs
to destroy the same cities over and over again, when one would do the job. You could even argue that
whatever benefit a campaign derives from all this money is balanced, somewhat, by the threat it poses.
Back in the days of soft money, a candidate had ownership of his party’s national apparatus and the
accusations it hurled on prime-time TV. He was responsible for the integrity of his argument, and his
advisers ultimately controlled it. What the reform-minded architects of McCain-Feingold inadvertently
unleashed, what Citizens United intensified but by no means created, is a world in which a big part of
the money in a presidential campaign is spent by political entrepreneurs and strategists who are
unanswerable to any institution. Candidates and parties who become the vehicles of angry outsiders, as
Mitt Romney is now, don’t really have control of their own campaigns anymore; to a large extent, they
are the instruments of volatile forces beyond their own reckoning. Maybe that makes for a cleaner and
more democratic system than the one we had before, in the way the campaign-finance reformers
intended. Standing here in 2012, it’s just hard to see how.
They Say: “FERPA Checks”
FERPA doesn’t protect student data — the Obama Department of Education continues
to ignore it.
Newman 13 — Alex Newman, president of Liberty Sentinel Media, Inc., a small information consulting
firm, degree in journalism from the University of Florida, foreign correspondent for The New American
magazine, writes for several publications in the U.S. and abroad, 2013 ("Orwellian Nightmare: Datamining Your Kids," The New American, August 1st, Available Online at
http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/education/item/16193-orwellian-nightmare-data-miningyour-kids, Accessed 7-7-2015)
Of course, all of the data collected must be shared with the U.S. Department of Education and other
entities within and outside the federal government. Acting unilaterally, U.S. Education Secretary Arne
Duncan even purported to overrule federal privacy laws by promulgating new “regulations” gutting
the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). Some lawmakers expressed outrage, but the
process continues.
“As part of what you described as a ‘cradle to career agenda,’ the Department of Education is
aggressively moving to expand data systems that collect information on our nation’s students,” wrote
Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.), now chairman of the House Education and Workforce Committee, in an early
2010 letter to Duncan. “The Department’s effort to shepherd states toward the creation of a de facto
national student database raises serious legal and prudential questions.”
As Kline points out in the letter, there is good reason to believe that the administration is again
flouting federal law. “Congress has never authorized the Department of Education to facilitate the
creation of a national student database,” he explained. “To the contrary, Congress explicitly prohibited
the ‘development of a nationwide database of personally identifiable information’ … and barred the
‘development, implementation, or maintenance of a Federal database.” Despite no mention of the
Constitution, multiple federal statutes are cited in the correspondence.
Apparently, the administration does not take kindly to having its alleged violations of the law
exposed. While it couldn’t fire Rep. Kline, the Education Department did reportedly dismiss its top
privacy official, then-Family Policy Compliance Office chief Paul Gammill. According to a 2010 report in
Inside Higher Ed, Gammill was fired after he “argued in internal meetings and documents that the
department’s approach to prodding states to expand their longitudinal student data systems violated
the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.” The Education Department refused to comment on the
case, though it openly admits that one of the long-term goals of the SLDS program is to “make education
data transparent through Federal and public reporting.”
2AC — Critical Thinking
2AC — Common Core Hurts Critical Thinking
Common Core testing ruins critical thinking and drives students away from education.
Natale 14 — Elizabeth Natale, English and language arts teacher for more than 15 years, in an
Interview with Breitbart News, Byline Dr. Susan Berry, 2014 (“Connecticut Teacher's Op-Ed Against
Common Core Goes Viral,” Breitbart News, January 26th, Available Online at
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2014/01/26/connecticut-teacher-s-op-ed-against-commoncore-goes-viral/, Accessed 06-23-2015)
Breitbart News: Supporters of Common Core say the standards are “rigorous” and teach “critical
thinking,” and will prepare students for “college and career” and a “global 21st century economy.”
You said in your op-ed that Common Core is “a system that focuses on preparing workers rather than
thinkers, collecting data rather than teaching and treating teachers as less than professionals.” What
about this huge discrepancy in how the standards are viewed?
Elizabeth Natale: I’m not opposed to rigor and critical thinking. Given the emphasis on non-fiction
reading, however, I don’t think this curriculum is preparing students for college and career or for the
global 21st century economy. Since when is reading and analyzing fiction irrelevant in the 21st century?
Students need to do this type of critical thinking in their careers, in college, and in the 21st century.
When I worked in public relations at Trinity College in Hartford, the alumni magazine ran a story about
graduates employed on Wall Street. The largest percentage of them were religion majors. Why?
Because religion majors have to think critically. They can be trained to do the work in any sort of
career.
BBN: It seems that many parents still don’t know much about the new standards. Are parents becoming
more informed and, if so, what’s your impression of their reactions to them?
EN: I don’t think the majority of parents know that much about it. I especially don’t think they know
much about the SBAC [Smarter Balance Assessment Consortium] testing. Again, my argument is less
with Common Core than with the associated testing. I have had a few parents write to me about talking
with their children about SBAC for the first time after reading my piece and being shocked at the
negative comments made by their children. Parents should sit down and look at the test with their
children. They should ask their children what they think about it. I also have had a few parents write to
say they are “opting out” when it comes to SBAC testing.
BBN: If a parent came to observe your classroom, would he or she see a difference because of Common
Core, and what would that difference be?
EN: I’m trying to resist changing everything I know is good just because of Common Core, but the test
looms over all of us. We give many more assessments to collect data. We give the student
assessments that are contrived to resemble SBAC testing, which is so counterproductive. I’m more
stressed, and I know the students sense that. I don’t think learning has to be “fun” every minute, but
Common Core and testing is certainly hurting everyone’s ability to be excited.
2AC — Education Impact — National Security
Lack of history and language education weakens military responses to crises
Council on Foreign Relations 12 – The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is an independent think
tank dedicated to being a resource for its members in order to help them better understand the world
and the foreign policy choices facing the United States and other countries, 2012 (“U.S. Education
Reform and National Security,” CFR Independent Task Force Report No. 68, March 2012, available online
via http://www.cfr.org/united-states/us-education-reform-national-security/p27618, accessed on
7/8/15)//CM - Edited for ablest language
The lack of language skills and civic and global awareness among American citizens increasingly
jeopardizes their ability to interact with local and global peers or participate meaningfully in business,
diplomatic, and military situations. The United States is not producing enough foreign-language
speakers to staff important posts in the U.S. Foreign Service, the intelligence community, and American
companies. A GAO report found that the State Department faces “foreign language shortfalls in areas
of strategic interest.”22 In Afghanistan, the report found, thirty-three 2of forty-five officers in languagedesignated positions did not meet the State Department’s language requirements. In Iraq, eight of
fourteen officers did not have the necessary skills. Shortages in such languages as Dari, Korean,
Russian, Turkish, Chinese languages, and others are substantial.23 This leaves the United States crippled
[weakened] in its ability to communicate effectively with others in diplomatic, military, intelligence,
and business contexts. Too many Americans are also deficient in both global awareness and
knowledge of their own country’s history and values. An understanding of history, politics, culture,
and traditions is important to citizenship and is essential for understanding America’s allies and its
adversaries. A failure to learn about global cultures has serious consequences: a recent report by the
U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences asserted that “cultural learning” and
“cultural agility” are critical skills in the military.24 What the authors call crosscultural competence
allows soldiers to correctly read and assess situations they encounter. It also gives them the tools they
need to respond effectively and in line with the norms of the local culture. Finally, it helps them
anticipate and respond to resistances or challenges that arise. “Our forces must have the ability to
effectively communicate with and understand the cultures of coalition forces, international partners,
and local populations,” U.S. secretary of defense Leon Panetta wrote in an August 2011 memo. “[The
Department of Defense] has made progress in establishing a foundation for these capabilities, but we
need to do more to meet current and future demands.”25
2AC — Education Impact — Hegemony
Education is key to U.S. world power – declining education trends risk decreases in
stability
Council on Foreign Relations 12 – The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is an independent think
tank dedicated to being a resource for its members in order to help them better understand the world
and the foreign policy choices facing the United States and other countries, 2012 (“U.S. Education
Reform and National Security,” CFR Independent Task Force Report No. 68, March 2012, available online
via http://www.cfr.org/united-states/us-education-reform-national-security/p27618, accessed on
7/8/15)//CM
In a broader sense, the growing gap between the educated and the undereducated is creating a
widening chasm that divides Americans and has the potential to tear at the fabric of society. As
problems within the American education system have worsened, mobility that was possible in
previous generations has waned. For the first time, most Americans think it is unlikely that today’s
youth will have a better life than their parents.26 With wider income inequality and an increase in
poverty, young people born to poor parents are now less likely to perform well in school and graduate
from college than their better-off peers, and they are increasingly less likely to rise out of poverty.27
This trend not only causes the American Dream to appear out of reach to more citizens but also
breeds isolationism and fear. The Task Force fears that this trend could cause the United States to turn
inward and become less capable of being a stabilizing force in the world, which it has been since the
mid-twentieth century. In short, unequal educational opportunities and the resulting achievement gap
have a direct impact on national security. Large, undereducated swaths of the population damage the
ability of the United States to physically defend itself, protect its secure information, conduct
diplomacy, and grow its economy. The unrelenting gap separating peers from peers also renders the
American Dream off limits to many young people. Task Force members fear this inequality may have a
long-term effect on U.S. culture and civil society.
2AC — Education Impact — Tyranny
Absent education, politics is useless. Education is starting point for fighting social
injustice and reshaping existing institutional relationships. The culture of non-thinking
guarantees tyranny.
Giroux 14 — Henry A. Giroux, Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural
Studies Department & Chair in Critical Pedagogy at The McMaster Institute for Innovation & Excellence
in Teaching & Learning, Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University, member of Truthout's
Board of Directors, author of dozens of books on learning and pedagogy including Youth in Revolt:
Reclaiming a Democratic Future, America's Educational Deficit and the War on Youth, Neoliberalism's
War on Higher Education, 2014 (“Data Storms and the Tyranny of Manufactured Forgetting,” Truthout,
June 24th, Available Online at http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/24550-data-storms-and-thetyranny-of-manufactured-forgetting#/, Accessed 06-25-2015)
Under the auspices of quality control, the cult of data and high-stakes testing becomes a signpost for
empirical madness and number crunching run amok. "Teaching to the test" more often than not results
in miseducating students while undermining any possibility of expanding their sense of wonder,
imagination, critique and social responsibility. Left unchecked, instrumental rationality parading as
educational reform will homogenize all knowledge and meaning, as it becomes a machine for
proliferating forms of civic and social death, deadening the spirit with the weight of dead time and a
graveyard of useless testing pedagogies. What does this have to do with the suppression of historical
consciousness and the death of politics in the broader culture? The answer becomes clearer when we
analyze the relationships among critical thinking, historical consciousness, and the notions of social
and self-emancipation.
If we think of emancipation as both a mode of critical understanding and a form of action designed to
overthrow structures of domination, we can begin to illuminate the interplay between historical
consciousness, critical thinking and emancipatory behavior. At the level of understanding, critical
thinking represents the ability to step beyond commonsense assumptions and to be able to evaluate
them in terms of their genesis, development and purpose. Such thinking should not be viewed simply
as a form of progressive reasoning; it must be considered in itself as a fundamental political act. In this
perspective, critical thinking becomes a mode of reasoning that, as Merleau-Ponty points out, is
embedded in the realization that "I am able," meaning that one can use individual capacities and
collective possibilities "to go beyond the created structures in order to create others."[29] Critical
thinking as a political act means that human beings must emerge from their own “submersion and
acquire the ability to intervene in reality as it is unveiled.”[30] Not only does this instil a sense that they
must work with others to actively shape history, but it also means that they must "escape" from their
own history - that is, the history which society has designated for them.
As historical memory is erased, critical thought is crushed by a sterile instrumental rationality under
the guise of mass information and a data storm.
As Jean Paul Sartre writes, "you become what you are in the context of what others have made of
you."[31] This is a crucial point, and one that links critical agency and historical consciousness. For we
must turn to history in order to understand the traditions that have shaped our individual biographies
and relationships with other human beings. This critical attentiveness to one's own history and culture
represents an important element in examining the socially constructed sources underlying one's
formative processes. To become aware of the processes of historical self-formation initiates an
important beginning in breaking apart the taken-for-granted assumptions that legitimize social
injustice and existing institutional arrangements. Therefore, critical thinking demands a form of
hermeneutic understanding that is historically grounded. Similarly, it must be stressed that the
capacity for a historically grounded critique is inseparable from those conditions that foster collective
communication and critical dialogue. In this case, such conditions take as a starting point the need to
delegitimize the culture of neoliberalism and the socio-economic structure it supports, particularly
what might be called a pernicious notion of instrumental rationality, with its one-sided emphasis on
mathematical utility, numbers, data and the cult of the empirical.
Schools play a crucial, but far from straightforward, role in reproducing the culture of ignorance and
instrumental rationality, though they are not alone as the popular media in its traditional and newer
digital formats have become a powerful educational force throughout the culture. Furthermore, the
mechanisms of social control - such as high-stakes testing - that increasingly characterize school life
are not new developments, despite what their proponents would claim for them. They are rooted in
the modern conditions that have functioned to transform human needs as well as buttress dominant
social and political institutions. Put another way, the prevailing mode of technocratic and
instrumental rationality that permeates both the schools and the larger society has not just been
tacked on to the existing social order as a recent innovation. It has developed historically over the last
century and with particular intensity since the end of the 1970s; consequently, it deeply saturates our
collective experiences, practices and routines. Thus, to overcome the culture of instrumental rationality
means that educators, artists, intellectuals and others will have to construct alternative social
formations and worldviews that transform both the consciousness as well as the deep vital structures
of schools and the larger American public. Put bluntly, education and the changing of habits,
consciousness, desires and knowledge must be viewed as both an educational task and central to any
viable notion of politics.
As a pedagogical challenge, progressives of various ideological stripes might engage in the political task
of making power visible by raising fundamental questions such as: What counts as knowledge? How is
this knowledge produced and legitimized? Whose interests does this knowledge serve? Who has
access to this knowledge? How is this knowledge distributed and reproduced in the classroom and wider
society? What kinds of social relationships are being produced at the level of everyday life in schools,
the workplace and other sites and may parallel or disrupt the social relations in the wider society? How
do the prevailing forms of public pedagogy and empirical methodological frenzy serve to legitimize
existing knowledge and practices?
Questions such as these, which focus on the production, distribution and legitimation of knowledge,
values, desires and subjectivities, should be related to the institutional arrangements of the larger
society. Moreover, these questions should be analyzed as part of a larger understanding of why so
many people participate in their own oppression, why they accept the values of an authoritarian
society, and why they are willing to embrace as common sense the cutthroat values, practices and
policies of neoliberalism, regardless of the misery caused by its malignant blend of social austerity
and unchecked casino capitalism. In other words, these are questions that should provide the
foundation for engaging the educative nature of politics as it disseminates its messages through all
those cultural apparatuses that are actively engaged in producing subjectivities amenable to the dictates
of an authoritarian society. It is important to recognize that these questions can help teachers,
students, young people, workers, artists, intellectuals and others to identify, understand and generate
those pivotal social processes needed to encourage the American public to become active participants
in the search for knowledge and meaning - a search designed to foster, rather than suppress, critical
thinking and social action.
Central to such a culture of questioning is the necessity to address the fact that the cult of instrumental
rationality in the United States has no language for relating the self to public life, social responsibility or
the demands of citizenship. It has nothing to say about what institutions should achieve to support
democracy, and why they too often fail. Instrumental reason erases the crucial question of how
knowledge is related to self-definition and weakens the ability of individuals to raise questions about
how knowledge works to secure particular forms of power and desire.
While it is true that critical thinking will not in and of itself change the nature of existing society,
engaging in an intellectual struggle with the death-driven rationality that now fuels neoliberal
capitalism will set the foundation for producing generations of young people who might launch a
larger social movement. Such a movement will enable new forms of struggle, and hopefully a new
future in which questions of justice, dignity, equality and compassion matter. The relationship
between the wider culture of instrumental rationality, commodification and privatization, and the wider
practices of public pedagogy is, in essence, a relationship between ideology and social control. The
dynamic at work in this relationship is complex and diverse. To begin to understand that dynamic as a
pedagogical and political issue is to understand that history is not predetermined, but waiting to be
seized.
The culture of instrumental rationality has undermined the critical nature of the civic and the political,
reduced education to a narrow focus on mathematical utility, weakened the democratic purpose of
schooling and other institutions, and undermined the role of educators, artists and other cultural
workers who are engaged and critical public intellectuals. Given the importance of education in and
out of schools in providing the formative culture necessary for students and others to develop the
capacities for connecting reason and freedom, ethics and knowledge, and learning and social change,
progressives must reclaim education as an emancipatory project deeply rooted in the goal of
expanding the possibilities of critical thought, agency and democracy itself.
Such a task is about reclaiming the Enlightenment emphasis on freedom, reason and informed hope as
well as engaging education as a crucial site of struggle, one that cannot be frozen in the empty,
depoliticizing ignorance that supports an oppressive culture of instrumental rationality. Near the end
of her life Hannah Arendt argued that thinking is the essence of politics because she recognized that no
politics could be visionary if it did not provide the foundation for human beings to become literate,
critical agents. Thinking is a dangerous activity, especially in dark times like the historical moment we
currently inhabit. But, for Arendt, what she called "nonthinking" is the real peril in that it allows
tyranny to take root, and history to repeat itself again and again. She wrote:
And to think always means to think critically. And to think critically is always to be hostile. Every thought
actually undermines whatever there is of rigid rules, general convictions, et cetera. Everything which
happens in thinking is subject to a critical examination of whatever there is. That is, there are no
dangerous thoughts for the simple reason that thinking itself is such a dangerous enterprise. . . .
nonthinking is even more dangerous. I don't deny that thinking is dangerous, but I would say not
thinking, ne pas reflechir c'est plus dangereux encore [not thinking is even more dangerous].[32]
No democratic society can survive with a configuration of power, institutions and politics dedicated to
keeping people ignorant while exploiting their needs, labor, desires and hopes for a better future.
Dependency and vulnerability are now viewed as a weakness, even as the public services and public
servants that might alleviate people's distress are defined as gratuitous costs by the neoliberal state.
American democracy is losing ground against an onslaught of neoliberal forces in every realm, not only
in the realm of politics. As historical memory is erased, critical thought is crushed by a sterile
instrumental rationality under the guise of mass information and a data storm. The formative cultures
and institutions that enable individuals to learn how to become critically engaged citizens are being
eviscerated. If unchecked, neoliberal barbarism will strengthen its dominance over everyday life, and
the transition into authoritarianism will quicken. The way out of this conundrum is not to be found in
the use of data-gathering technologies or in an uncritical faith in the expansion of new digital and social
media. Neither will it be discovered in a callous retreat from compassion and social responsibility, or in
reliance on a depoliticizing instrumental rationality.
It is only a rebirth of historical memory that will enable the merging of dangerous thinking, critical
knowledge and subversive action into a movement capable of reviving the dream of a future in which
the practice of radical democratization prevails. Memory work is dangerous, particularly to those
defenders of tyranny such as Cheney, Kristol, Rice and other warmongers for whom the politics of
forgetting is crucial to their own legitimation. When such anti-public intellectuals have returned to the
national spotlight in order to revel in history's erasure, it is time to make trouble and to hope, as
Herbert Marcuse once stated, that “the horizon of history is still open.”[33]
2AC — Value to Life Impact
The data-driven life is devoid of quality — we become automotons.
Feiler 14 — Bruce Feiler, writer for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The New York
Times Magazine, and Gourmet, where he won three James Beard Awards, contributor to NPR, ABC, NBC,
CBS, CNN and Fox News, author of 6 NYT bestsellers on education, families and success, 2014 ("The
United States of Metrics," New York Times, May 16th, Available Online at
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/fashion/the-united-states-of-metrics.html?_r=1, Accessed 7-62015)
In the last few years, there has been a revolution so profound that it’s sometimes hard to miss its
significance. We are awash in numbers. Data is everywhere. Old-fashioned things like words are in
retreat; numbers are on the rise. Unquantifiable arenas like history, literature, religion and the arts
are receding from public life, replaced by technology, statistics, science and math. Even the most
elemental form of communication, the story, is being pushed aside by the list.
The results are in: The nerds have won. Time to replace those arrows in the talons of the American eagle
with pencils and slide rules. We’ve become the United States of Metrics.
Given our new obsessions with numbers, you’re probably eager for some statistics to back up this
argument. (Actually, by this point, you’ve probably already stopped reading. A study by the Internet data
company Chartbeat looked at “deep user behavior” across two billion web visits and found that 55
percent of readers spent fewer than 15 seconds on a page.)
In any event, here goes:
HEALTH Sixty-nine percent of Americans track their weight, diet or exercise, while a third track their
blood pressure, sleep patterns and headaches. The market for digital fitness devices brought in $330
million last year and is expected to double this year. Samsung just added a heart-rate monitor to its
popular Galaxy line of phones. The No. 1 paid app on iTunes this spring is the Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock,
which monitors the amount and quality of winks you get and wakes you during a light phase of your
cycle. The app is the top seller in every G-8 country.
SOCIAL MEDIA Facebook is the king of metrics. The site counts the number of friends (average 338), the
number of likes on each status report, the number of comments on each report and the number of likes
on each comment. Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Foursquare and Tumblr all tally your followers and
connections, along with the number of pass-alongs, favorites and responses. Want to know how
influential you are on social media? Klout and Kred use analytics to rank your impact. Five hundred
million users have calculated their Klout score on a scale from 1 to 100.
SOCIAL SCIENCE That God-shaped hole in the universe? It’s been filled with social science. Whereas once
we quoted politicians or preachers, now we quote Gallup or Pew. (Actually, few neologisms better
capture the change in the United States in the last 50 years than the move from pew to Pew.) There’s a
study, poll or survey for everything these days. TED Talks, the headquarters of this movement, have
been viewed more than a billion times, and talks are ranked by views. The hottest nonfiction book this
spring is “Capital in the 21st Century,” a 696-page economic tome by Thomas Piketty.
Every generation gets the gurus it craves. Ours include Malcolm Gladwell, Daniel Kahneman, Brené
Brown, Jim Collins, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, Dan Gilbert, Dan Pink, Dan Ariely and Nate Silver.
What do they all have in common? They use research to tackle issues that were once the provenance of
poets, theologians and philosophers. (Also, there’s a 40 percent chance they’re named Dan.)
SPORTS While sports fans have always loved statistics, the explosion of fantasy sports in recent years
means that the statistics, in essence, now play one another. Fans assemble their own rosters of players
from various teams, then those teams “compete” based on metrics. Thirty-two million people play
fantasy sports each year. Offerings include baseball, football, rugby, professional wrestling, surfing, auto
racing, hockey and golf. (There’s even a Fantasy Congress.) The economic impact is $4 billion a year.
LIFESTYLE The Quantified Self movement utilizes life-logging, wearable computing and other techniques
to assemble what it calls “self-knowledge through numbers.” New York University just announced that it
has teamed with Hudson Yards to create the nation’s first “quantified community.” Electronic monitors
will collect data on such things as pedestrian traffic, air quality, energy consumption, composting
compliance, even the physical activity of residents in order to build a “smart community.” The app
Reporter pings you several times a day and asks you questions like “Where are you?,” “Who are you
with?” and “What did you learn today?” The service then creates a graph of your life.
There’s even smart cutlery. HapiFork tracks how fast you eat. If you don’t pause 10 seconds between
each bite, the utensil turns bright red and vibrates to slow you down.
Big Brother isn’t our big enemy anymore. It’s Big Self. That hovering eye in the sky watching every
move you make: It’s you.
So what are the consequences of this new numerized world?
Duncan Watts, a social scientist at Microsoft Research and the author of “Everything Is Obvious,”
welcomes the trend. He said all this new information enables better decisions.
“If you had to choose between a world in which you do everything based on instinct, tradition or some
vague, received wisdom, or you do something based on evidence, I would say the latter is the way to
go,” he said.
The challenge is coming up with the proper interpretation of the data, he said. Did you not get a full
night’s sleep because you were mindlessly flipping channels or watching Internet porn, or because you
were comforting a sick child or having a night of great sex the way they do in New Mexico?
“Coming up with the correct meaning is what’s hard,” Mr. Watts said.
Tony Haile, the chief executive of Chartbeat, which provides real-time analytics for ESPN, CNN and The
New York Times Company, agrees. (In addition to studying readers’ habits, nearly every major news
organization has invested in “data journalism,” the use of computerized tools to scan digital records, cull
big data and visualize complex stories through three-dimensional charts and revolving infographics.) He
said the benefits of metrics far outweigh the risks. Data provides what he calls a “sixth sense,” giving
instant feedback that’s objective. A former tour guide to the North Pole, Mr. Haile measures his sleep,
his exercise, his fat percentage and how many steps he takes each day.
“I do it because it’s fun,” he said. “I get a buzz when I see I’ve hit my 10,000 steps.”
Still, in the same way we never use one sense in isolation, Mr. Haile said, the same should apply to data.
“Just as looks can be deceiving, data can also be deceiving because they’re not the whole picture,” he
said. “But it’s an important part of the picture and one we didn’t have before. I’m much less concerned
about the data taking over as long as we remember that it’s an additional layer.”
Others, though, are concerned. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the statistician and former options trader who
wrote the best-selling book “The Black Swan,” about unexpected events, said he believes the current
obsession with metrics is a seductive trap.
“The evil here is not having metrics,” he said. “The problem is that you start trying to maximize every
metric you have and reduce everything else.”
Mr. Taleb said he likes knowing how many kilograms of meat he’s buying, but if his meal is measured
only by kilograms of meat and calories consumed, then dozens of other uncountable qualities, like the
pleasure of the food or the quality of the conversation, go ignored.
“As a scientist, I can say that very little is measurable,” he said, “and even those things that are
measurable, you cannot trust the measurement beyond a certain point.”
Many nonscientists are even more frustrated. Anne Lamott, the novelist and nonfiction writer whose
best-selling books include “Bird by Bird” and “Traveling Mercies,” is concerned that the headlong rush
into data is overshadowing “everything great and exciting that someone like me would dare to call
grace.”
“What this stuff steals is our aliveness,” she said. “Grids, spreadsheets and algorithms take away the
sensory connection to our lives, where our feet are, what we’re seeing, all the raw materials of life,
which by their very nature are disorganized.” Metrics, she said, rob individuals of the sense that they
can choose their own path, “because if you’re going by the data and the formula, there’s only one
way.”
2AC — One-Size-Fits-All Fails
Common core, like every attempt for standardized standards, is doomed — a one-sizefits-all approach can’t solve
Kibbe 14 — Matt Kibbe, President of FreedomWorks, former Chief of Staff to Rep. Dan Miller, Director
of Federal Budget Policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Senior economist at the Republican National
Committee, 2014 ("Common Core’s Top-Down Standards are Doomed to Failure," US News & World
Report, February 27th, Available Online at http://www.usnews.com/debate-club/are-the-common-corestandards-a-good-idea/attempts-to-standardize-education-are-doomed-to-fail, Accessed 7-6-2015)
For the uninitiated, Common Core represents a set of national standards with the aim of imposing
uniformity on the country’s schools through rigorous testing requirements. Aside from the circulation
of number of laughably terrible math questions approved under the new standards, the response from
those affected has not been enthusiastic, with a wide variety of state level initiatives being proposed
to block the implementation of Common Core. Even the National Education Association, the largest
teachers’ union in the country, is walking back its initial support for the standards in light of what it
calls a “completely botched” roll-out.
This should come as no surprise. Attempts to standardize something like education are, by their very
nature, doomed to fail because every child’s mind is unique. Different students learn in different ways,
at different paces, and forcing adherence to inflexible, one-size-fits-all standards can only result in
harm in the long term.
Since school funding is tied to success in testing, good teachers are handicapped from using their skills
to their best advantage. Instead of bringing their years of experience to engage students on a personal
level, pressure to produce measurable “results” will turn teachers into little more than automatons,
frantically teaching to the test under the threat of losing their own jobs if the required scores don’t
materialize. We saw this same pattern under No Child Left Behind, which placed increased emphasis on
standardized testing. The freedom and creativity necessary to inspire students and get them thinking for
themselves, as unique individuals, is lost in the ruthless quest for conformity.
[Check out our editorial cartoons on President Obama.]
In a recent and half-hearted attempt to spin Common Core into something conservatives could support,
Republican strategist Rich Galen insisted, “Standards and accountability are conservative values that we
have promoted for decades!" While there is undoubtedly some truth in this, the assumption behind the
statement is completely backwards. There is nothing conservative about standards imposed from on
high by a government that has proven itself to be — time and time again — hopelessly corrupt,
relentlessly partisan, and painfully incompetent. Instead, accountability should be local in nature. No
one is better equipped to understand the needs of individual children than their parents, working
with teachers within their shared communities.
National standards fail — policymakers don’t understand the classroom and teachers
inevitably reject standards anyways
Mehta 13 — Jal Mehta, Associate Professor in education at Harvard, PhD in Sociology and Public Policy
from Harvard, 2013 (“Why American Education Fails” Foreign Affairs, May/June Issue, Available online
at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2013-04-03/why-american-education-fails,
Accessed 7-7-15)
The result has been a vicious cycle in the interaction between policymakers and practitioners, one that
leaves little hope for the much-needed improvements in American education. Policymakers
understandably want to intervene in the failing system, given the highly uneven performance among
schools, with dropout rates as high as 40-50 percent in some urban districts. They have done so through
a variety of mechanisms, but most notably through an effort to set higher standards for student
performance and to create consequences for schools that fail to improve. Teachers, for their part,
resent the external mandates developed by people who know little of their daily work and who are
unwilling to provide the social support that their students need. Teachers' unions worry that their
members are being scapegoated for their schools' failure, and so they frequently harden their
positions and seek to resist what they see as unfair and unwise external accountability measures.
Many policymakers, in turn, see schools as units that need tighter coupling to overcome the teachers'
opposition and think of unions as an obstruction to necessary reforms. The cycle continues, with each
group playing its appointed role, but with no improvement in sight.
They Say: “Teacher Quality”
Common Core discourages qualified teachers from teaching – teachers reject the
standards and resources for Common Core implementation could instead be used for
more attractive reforms.
Ravitch 13 – Diane Ravitch, a historian of education, educational policy analyst, and research
professor at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.
Previously, she was a U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education. Ravitch is a 3-time winner of the Delta Kappa
Gamma Educators’ Award. She has a PhD from Columbia University in education history, 2013 (“Why
Teachers Don’t Like the Common Core”, http://dianeravitch.net, December 21, Available Online at
http://dianeravitch.net/2013/12/21/why-teachers-dont-like-the-common-core/, accessed 7/10/15, KM)
Although Arne Duncan, Jeb Bush, the New York Times, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and Exxon Mobil have done their best to create an air of
inevitability about the Common Core (the train has left the station), parents and teachers
continue to object to the
imposition of these untested standards written mostly by non-educators. In this article, which appeared in the
Journal News in the Lower Hudson Valley of New York, Melissa Heckler and Nettie Webb–veteran educators– explain their
objections to the Common Core. They insist that what matters most in education is the interaction
between teachers and students, not a scripted curriculum or higher standards. They write: Through
the knowledge of subject content, teaching strategies, and brain research, teachers strive to reach and
teach every child. The scripted modules undermine the essential teaching relationship by preventing
the individualized exchange between teacher and student, the hallmark of active learning. Student
interest should be a salient feature that helps develop and drive curriculum — something not possible with
prescribed modules. Good teachers embrace change but not change for the sake of change: Veteran teachers recognize what we did
yesterday is not necessarily good for today. Teachers embrace processes that produce meaningful, constructive change that moves education
forward in our country. However, teachers
recognize that Common Core is not research-based and there hasn’t been
the opportunity to define and refine the standards in this chaotic collapsed time frame for implementation. Common Core is causing
students to suffer. This is why teachers reject this change so vehemently. Stress has caused these
reactions: students reporting they hate school, regressive behaviors like toileting mishaps, crying,
increased aggression, sleeplessness and stomach upsets before and during the tests. This is what has
occurred under Common Core. This is meaningless, destructive change. Why do teachers resist the mandates of Common
Core? We suggest money spent on the development of these major unresearched and unfunded
mandates to implement CCSS be used to alleviate the lack of resources — unequal staffing, support
services, and restoration of school libraries, music and art classes, as well as enrichment programs in
these schools. Research has shown that this is the way to help even the playing field for the districts in poverty. Teachers are mindmolders. When they embrace, create and implement meaningful change with their students, they are helping every child reach his or her
potential. Teachers embrace constructive, researched change that result in better, meaningful learning. Resistance to the Common Core
standards should be understood in this context.
Teachers are incentivized to quit because of Common Core – the standards prevent
educators with creative, successful teaching methods from actually teaching.
Chiaramonte 13 – Perry Chiaramonte, a reporter with FoxNews.com where he covers a wide range of
issues including international affairs, politics, urban policy/planning, education, and technology, 2013
(“Teachers complain Common Core-linked lessons little more than scripts to read/”, Fox News,
December 8, Available Online at http://dianeravitch.net/2013/12/21/why-teachers-dont-like-thecommon-core/, accessed 7/10/15, KM)
Some of the biggest critics of new lesson plans aligned with the national Common Core standards are the people charged with teaching them.
A growing number of teachers say the national standards, adopted by some 45 states, have combined with
pressure to "teach to the test" to take all individuality out of their craft. Some teachers told FoxNews.com the new
education approach is turning their lessons into little more than data-dispensing sessions, and they fear their jobs are being
marginalized. “Now teachers aren’t as unique,” said Michael Warren, a public school history teacher in New Jersey. “It
means anyone can do it. It’s like taking something done by humans and having it done by a machine.” Backers of the Common
Core Standards Initiative, which was created at the behest of the nation's governors and has since been enthusiastically backed by the Obama
administration, say it is critical to ensuring all of the nation's middle and high school students meet a baseline in math and English. But while
Common Core is not itself a curriculum, but a set of standardized tests, private curriculum producers are marketing their materials as "Common
Core-aligned." Critics of Common Core say establishment of a national standard is simply a backdoor way of nationalizing curriculum. “The root
of the problem with the Common Core initiative is that standards drive testing, which drives curriculum,” Glyn Wright, executive director of The
Eagle Forum, a Washington-based watchdog group that has long campaigned against the new curriculum, told FoxNews.com. “The standards
were created by private organizations in Washington, D.C., without input from teachers or parents and absent any kind of study or pilot test to
prove its effectiveness.” “In fact, the only mathematician and the only ELA expert on the validation committee refused to sign off on the
standards because they are inadequate,” she added, “Yet, the standards have been copyrighted and cannot be changed, and this is resulting in
a loss of local and state control.” Parent groups have criticized Common Core, and there are efforts under way in several states to repeal
participation. But the complaints
from teachers are relatively new, and come as the Common Core-aligned teaching
materials are being implemented for the first time in many districts. In a recent Washington Post blog post, a Delaware
public school educator penned an anonymous letter complaining that Common Core was taking the joy out of a
profession she loved. “Teaching used to be a fun job that I was deeply passionate about," the teacher
wrote. "I used my own creativity, mixed with a healthy dose of perseverance, dedication and cheerleading to encourage my
students, most labeled ‘special needs,’ to believe in their own abilities and self-worth.” The teacher goes on to explain
that despite strong performance reviews in the past, the Common Core standards have been counterintuitive to her methods as her employers told her that her performance would be judged to how
closely she adheres to the new standard. "I was given a curriculum and told by my administration to teach it ‘word-for-word,’"
the teacher wrote. "In a meeting with my administration, I was reprimanded with “Don’t forget, standards drive
our instruction.” Another New Jersey public school teacher who asked not to be named, said the rigid new
instructions for teaching have left her and her colleagues feeling like "robots." "I'm unable to do projects
anymore because we have so much other stuff to do that is based on the Common Core," she told FoxNews.com. "All the teachers at my
school, all
we talk about is how we don't teach anymore and we feel like robots just doing what we are
told to teach and can't have any creativity for the students to enjoy themselves."
They Say: “Doesn’t Mandate a Curriculum”
Common Core has a large effect on school curriculum even if it doesn’t mandate one
Bedrick 14 — Jason Bedrick, Policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom,
former education policy research fellow at the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy, M.A. in Public
Policy from Harvard University, 2014 ("Common Core and the Impact of National Standards," Cato
Institute, August 20th, Available Online at http://www.cato.org/publications/testimony/common-corenational-standards, Accessed 7-6-2015)
Additionally, the conformity induced by Common Core undermines the very diversity and innovation
that give parental choice its value. While Common Core does not directly mandate a specific
curriculum, its testing regime will drive what is taught in the classroom, when it is taught, and even
how it is taught. For example, Common Core tests algebra in 9th grade, which has already induced
states like California to abandon their previous practice of teaching algebra in 8th grade. Had they not
conformed, their students would likely have scored lower when being tested on material that they had
not covered in a year.
The Common Core tests would also drive how concepts are taught in the classroom. As Dr. James Shuls
of the Show-Me Institute, a former school teacher, has written:
The fact is that curriculum standards don’t tell teachers how to teach in the same way that a
high jump bar doesn’t tell a jumper how to jump. You could theoretically jump over a high
jump bar in whatever way you would like; but because of how the jump is structured there is
a clear advantage to doing the old Fosbury Flop.2
Topicality
Topicality — Its
Its — “We Meet”
Common Core is a federal program — the USFG uses a combination of aid and
mandates to force the states to conduct testing, data mining, and other forms of
surveillance.
Newman 13 — Alex Newman, president of Liberty Sentinel Media, Inc., a small information consulting
firm, degree in journalism from the University of Florida, foreign correspondent for The New American
magazine, writes for several publications in the U.S. and abroad, 2013 (“Common Core: A Scheme to
Rewrite Education,” The New American, August 8th, Available Online at
http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/education/item/16192-common-core-a-scheme-to-rewriteeducation, Accessed 06-29-2015)
Almost immediately following the public announcement on Common Core, the Obama administration
and the federal leviathan it leads began the push to ensure compliance nationwide. Indeed,
widespread acceptance of Common Core thus far has been almost exclusively attributed to the taxpayer
largess offered under various programs. One key element in getting states to comply was the $50
billion “State Fiscal Stabilization Fund,” part of the 2009 “stimulus” bill, which distributed funds to
state governments that agreed to adopt Common Core and create or improve systems to track
students (see “Orwellian Nightmare: Data-mining Your Kids”).
Obama’s controversial and unconstitutional $10 billion “Race to the Top” program was also crucial.
Billions of federal dollars have been awarded to state governments from a fund for the scheme, which
was also established with $4.5 billion under the 2009 so-called stimulus bill. With federal aid, of course,
comes federal control. And to be eligible for the massive grants, state governments were forced to
adopt Common Core or other “internationally benchmarked standards” while creating “data systems”
to track students. Some $350 million was set aside “to help fund common assessments for states that
adopt common international standards,” the Department of Education announced, referring to the
national testing regime set to be rolled out as early as next year.
Unveiled at a 2009 event at U.S. Department of Education headquarters was an array of other federal
grants worth billions of dollars — much of it from the “stimulus” bill — aimed at usurping control over
education and America’s youth from families and communities. Among the programs outlined in a
Department of Education press release: a $650 million “Investing in Innovation Fund,” a $297 million
“Teacher Incentive Fund,” and more. Another $3.5 billion in “School Improvement Grants” was
earmarked for states to support “efforts to reform struggling schools.”
Another key element in getting state governments to agree to the national standards was the
issuance of waivers from the Bush-era “No Child Left Behind.” Without authority from Congress, the
Department of Education announced in 2011 that it would grant waivers from NCLB to state
governments in exchange for obedience to various federal decrees and the adoption of Common Core
or other standards approved by the administration. Acceptance of Common Core-aligned testing was
also required.
More than a few members of Congress and state officials feigned outrage by the waiver-in-exchangefor-obedience-to-Obama scheme, but the administration went forward anyway.
Local school districts are in the administration’s crosshairs as well. In May of 2012, the U.S. Department
of Education began offering huge taxpayer-funded incentives to school districts that adopted the
controversial scheme.
“This district-level program is a full-scale assault on state sovereignty,” explains the group Truth in
American Education, which opposes the Common Core plan. “It is a power-grab through which the
federal government will skirt citizens’ elected statewide bodies and negotiate directly with school
districts to embrace federal policy. It will also undermine the state governmental structure by grouping
school districts together on policy decisions and thereby making it more difficult for the group to
disengage from federal programming.”
Federal government mandates longitudinal database surveillance of every American
student from pre-K to college.
Hohmann 14 — Leo Hohmann, news editor for WND (WorldNetDaily), former managing editor of the
Triangle Business Journal in Raleigh, North Carolina, 2014 (“Whistle Blown On 'Womb-To-Workforce'
Data-Mining Scheme,” WorldNetDaily, November 30th, Available Online at
http://www.wnd.com/2014/11/whistle-blown-on-womb-to-workforce-data-mining-scheme/, Accessed
06-23-2015)
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/11/whistle-blown-on-womb-to-workforce-data-miningscheme/#FBBfh5GbB00Wim0u.99
Privacy advocates are calling for a moratorium on the Pennsylvania school system’s sweeping datacollection program, which they say is part of the federal government’s goal of being able to track the
development of every child “womb to workforce.”
All 50 states have been mandated by the U.S. Department of Education to establish inter-connected
“longitudinal databases” accumulating information on every student from pre-kindergarten through
college.
Two groups, Pennsylvania Against Common Core and Pennsylvanians Restoring Education, are asking
Gov. Tom Corbett to place a moratorium on data collection in the Pennsylvania Information
Management System or PIMS. The system gathers information on students in all 500 school districts
across the state and some schools have started collecting behavioral data that goes beyond testing for
academic knowledge, according to the two organizations.
The two groups are also asking the state attorney general’s office to launch an investigation into
possible violations of student privacy laws.
“We are asking the governor to rescind all contracts and written agreements that the Pennsylvania
Department of Education has with any commonwealth entity and any outside contractor who can access
personally identifiable information on our children in violation of federal law, state policy, and Chapter 4
(state code) regulations,” reads a statement issued by Pennsylvania Restoring Education and
Pennsylvania Against Common Core.
While Pennsylvania has become ground zero in the backlash against what is seen as an increasingly
invasive student tracking system, all 50 states are in the process of expanding and digitizing their
student records under the direction of the U.S. Department of Education. The goal is to have all state
systems plugged into a centralized database storing sensitive student information.
The testing is designed and funded by the federal government — all students will be
involved.
Newman 13 — Alex Newman, president of Liberty Sentinel Media, Inc., a small information consulting
firm, degree in journalism from the University of Florida, foreign correspondent for The New American
magazine, writes for several publications in the U.S. and abroad, 2013 (“Common Core: A Scheme to
Rewrite Education,” The New American, August 8th, Available Online at
http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/education/item/16192-common-core-a-scheme-to-rewriteeducation, Accessed 06-29-2015)
Despite the growing outcry surrounding Common Core, analysts say that without a significant change in
course, it is only a matter of time before the nationalized education scheme ensnares virtually every
student in America. Homeschoolers, private-schooled children, and even kids in states that have
refused to participate will likely all be impacted by the standards, sometimes without even being
aware of it. Consider, for example, the rush by virtually all major publishers to align their textbooks with
Common Core. Most parents have no idea of the major changes taking place.
Meanwhile, a national testing regime based on the new standards is already being rolled out, with the
Common Core-aligned tests planned for introduction by 2014. Two “consortia” receiving hundreds of
millions of taxpayer dollars from the federal government, Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium
(SBAC) and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), were put in
charge of developing standardized tests to go along with Common Core. Students will be tested
regularly from the third grade to ensure that their Common Core-based education is proceeding
smoothly. All of that private data will be available in perpetuity to the federal government and other
as-yet unknown parties.
Even students who do not live in one of the states using Common Core-aligned standardized tests may
ultimately be forced to learn from the same set of standards. Consultant David Coleman, widely
regarded as the “architect” of Common Core, became president of the College Board last year — all but
ensuring that the SATs, which are produced by the College Board, will be aligned with the new
standards. Of course, SATs are used nationwide in admissions to higher-learning institutions.
Common Core exists because of coercion from the federal Department of Education.
Strauss 13 — Valerie Strauss, education columnist for the Washington Post, 2013 (“Five myths about
the Common Core,” Washington Post, December 13th, Available Online at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-the-common-core/2013/12/13/da05f8325c40-11e3-be07-006c776266ed_story.html, Accessed 06-30-2015)
The Common Core State Standards, which spell out what K-12 students should learn in school, are at the
center of a heated debate: Who should control public education? What do students really need to
know? Let’s separate fact from fiction to figure out what’s at stake.
1. The Common Core is a federal takeover of public education that imposes a national curriculum.
It isn’t and it doesn’t — though it has substantial support from the Obama administration, verging on
coercion.
The Common Core has been spearheaded by the National Governors Association and the Council of
Chief State School Officers, D.C.-based associations that get funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation. In 2009, with bipartisan support, they engaged education reform nonprofits to take the
lead in writing standards for what students should know and be able to do in math and English/language
arts, grade by grade, from kindergarten through 12th.
The Core does not prescribe how students should meet those standards, though the English/language
arts authors also wrote curriculum guidelines for textbook publishers, and school districts in different
states can and are using the same prepackaged lessons.
Forty-five states and the District have adopted the Core, and the Obama administration has a lot to do
with that statistic. Its $4.3 billion Race to the Top competition makes adoption of “common
standards” an incentive to win federal funding. The Education Department also wanted states that
applied for waivers from No Child Left Behind to adopt common standards.
The Common Core databases are federally funded.
Hohmann 14 — Leo Hohmann, news editor for WND (WorldNetDaily), former managing editor of the
Triangle Business Journal in Raleigh, North Carolina, 2014 (“Whistle Blown On 'Womb-To-Workforce'
Data-Mining Scheme,” WorldNetDaily, November 30th, Available Online at
http://www.wnd.com/2014/11/whistle-blown-on-womb-to-workforce-data-mining-scheme/, Accessed
06-23-2015) **Hoge = Anita Hoge, a member of Pennsylvanians Restoring Education and an expert on
the student assessment industry.
Hoge said the 50 states are at varying stages of designing and implementing their own statewide
longitudinal databases.
“Some have them set up, some are in the process of setting them up, it depends on the state and how
much money they have,” she said.
The first two federal grants to Pennsylvania exceeded $20 million.
“The contracts are huge, absolutely huge, to implement this system,” Hoge said. “So you had to have a
state department of education that was willing to take the lead and set up the entire system.”
Pennsylvania’s former secretary of education, Gerald Zahorchak, was among the first state education
chiefs to take the millions in federal money and run with the program. For his efforts, he received a
national leadership award in 2008.
Pennsylvania was one of 20 states that initially received a combined $250 million in federal stimulus
funds to develop and implement data systems capable of tracking student progress from early
childhood through college graduation.
“The Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS) grants will help deliver much-needed data into the
hands of educators and policymakers,” according to a Pennsylvania Department of Education press
release from 2010.
All 50 states submitted applications for the database grants in late 2009.
They Say: “States Control the Program”
Don’t be fooled by “state” in the name — Common Core standards are federal.
ReThinking Schools 13 — ReThinking Schools, nationally prominent publisher of educational
materials, with subscribers in all 50 states, 2013 (“Corporate Education 'From Above' and the Trouble
with Common Core,” Common Dreams, June 26th, Available Online at
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2013/06/26/corporate-education-above-and-trouble-commoncore, Accessed 06-23-2015)
For starters, the misnamed “Common Core State Standards” are not state standards. They're national
standards, created by Gates-funded consultants for the National Governors Association (NGA). They
were designed, in part, to circumvent federal restrictions on the adoption of a national curriculum,
hence the insertion of the word “state” in the brand name. States were coerced into adopting the
Common Core by requirements attached to the federal Race to the Top grants and, later, the No Child
Left Behind waivers. (This is one reason many conservative groups opposed to any federal role in
education policy oppose the Common Core.)
The federal government pretends that Common Core is a states’ program, but they’ve
just bludgeoned states into implementing the testing and monitoring for the DOE.
Newman 13 — Alex Newman, president of Liberty Sentinel Media, Inc., a small information consulting
firm, degree in journalism from the University of Florida, foreign correspondent for The New American
magazine, writes for several publications in the U.S. and abroad, 2013 (“Common Core: A Scheme to
Rewrite Education,” The New American, August 8th, Available Online at
http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/education/item/16192-common-core-a-scheme-to-rewriteeducation, Accessed 06-29-2015)
If something is not done soon, the vast majority of American K-12 school children will be taught using
dubious, federally backed national education “standards” that have come under fire from across the
political spectrum. America’s kids, as well as their parents, will also be monitored and tracked in
unprecedented ways from early childhood into the workforce. Opposition is growing by leaps and
bounds, but government officials are not yet backing down.
The controversial “standards” scheme, known informally as “Common Core,” is being foisted on state
governments all across the country with a combination of taxpayer-funded bribes, outright
deception, and federal bludgeoning. Despite America’s long traditions of local governance and
separation of powers, the Obama administration and its establishment allies in both parties are
determined to get the standards rolled out nationwide. So far, their progress has been remarkable.
Even with the backing of billionaire Bill Gates and the U.S. Department of Education, the entire
“Common Core State Standards Initiative,” as it is referred to officially, was developed and rolled out
with almost no serious media attention. The eerie silence, of course, helped proponents avoid scrutiny
in the early phases, when it would have been much easier for critics to derail the scheme that will
essentially nationalize education — along with the minds of America’s youth, and therefore, the nation’s
future.
Education and policy experts who spoke with The New American blasted the standards themselves, the
centralization and federalization of schooling, the long-term agenda behind the plan, and the nefarious
tactics used to advance it. One critic, Tennessee Liberty Alliance co-founder Glenn Jacobs, even
suggested in a column that Common Core proponents were seeking to produce what Russian
communists referred to as “New Soviet Men.” Others are calling the program “ObamaCore.”
With the federal government handing out massive grants only to state governments that comply,
some 45 states and Washington, D.C., have already signed up to implement the full plan. Among the
few states that have not jumped completely on the bandwagon, only Texas appears to be standing firm,
with Minnesota, Nebraska, Virginia, and Alaska all reportedly flirting with various elements of the
scheme.
Even the states that refuse to join — not to mention homeschoolers and private schools — may find
themselves ensnared in the program due to national testing, college admission requirements, and
more. However, experts expect resistance to accelerate.
Common Core is NOT driven by the states — this is federal propaganda designed to
avoid a constitutional challenge.
Newman 13 — Alex Newman, president of Liberty Sentinel Media, Inc., a small information consulting
firm, degree in journalism from the University of Florida, foreign correspondent for The New American
magazine, writes for several publications in the U.S. and abroad, 2013 (“Common Core: A Scheme to
Rewrite Education,” The New American, August 8th, Available Online at
http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/education/item/16192-common-core-a-scheme-to-rewriteeducation, Accessed 06-29-2015)
Proponents of Common Core continue to downplay concerns about the controversial scheme by
incessantly parroting two primary lines: the standards are “state-led” and “voluntary.” Because
multiple federal laws specifically prohibit any federal direction, control, or supervision of curricula,
programs of instruction, and instructional material in elementary or secondary schools, the whole
scheme would be unlawful — not to mention unconstitutional — if the standards were not, in fact,
“state-led” and “voluntary.”
However, the idea that Common Core is being driven by state governments is easily shown to be
bogus — neither legislators nor elected officials played any significant role in developing the scheme,
and in fact, states had to agree to the standards in 2009, before the standards were even published, to
be eligible for federal bribes. Instead, as even establishment analysts have admitted, Common Core is a
set of national standards pushed by the federal government and created by “consultants” funded by
unaccountable billionaires.
Dr. Sandra Stotsky explained that when “states signed on to common core standards, they did not
realize … that they were transferring control of the school curriculum to the federal government.”
Even if it were truly a “state-led” initiative, however, critics say it would still be a bad idea, as parents
and local school districts continue to lose control over education.
Are the standards voluntary? For now, the argument could be made that they are technically not
mandatory, since no state government can be forced to comply. However, the fact that the federal
government is bribing state governments with taxpayer money to go along with the plan — not to
mention the federally funded national testing regimes — virtually ensures that American students will
have to submit to some elements of Common Core whether they want to or not.
Common Core is a state program in name only — the federal government mandates
its use.
Burke 12 — Lindsey M. Burke, Will Skillman Fellow in Education in the Domestic Policy Studies
Department at The Heritage Foundation, 2012 (“States Must Reject National Education Standards While
There Is Still Time,” The Heritage Foundation, April 16th, Available Online at
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2012/04/states-must-reject-national-education-standardswhile-there-is-still-time, Accessed 06-30-2015)
The Common Core State Standards Initiative began in earnest in the spring of 2009 with an
announcement by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers that
they would be developing Common Core standards and assessments. States were told they could
choose whether to replace their existing standards with the Common Core standards in math and ELA—
but the Obama Administration quickly became involved, raising questions about the neutrality of the
federal government in the effort and, ultimately, the voluntary nature of the Common Core push.
One of the first indications of federal involvement in common standards came on February 17, 2009,
when President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) into law. The
ARRA provided an unprecedented $98 billion in new federal funding to the U.S. Department of
Education, of which $4.35 billion was earmarked for the Race to the Top (RTT) competitive grant
program. RTT invited states to compete for $4.35 billion during a difficult budgetary climate and doled
out grants to states that agreed to the Administration’s policy proposals. Notably, applications for RTT
funding required states to describe how they would transform their standards and assessments to
“college and career-ready” standards that were common to a significant number of states. By June 1,
2010, applicants had to submit “evidence of having adopted common standards.”[1]
The Department of Education defines common standards as “a set of content standards that define
what students must know and be able to do and that are substantially identical across all states in a
consortium.”[2] While there was no explicit requirement to adopt the Common Core State Standards
developed by the NGA and CCSSO, the Common Core standards were the only standards that met the
Education Department’s criteria for commonality at the time, as well as today.
Race to the Top also required states to join one of two testing consortia crafting assessments that are
aligned with the Common Core State Standards Initiative. More than $350 million of Race to the Top
was earmarked for the funding of national assessments in math and ELA. Education Secretary Arne
Duncan stated that the Common Core standards and assessments “will help put an end to the insidious
practice of establishing 50 different goalposts for educational success.”[3]
President Obama was not shy about the incentives in Race to the Top to push states to adopt common
standards and tests. During his remarks at James C. Wright Middle School in 2009, President Obama
stated:
In the coming weeks, states will be able to compete for what we’re calling a Race to the Top award.
We’re putting over $4 billion on the table—$4 billion with a “b”—one of the largest federal investments
that the federal government has ever made in education reform…. And I have to tell you, this was not an
easy thing to get through Congress. This is not normally how federal dollars work.
…I want to commend the leadership of the governors and school chiefs who’ve joined together to get
this done. And because of these efforts, there will be a set of common standards that any state can
adopt...and I urge all our states to do so.[4]
Secretary Duncan echoed the President’s support of the common standards effort, stating: “We have 50
different standards, 50 different goal posts…We want to fundamentally reverse that. We want common,
career-ready internationally benchmarked standards.”[5]
The Obama Administration has also linked federal policy to the Common Core State Standards
Initiative beyond Race to the Top funding. In February 2010, Secretary Duncan told a group of
governors that access to the nearly $15 billion in Title I funding for low-income school districts could be
tied to the adoption of common standards.[6] That March, the Obama Administration released its
“blueprint” to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, currently known as No Child
Left Behind. The blueprint suggested renaming the Title I program for low-income children the “Collegeand-Career-Ready Students program” and states:
Following the lead of the nation’s governors, we’re calling on all states to develop and adopt standards
in English language arts and mathematics that build toward college- and career-readiness by the time
students graduate from high school. States may choose to upgrade their existing standards or work
together with other states to develop and adopt common, state-developed standards.[7]
More recently, in fall 2011, the Obama Administration announced that it would offer NCLB waivers to
states that agreed to conditions stipulated by the Department of Education. States applying for a
waiver must adopt “college- and career-ready standards” in math and ELA that are “common to a
significant number of states” or have been “certified by a state network of institutions of higher
education.”[8]
Common Core was started as a state program, but it’s now federal.
US News & World Report 14 — US News & World Report, Byline Allie Bidwell, education reporter,
2014 (“More States Seek to Repeal Common Core,” US News & World Report, January 31st, Available
Online at http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/01/31/more-states-seek-to-repeal-commoncore, Accessed 06-30-2015) *Schneider = Indiana State Senator Scott Schneider.
Still, some opponents say the standards, which have been strongly supported by the federal
government (and given states financial incentives through Race to the Top grants), are an overreach
into local control of education standards and curriculum.
"Common Core threatens our high standards and our ability to determine as a state what our students
need to learn to be prepared for a successful future," Schneider said in an April statement. "With the
federal government's involvement pushing states to adopt the standards, this is no longer a state-led
initiative, and Indiana has lost its ability to set its own education policy."
They Say: “Think Progress Evidence”
Think Progress is wrong — Common Core is federally constructed and funded
Pullman 15 — Joy Pullman, managing editor of The Federalist and an education research fellow at The
Heartland Institute, 2015 ("Ted Cruz Gets Common Core Way Better Than ThinkProgress," Federalist,
March 15th, Available Online at http://thefederalist.com/2015/03/24/ted-cruz-gets-common-core-waybetter-than-thinkprogress-does/, Accessed 7-6-2015)
Legum might want to spend some time googling up the pertinent federal and other publicly available
source documents, because he’s flat-out wrong.
Fed Involvement in Common Core
Federal law does indeed prohibit any federal entity from having anything to do with curriculum.
Legum may not have noticed, but the Obama administration doesn’t give a damn what any law says.
So, in flat contradiction to the law, the Obama administration has indeed funded and coerced Common
Core.
These two federal shadow agencies (PARCC and SBAC) explicitly told the Obama administration they
would use tax dollars to create Common Core curriculum.
Common Core is not, as its apologists insist because there’s no other way to cover their butts on this,
merely “curriculum benchmarks.” The document governors signed to signal their consent to the
creation of Common Core defines the initiative in two “phases”: The first is standards, the second
linked assessments. And the federal government provided $360 million in tax dollars explicitly to
create the pair of linked national testing systems that share test questions and student data, both
with each other and the federal government. Federal employees oversaw the creation of these tests
right down to the test questions. Without federal money, there would be no second half of Common
Core.
Furthermore, these two federal shadow agencies (PARCC and SBAC) explicitly told the Obama
administration they would use tax dollars to create Common Core curriculum. SBAC’s grant
agreement with the feds promised it would provide teachers “exemplary instructional materials
linked to CCSS,” “model curriculum and instructional modules that are aligned with the CCSS,” and
teacher training. It will send teachers “recommended readings, focused group discussions, use of online
tools, and sharing of annotated examples of best practices and exercises.” The organization budgeted
$5.125 million in federal funds to contract with yet another organization to develop such
“instructional and curriculum resources for educators.” PARCC’s says it is writing “model curriculum
frameworks” and “exemplar lesson plans.”
It’s also utterly blind to pretend the Obama administration’s Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind
waivers did not push states into Common Core. State board of education minutes from Race to the Top
winners show that these boards believed “The verbatim adoption of these standards is required for
Race to the Top approval” (that’s Tennessee’s). As the Washington Post reported, the term “Common
Core” was written directly into Race to the Top mandates until substituted for a definition that
matched only them so people wouldn’t get “suspicious.”
Lastly, the federal government provides at least half the operating funds of the two organizations that
created Common Core, which are private nonprofits with no authority to create any binding national
initiatives or laws. So either way, the feds were there at the beginning, at the request of Common
Core’s creators, no less.
Topicality — Surveillance
Surveillance — “We Meet”
Common Core is government surveillance.
Schlafly 13 — Phyllis Schlafly, American constitutional lawyer, conservative activist, author, and
speaker and founder of the Eagle Forum, 2013 (“Backlash Against Common Core,” The Eagle Forum,
May 15th, Available Online at http://www.eagleforum.org/publications/column/backlash-againstcommon-core.html, Accessed 06-22-2015)
Common Core means government agencies will gather and store all sorts of private information on
every schoolchild into a longitudinal database from birth through all levels of schooling, plus giving
government the right to share and exchange this nosy information with other government and private
agencies, thus negating the federal law that now prohibits that. This type of surveillance and control
of individuals is the mark of a totalitarian government.
Common Core reminds us of how Communist China gathered nosy information on all its
schoolchildren, stored it in manila folders called dangans, and then turned the file over to the kid’s
employer when he left school.
The New York Times once published a picture of a giant Chinese warehouse containing hundreds of
thousands of these folders. That was in the pre-internet era when information was stored on paper;
now data collection and storage are efficiently managed on computers in a greater invasion of
privacy.
Common Core is a nationwide surveillance system.
Hohmann 14 — Leo Hohmann, news editor for WND (WorldNetDaily), former managing editor of the
Triangle Business Journal in Raleigh, North Carolina, 2014 (“Whistle Blown On 'Womb-To-Workforce'
Data-Mining Scheme,” WorldNetDaily, November 30th, Available Online at
http://www.wnd.com/2014/11/whistle-blown-on-womb-to-workforce-data-mining-scheme/, Accessed
06-23-2015) **Hoge = Anita Hoge, a member of Pennsylvanians Restoring Education and an expert on
the student assessment industry.
Hoge says Pennsylvanians Restoring Education has documented evidence of a “systemic collusion”
between the Pennsylvania Department of Education and the National Center for Education Statistics to
create a national ID without the knowledge of citizens.
The next step for the education database is to link it with the Department of Labor with the addition
of the last five digits of the student’s Social Security number or link to the unique ID created by
eScholar, she said, citing written correspondence between former Pennsylvania Secretary of Education
Zahorchak and former Secretary of Labor Sandi Vito, a copy of which has been obtained by WND.
Creating a modern ‘Stasi’
“This creates a database of human capital — your worth, or non-worth — to the economy,” Hoge
said. “The government wants to know how you think and what you think and everything about you.
This is a government intelligence operation using education to create a dossier on every family in this
country. Attitudes and practices of each family are unwittingly revealed in the students’ responses in
the classroom and on tests through the “Special Ed Student Snap and Student Snap.” (Source:
Pennsylvania State University, PennData Grant: Project Number 062-14-0-042: Federal Award Number:
HO27A130162)
Every person age 28 and under, schooled in Pennsylvania, has a psychometric profile, an intelligence
profile kept by the state of Pennsylvania, Hoge said.
“In 10 years, every Pennsylvania schooled person, age 38 and under….In 20 years, every person age 48
and under…In 30 years, Pennsylvania will have a complete psychographic on every person in the
workforce and on every child born thereafter in the workforce,” she said. “This is an American
electronic model eerily similar to East Germany Stasi of yesteryear.”
Common Core as the vehicle
The Common Core national standards are the “vehicle” used to standardize the data collection as the
autonomy of the local school district is stripped away and teachers in the classroom are reduced to
virtual automatons, Hoge said.
“The individual mandate, similar to the Obamacare individual mandate for health care, requires
students to conform to this national agenda,” she said. “There is no privacy.”
She described the system as a top-down form of federal control that bypasses state legislatures. The
goal is to standardize the entire nation’s educational system.
Teachers must “remediate” each child to ensure he or she is absorbing the attitudes, values, beliefs
and dispositions required by the system.
And teachers are constantly monitored by the system to make sure they are doing just that.
This turns teachers into virtual psychologists, despite the fact they are not state-licensed practitioners
and vulnerable to malpractice issues, Hoge said. If students don’t meet the required proficiency in
“interpersonal skills,” teachers can be threatened with reprisals including possible termination,
according to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act “flexibility waiver” issued by the Obama
administration. These waivers absolved school systems from certain requirements of President Bush’s
No Child Left Behind Act, but exacted a heavy toll in the form of states losing their autonomy over
classroom instruction.
An organized, ‘national system of surveillance and monitoring’
The contracts uncovered in Pennsylvania refer to Common Core as the “model curriculum.”
Common Core provides 2,394 fool-proof validated scripts with which to “remediate” each child to
achieve proficiency in the “interpersonal skills.”
“We have also discovered that these Interpersonal Skills Standards are also embedded in other
academic areas of Career Education and Work, Family and Consumer Sciences, and Health Safety and
Physical Education,” according to the statement from Pennsylvanians Restoring Education. “The test
contract in Appendix B for the Keystone Exams states, ‘The diagnostic assessments are intended to be
easily administered online and provide immediate feedback of students ‘strengths and weaknesses.’”
This is nothing more than a sophisticated method of brainwashing, Hoge said.
“Clearly this data-collection system has utilized education funds to set up a national system of
surveillance and interventions on our students that is structured from the federal level down into
each classroom,” she said. “Huge amounts of our taxpayer money have been used to fund this system
of surveillance creating a dossier on each student and their family for the purpose of creating the
worker desired by big business and enforced by the arbitrary, authoritative state.”
She said the plan to transform America’s school into factories that churn out “human capital” began in
1990 when the U.S. Department of Labor established the Secretary’s Commission on Achieving
Necessary Skills or SCANS. ACT was awarded the contract to develop the list of skills seen as necessary
for the 21st century global economy. This skill list formed the basis of what would later become
Common Core State Standards, which was copyrighted by the Council of Chief State School Officers and
adopted by 43 states.
In 2013, the Council decided to add non-academic “soft” skills to the list.
“We are requesting Gov. Corbett to stop the data collection, stop the invasion of privacy… We want
legislation NOW, to protect our families, protect our children, and protect our children’s future,” stated
Pennsylvanians Restoring Education.
The group ended its statement with a chilling conclusion.
“America used to educate its children and let them create their own world. Now, we are creating their
world and forcing them to live in it.”
Common Core is a surveillance policy, just like NSA programs.
Logue 13 — Gretchen Logue, education activist and founder of Missouri Education Watchdog, 2013
("Education Reform is Really About Surveillance.," Missouri Education Watchdog, January 3rd, Available
Online at http://thebellnews.com/2013/01/03/education-reform-is-really-about-surveillance/, Accessed
7-7-2015)
The method of making money (not really providing education reform for the sake of education) is in full
swing. But look down the road. WHY are we experiencing this monstrous wave of centralized control?
It’s for the data. The linked article explains about the surveillance of Americans via the National
Security Agency (NSA) capturing email information (without Americans realizing it) and the massive
storage and infrastructure needed for this activity. WHY is the government keeping your information?
Michael S. Rozeff writing in LewRockwell.com:
If we examine the legality of this NSA warrantless surveillance, we will quickly become mired
down in abstruse issues of statutory and constitutional law. Let us not go there. That won’t give
us the central answer to the question of what’s wrong with a wide network of government
surveillance of Americans, with or without warrants.
It’s the same for Common Core Standards. The grab of educational direction by the Department of
Education is unconstitutional, but trying to get them out of your state legislatively promises to take
several years. Look bigger picture. WHY is the government so interested in establishing common core
standards? Like the NSA and the tracking of financial transactions, the tracking of student data will be
able to determine your student’s place in a managed workforce. Your students will be placed in a
position based on his/her data set.
Common Core is government surveillance — they collect and store the data.
Perkins 13 — Tony Perkins, Head of the Family Research Council, 2013 (“Common Core’s Uncommon
Opponents,” Accuracy in Academia, December 5th, Available Online at
http://www.academia.org/common-cores-uncommon-opponents/, Accessed 06-30-2015) **[“he” in the
first sentence refers to Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal.]
Like us, he knows that behind the curtain of Common Core is a strong drive the federal government to
centralize education and strip parents and local schools of their authority. The program is also making
headlines for its veiled attempt at data collection through suspicious student surveys and other
means. “Common Core means government agencies will gather and store all sorts of private
information on every schoolchild into a longitudinal database from birth through all levels of
schooling, plus giving government the right to share and exchange this nosy information with other
government and private agencies…” Phyllis Schlafly pointed out. “This type of surveillance and control
of individuals is the mark of a totalitarian government.” What’s more, the type of curriculum being
spawned by Common Core (CC) is objectionable to many parents. Contact your state officials and
encourage them to avoid CC and its lure of federal money. A rotten Core is worse than no core at all.
The federal government collects, analyzes and stores the data.
Newman 13 — Alex Newman, president of Liberty Sentinel Media, Inc., a small information consulting
firm, degree in journalism from the University of Florida, foreign correspondent for The New American
magazine, writes for several publications in the U.S. and abroad, 2013 ("Orwellian Nightmare: Datamining Your Kids," The New American, August 1st, Available Online at
http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/education/item/16193-orwellian-nightmare-data-miningyour-kids, Accessed 7-7-2015)
Much of the information vacuumed up at all levels of government already makes its way into a
national Department of Education scheme known as “EDFacts.” The department describes it online:
“EDFacts is a U.S. Department of Education (ED) initiative to collect, analyze, report on and promote
the use of high-quality, kindergarten through grade 12 (K-12) performance data.... EDFacts centralizes
data provided by state education agencies, local education agencies and schools.” Under EDFacts,
state education agencies submit some 180 data groups. The federal National Center for Education
Statistics, meanwhile, describes over 400 data points to be collected.
The U.S. Department of Labor, separately, admits that it is working to “integrate workforce data and
create linkages to education data.” According to the department’s “Workforce Data Quality Initiative,”
the SLDS will “enable workforce data to be matched with education data to ultimately create
longitudinal data systems with individual-level information beginning with pre-kindergarten through
post-secondary schooling all the way through entry and sustained participation in the workforce and
employment services system.” When combined with information from the IRS, ObamaCare, the NSA,
and countless other federal data-collection schemes, the picture that emerges has critics very nervous.
The federal government is the one that collects, coordinates, and stores the student
data.
Newman 13 — Alex Newman, president of Liberty Sentinel Media, Inc., a small information consulting
firm, degree in journalism from the University of Florida, foreign correspondent for The New American
magazine, writes for several publications in the U.S. and abroad, 2013 ("Orwellian Nightmare: Datamining Your Kids," The New American, August 1st, Available Online at
http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/education/item/16193-orwellian-nightmare-data-miningyour-kids, Accessed 7-7-2015)
According to the Department of Education, grants awarded to states under the program are aimed at
supporting the creation and implementation of systems “that have the capacity to link individual
student data across time and across databases” and “promote the linking of data collected or held by
various institutions, agencies, and States.” Among the data to be included are the yearly test records of
individual students mandated under the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act. “States are
encouraged to include additional information in their longitudinal data systems,” the department
continued.
In another Education Department document offering “guidance” on the SLDS schemes, further insight is
offered into what sort of information authorities are seeking and collecting. Among the “Personally
Identifiable Information” outlined in the report: name, parents’ names, address, Social Security
number, date of birth, place of birth, mother’s maiden name, and more.
Other private and protected data that might be collected, the document suggests, include the
“political affiliations or beliefs of the student or parent; mental and psychological problems of the
student or the student’s family, sex behavior or attitudes; illegal, anti-social, self-incriminating, and
demeaning behavior; critical appraisals of other individuals with whom respondents have close family
relationships; legally recognized privileged or analogous relationships, such as those of lawyers,
physicians, and ministers; religious practices, affiliations, or beliefs of the student or the student’s
parent; or income.” While the collection of such data in surveys and questionnaires funded by federal
tax dollars requires parental consent under federal law, state-level collection does not. Plus, experts say
there are numerous other potential loopholes as well.
Surveillance — “Counter Interpretation”
“Surveillance” is gathering data---it doesn’t require preventive intent
Rule 12 – James B. Rule, Distinguished Affiliated Scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Society
at the University of California, Berkeley, Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies, Ed. Lyon, Ball, and
Iaggerty, p. 64-65
For many people, the term “surveillance” conjures up images of the systematic tracking of individuals’
lives by distant and powerful agencies. These pop-up cartoon images are not entirely misleading. To be
sure, surveillance takes many different forms. But since the middle of the twentieth century, the
monitoring of ordinary people’s affairs by large institutions has grown precipitously. Such direct
intakes of detailed information on literally millions of people at a time—and their use by organizations
to shape their dealings with the people concerned—represent one of the most far-reaching social
changes of the last 50 years. These strictly bureaucratic forms of surveillance, and their tensions with
values of privacy, are the subject of this chapter.
Surveillance
Surveillance is a ubiquitous ingredient of social life. In virtually every enduring social relationship,
parties note the actions of others and seek to influence future actions in light of information thus
collected. This holds as much for intimate dyads—mutually preoccupied lovers, for example, or mothers
and infants—as for relations among sovereign states. Surveillance and concomitant processes of social
control are as basic to the life of neighborhoods, churches, industries and professions as they are to
relations between government or corporate organizations and individuals.
But whereas the ability of communities, families, and local associations to track the affairs of individuals
has widely declined in the world's "advanced" societies, institutional surveillance has lately made vast
strides. Throughout the world's prosperous liberal societies, people have come to expect their dealings
with all sorts of large organizations to be mediated by their "records." These records are ongoing
products of past interactions between institutions and individuals—and of active and resourceful
efforts by the institutions to gather data on individuals. The result is that all sorts of corporate and
state performances that individuals expect—from allocation of consumer credit and social security
benefits to the control of crime and terrorism—turn on one or another form of institutional surveillance.
Perhaps needless to say. the outcomes of such surveillance make vast differences in what Max Weber
would have called the "life chances" of the people involved.
No twenty-first-century society, save perhaps the very poorest, is altogether without such large-scale
collection, processing and use of data on individuals' lives. Indeed, we might arguably regard the extent
of penetration of large-scale institutions into the details of people's lives as one measure of modernity
(if not post-modernity). The feet that these activities are so consequential—for the institutions, and for
the individuals concerned—makes anxiety and opposition over their repercussions on privacy values
inevitable.
Despite the slightly foreboding associations of the term, surveillance need not be unfriendly in its
effects on the individuals subjected to it. In the intensive care ward at the hospital, most patients
probably do not resent the intrusive and constant surveillance directed at them. Seekers of social
security benefits or credit accounts will normally be quick to call attention to their recorded eligibility
for these things—in effect demanding performances based on surveillance. Indeed, it is a measure of
the pervasiveness of surveillance in our world that we reflexively appeal to our "records" in seeking
action from large institutions.
But even relatively benevolent forms of surveillance require some tough-minded measures of
institutional enforcement vis-a-m individuals who seek services. Allocating social security payments to
those who deserve them—as judged by the letter of the law—inevitably means hoi allocating such
benefits to other would-be claimants. Providing medical benefits, either through government or private
insurance, means distinguishing between those entitled to the benefits and others. When the good
things of life are passed around, unless everyone is held to be equally entitled, the logic of surveillance
demands distinctions between the deserving, and others. Ami this in turn sets m motion requirements
for positive identification, close record-keeping, precise recording of each individual case history, and so
on (see also Webster, this volume).
“Surveillance” includes routine data collection---they exclude the majority of
contemporary activity and over-focus on dramatic manifestations
Ball 3 – Kirstie Ball, Professor of Organization at The Open University, and Frank Webster, Professor of
Sociology at City University, London, The Intensification of Surveillance: Crime, Terrorism and Warfare in
the Information Age, p. 1-2
Surveillance involves the observation, recording and categorization of information about people,
processes and institutions. It calls for the collection of information, its storage, examination and - as a
rule - its transmission. It is a distinguishing feature of modernity, though until the 1980s the centrality
of surveillance to the making of our world had been underestimated in social analysis. Over the years
surveillance has become increasingly systematic and embedded in everyday life, particularly as state
(and, latterly, supra-state) agencies and corporations have strengthened and consolidated their
positions. More and more we are surveilled in quite routine activities, as we make telephone calls, pay
by debit card, walk into a store and into the path of security cameras, or enter a library through
electronic turnstiles. It is important that this routine character of much surveillance is registered,
since commentators so often focus exclusively on the dramatic manifestations of surveillance such as
communications interceptions and spy satellites in pursuit of putative and deadly enemies.
In recent decades, aided by innovations in information and communications technologies (ICTs),
surveillance has expanded and deepened its reach enormously. Indeed, it is now conducted at
unprecedented intensive and extensive levels while it is vastly more organized and technology-based
than hitherto. Surveillance is a matter of such routine that generally it escapes our notice - who, for
instance, reflects much on the traces they leave on the supermarkets' checkout, and who worries about
the tracking their credit card transactions allow? Most of the time we do not even bother to notice the
surveillance made possible by the generation of what has been called transactional information
(Burnham, 1983) - the records we create incidentally in everyday activities such as using the telephone,
logging on to the Internet, or signing a debit card bill. Furthermore, different sorts of surveillance are
increasingly melded such that records collected for one purpose may be accessed and analysed for
quite another: the golf club's membership list may be an attractive database for the insurance agent,
address lists of subscribers to particular magazines may be especially revealing when combined with
other information on consumer preferences. Such personal data are now routinely abstracted from
individuals through economic transactions, and our interaction with communications networks, and the
data are circulated, as data flows, between various databases via 'information superhighways'.
Categorizations of these data according to lifestyle, shopping habits, viewing habits and travel
preferences are made in what has been termed the 'phenetic fix' (Phillips & Curry, 2002; Lyon, 2002b),
which then informs how the economic risk associated with these categories of people is managed. More
generally, the globe is increasingly engulfed in media which report, expose and inflect issues from
around the world, these surveillance activities having important yet paradoxical consequences on
actions and our states of mind. Visibility has become a social, economic and political issue, and an
indelible feature of advanced societies (Lyon, 2002b; Haggerty & Ericson, 2000).
Counter-interp – Surveillance includes storage.
Ball ‘3
Kirstie Ball, Professor of Organization at The Open University, and Frank Webster, Professor of Sociology
at City University, London, The Intensification of Surveillance: Crime, Terrorism and Warfare in the
Information Age, p. 1-2
Surveillance involves the observation, recording and categorization of information about people,
processes and institutions. It calls for the collection of information, its storage, examination and - as a
rule - its transmission. It is a distinguishing feature of modernity, though until the 1980s the centrality
of surveillance to the making of our world had been underestimated in social analysis. Over the years
surveillance has become increasingly systematic and embedded in everyday life, particularly as state
(and, latterly, supra-state) agencies and corporations have strengthened and consolidated their
positions. More and more we are surveilled in quite routine activities, as we make telephone calls, pay
by debit card, walk into a store and into the path of security cameras, or enter a library through
electronic turnstiles. It is important that this routine character of much surveillance is registered, since
commentators so often focus exclusively on the dramatic manifestations of surveillance such as
communications interceptions and spy satellites in pursuit of putative and deadly enemies.
They Say: “Surveillance Means Crime”
“Surveillance” is more than observation of criminals
Marx 5 – Gary T. Marx, Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “Surveillance
and Society”, Encyclopedia of Social Theoryhttp://web.mit.edu/gtmarx/www/surandsoc.html
Traditional Surveillance
An organized crime figure is sentenced to prison based on telephone wiretaps. A member of a protest
group is discovered to be a police informer. These are instances of traditional surveillance --defined by
the dictionary as, “close observation, especially of a suspected person”.
Yet surveillance goes far beyond its’ popular association with crime and national security. To varying
degrees it is a property of any social system --from two friends to a workplace to government.
Consider for example a supervisor monitoring an employee’s productivity; a doctor assessing the health
of a patient; a parent observing his child at play in the park; or the driver of a speeding car asked to
show her driver’s license. Each of these also involves surveillance.
Information boundaries and contests are found in all societies and beyond that in all living systems.
Humans are curious and also seek to protect their informational borders. To survive, individuals and
groups engage in, and guard against, surveillance. Seeking information about others (whether within, or
beyond one’s group) is characteristic of all societies. However the form, content and rules of
surveillance vary considerably --from relying on informers, to intercepting smoke signals, to taking
satellite photographs.
In the 15th century religious surveillance was a powerful and dominant form. This involved the search
for heretics, devils and witches, as well as the more routine policing of religious consciousness, rituals
and rules (e.g., adultery and wedlock). Religious organizations also kept basic records of births,
marriages, baptisms and deaths.
In the 16th century, with the appearance and growth of the embryonic nation-state, which had both
new needs and a developing capacity to gather and use information, political surveillance became
increasingly important relative to religious surveillance. Over the next several centuries there was a
gradual move to a “policed” society in which agents of the state and the economy came to exercise
control over ever-wider social, geographical and temporal areas. Forms such as an expanded census,
police and other registries, identity documents and inspections appeared which blurred the line
between direct political surveillance and a neutral (even in some ways) more benign, governance or
administration. Such forms were used for taxation, conscription, law enforcement, border control (both
immigration and emigration), and later to determine citizenship, eligibility for democratic participation
and in social planning. In the 19th and 20th centuries with the growth of the factory system, national
and international economies, bureaucracy and the regulated and welfare states, the content of
surveillance expanded yet again to the collection of detailed personal information in order to enhance
productivity and commerce, to protect public health, to determine conformity with an ever-increasing
number of laws and regulations and to determine eligibility for various welfare and intervention
programs such as Social Security and the protection of children. Government uses in turn have been
supplemented (and on any quantitative scale likely overtaken) by contemporary private sector uses of
surveillance at work, in the market place and in medical, banking and insurance settings. The
contemporary commercial state with its’ emphasis on consumption is inconceivable without the massive
collection of personal data. A credentialed state, bureaucratically organized around the certification of
identity, experience and competence is dependent on the collection of personal information. Reliance
on surveillance technologies for authenticating identity has increased as remote non face-to-face
interactions across distances and interactions with strangers have increased. Modern urban society
contrasts markedly with the small town or rural community where face-to-face interaction with those
personally known was more common. When individuals and organizations don’t know the reputation of,
or can’t be sure with whom they are dealing, there is a turn to surveillance technology to increase
authenticity and accountability.
The microchip and computer are of course central to surveillance developments and in turn reflect
broader social forces set in motion with industrialization. The increased availability of personal
information is a tiny strand in the constant expansion in knowledge witnessed in the last two centuries,
and of the centrality of information to the workings of contemporary society.
The New Surveillance
The traditional forms of surveillance noted in the opening paragraph contrast in important ways with
what can be called the new surveillance, a form that became increasingly prominent toward the end of
the 20th century. The new social surveillance can be defined as, "scrutiny through the use of technical
means to extract or create personal or group data, whether from individuals or contexts". Examples
include: video cameras; computer matching, profiling and data mining; work, computer and electronic
location monitoring; DNA analysis; drug tests; brain scans for lie detection; various self-administered
tests and thermal and other forms of imaging to reveal what is behind walls and enclosures.
Their interpretation is outdated
Odoemelam 15 – Chika Ebere Odoemelam, Ph.D. in Media Studies from the University of Malaya,
Visiting Research Postgraduate Scholar at Lehigh University, “Adapting to Surveillance and Privacy Issues
in the Era of Technological and Social Networking”, International Journal of Social Science and Humanity,
5(6), June, p. 573
The concise Oxford Dictionary defines surveillance as “close observation”, especially of a suspected
person”. From the above definition, one can deduce that surveillance is supposed to apply to “a
suspected person”. But the big question is , is that the case in our today's world? Electronic
surveillance has become a common phenomenon especially in the developed world as a way of
monitoring the activities of every member of the society irrespective of whether or not they are a
suspect. Again, in our present day world filled with all kinds of modern technology, surveillance could be
carried out from afar instead of only from “close observation”, as the dictionary meaning suggests.
Satellite images and remote monitoring of communications via highpowered infra-red technologies can
be used for long distance surveillance activities. Thus, governments and big corporations have made
surveillance part of everyday life, in that it includes, but is not limited to, hidden cameras in an ATM
machines, data bases of all employees in a particular company, scanners that picks mobile phone
communications, computer programs that monitor keystrokes, or key words and video cameras that
parents can use, to monitor, their children at a day care centre.
Broad interpretations of “surveillance” are key to advance discussion of the topic
beyond a limited fixation on overt monitoring---that’s critical to capture the essence
of modern, bureaucratic information gathering
Ericson 6 – Richard V. Ericson, Principal of Green College, University of British Columbia, and Kevin D.
Haggerty, Doctoral Candidate in sociology at the University of British Columbia, The New Politics of
Surveillance and Visibility
p. 3-4
Surveillance involves the collection and analysis of information about populations in order to govern
their activities. This broad definition advances discussion about surveillance beyond the usual
fixation on cameras and undercover operatives. While spies and cameras are important, they are
only two manifestations of a much larger phenomenon.
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 (hereafter 9/11) now inevitably shape any discussion of
surveillance (Lyon 2003). While those events intensified anti-terrorist monitoring regimes, surveillance
against terrorism is only one use of monitoring systems. Surveillance is now a general tool used to
accomplish any number of institutional goals. The proliferation of surveillance in myriad contexts of
everyday life suggests the need to examine the political consequences of such developments.
Rather than seek a single factor that is driving the expansion of surveillance, or detail one overriding
political implication of such developments, the volume is concerned with demonstrating both the
multiplicity of influences on surveillance and the complexity of the political implications of these
developments. Contributors to this volume are concerned with the broad social remit of surveillance as a tool of governance in military conflict, health, commerce, security and entertainment - and the new
political responses it engenders.
Disadvantages
Education Competitiveness DA
2AC — Education Competitiveness DA
The US education system is an embarrassment – we’re one of the lowest-ranking
industrialized countries in education.
Ingraham 14 – Christopher Ingraham, Reporter at the Washington Post that covers politics, policy,
and economics citing an OECD education report, 2014 (“The state of U.S. education: Above-average
spending, below-average graduation rates”, Washington Post, September 12, Available Online at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/09/12/the-state-of-u-s-education-aboveaverage-spending-below-average-graduation-rates/, accessed 7/6/15, KM)
New data out this week paint a less-then-flattering portrait of the U.S. education system. The Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development notes that while a large proportion of adults have college degrees, degree
attainment is rising much faster in other developed countries. The U.S. is lagging in what the OECD
calls "educational mobility:" the share of adults who've attained a higher education level than their
parents. As the New York Times writes, "Barely 30 percent of American adults have achieved a higher level of
education than their parents did. Only Austria, Germany and the Czech Republic do worse. In Finland more than 50 percent of
adults are more educated than their parents." Perhaps more vexing, the U.S. is a laggard when it comes to high
school education too. Despite a per-pupil secondary education spending level that's roughly a third
higher than the OECD average, in 2012 our high school graduation rate of 78.7 percent ranked us 22 out of
29 countries the OECD surveyed - well behind the Czech Republic, and just a hair ahead of China. It's tempting to imagine
just how different our society might be if we could boost high school graduation rates by nearly 20
percent, putting them in line with our western European counterparts. But beyond that, it is worth noting that our
graduation rate has improved considerably in recent years - in 2000, for instance, only 72 percent of high school freshman made it out with a
degree. One final note - a study out this week points to a significant link between teen marijuana use and decreased likelihood of high school
graduation. This has raised some concerns that the relaxation of marijuana laws in U.S. states might lead to lower graduation rates and poorer
outcomes for teens overall. But the Netherlands has employed a tolerant marijuana policy for decades now, and the OECD figures show that
high school graduation rates there are among the highest of countries surveyed. While many factors play into educational outcomes at the
country level, this does suggest that liberal cannabis policies haven't created a Dutch educational crisis.
Case outweighs —
Competitiveness decline inevitable — slow growth, small businesses, economic
inequality.
Porter 14 – Interview between Chris Matthews and Michael Porter, who is Bishop William Lawrence
University Professor at The Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, based at the Harvard Business
School. Porter is a leading authority on competitive strategy and the competitiveness and economic
development of nations, states, and regions. Porter's work is recognized in many governments,
corporations and academic circles globally. He chairs Harvard Business School's program dedicated for
newly appointed CEOs of very large corporations, 2014 (“The slow decay of American economic
competitiveness”, The Washington Post, September 8, Available Online at
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jul/22/common-core-can-make-america-competitive/,
accessed 7/2/15, KM)
A new survey from Harvard Business School paints a worrying picture for the health of small business
in America. While the American economy is adding jobs at a faster pace than at any point since the
end of the financial crisis and is growing faster than many of its developed peers, it’s still not close to
full strength. Harvard Business School’s 2013-2014 survey on competitiveness queried thousands of Harvard alumni to get a sense of what
business leaders feel is holding the economy back, and the findings were released Monday. Fortune spoke with Michael Porter, professor and
lead researcher on the competitiveness survey, about the survey’s findings. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. Fortune: Can
you summarize the findings of this year’s survey? Michael Porter: The big message here is that if the economy is going to grow and thrive in the
long run, you have to be competitive. We define competitiveness as consisting of two things: You have to provide an
environment in which firms operating in the U.S. can win in the marketplace, but at the same time we
have to do that in a way that allows income and the standard of living of the average citizen to go up.
Fundamentally, competitiveness depends on doing those things together. If you’re doing one but not
the other, it’s unsustainable. The big finding we’ve seen in our surveys in recent years, and which was reinforced in this
report, is the divergence between the fate of businesses, particularly large businesses, and the average
worker. What we’ve been able to show in this work is that actually it’s not only the difference
between the high skill citizen and the average citizen that’s diverging; there are also big differences in
performance between large businesses and small businesses. Small business is declining as a force for
job creation in America, and we’re seeing less new business formation in the economy. And I think the
reason for this is that small businesses are disproportionately affected by high regulatory costs, legal costs, a
deteriorating infrastructure, and high corporate taxes. The report shows that business leaders are concerned about the
tax code, infrastructure, and worker skills in America: all problems that require political solutions. Does the business community have a plan to
address these issues amid political gridlock? Corporate
taxes are probably the single biggest issue [in which] a policy
change could make an immediate and substantial difference in the trajectory of the economy. It’s partly the corporate tax rate
itself, which is the highest in the OECD, but also this issue of repatriation, where we have so much capital
stuck abroad because of the international tax regime we have. Businesses are ready to do a deal where you bring
down the corporate tax rate to something reasonable in the mid twenties and you eliminate virtually all or most deductions in a revenueneutral way. The business community isn’t holding out for lower taxes overall. They just want a more rational tax code that provides certainty
and makes it easier to invest in the U.S. rather than elsewhere. Unfortunately, the political will isn’t there. Is there anything the business
community can do to help end this gridlock in Washington? The business community is very wary of entering the political fray right now. The
business leaders I talk to are tired of Washington. They see more downside than upside when it comes to speaking out and then getting
criticized, so business kind of has a bunker mentality. But business right now isn’t presenting a very organized and forceful advocacy of the sort
of policies we need and outline in this report, and that’s unfortunate. We believe that business must deal with some of these issues themselves
as businesses, rather than waiting for government. But, ultimately, government has to make some big changes too, and how to mobilize
business in that process is something we’re struggling with. Your report raises the issue of the so-called “skills gap” in the American labor
market. We hear from business leaders that American workers don’t have necessary skills, yet businesses also seem unwilling to raise wages or
provide much training in order to encourage workers to build those skills. What’s going on here? The stunning and disappointing [finding] from
this survey was that businesses will go to great lengths to avoid hiring full-time people. They’d rather outsource, they’d rather use automation,
and the first question is “why?” I think the answer to that is the same structural competitiveness issues that we’ve been talking about: high
corporate taxes, high regulatory and compliance costs, and high healthcare costs. And there is also a perception of this skills gap, but the
discussion about this skills gap has been too abstract. In fact, the skills businesses need are very specific to region and industry. There’s not one
big labor market, but many different micro markets for skills all across the country. The problem is that businesses don’t communicate their
needs very well, so young people don’t know what skills they need to succeed. Companies haven’t been doing a good job of workforce planning
and communicating their needs, and business has been a passive player in the market for skills. What this report has found is yes, there is a
skills problem, but it’s not something that you can deal with at the national level because of all the micro markets. And it’s not something that
can be solved just by the demand side or the supply side. It seems like larger businesses are thriving and are much more optimistic than small
businesses when it comes to competitiveness in the U.S. Is this a new phenomenon? This is a relatively new finding since this is the first year we
grouped respondents by the size of the company they worked for. What we found is the smallest businesses were much more pessimistic about
the business environment than larger firms. Small
businesses are absolutely the bedrock of the American
economy. They create more jobs than other businesses, and it’s a core aspiration of many Americans
to own their own businesses. And well before the beginning of the recession, we were seeing troubling trends that run counter to
the role small business has typically played in the economy. Small business has for years now been accounting for a
smaller share of new jobs. We’re seeing the formation of small businesses declining. We see the
closing of small businesses increasing. And this is not just a result of the downturn. These are ongoing
trends. So, why would this be? Our narrative here is that the U.S. for years been the most competitive economy on earth, with great
infrastructure, an educated workforce, and a strong middle class. As our relative strengths in these areas have begun to disappear, it’s small
businesses that are the canary in the coal mine, because large businesses have the ability to look
overseas for better opportunities. This divergence between the fates of large and small business is
just one more sign that relative competitiveness in the U.S. is declining.
Common Core hurts economic competition — lower labor costs internationally
displace jobs, rigid standards can’t account for future industries, standards ignore the
importance of creativity to the economy, and lack of global education outweigh any
marginal benefits.
Zhao 13 – Yong Zhao, presidential chair and associate dean for global education at the University of
Oregon’s College of Education, where he also serves as the director of the Center for Advanced
Technology in Education. He is a fellow of the International Academy for Education. Zhao was the
former director of both the Center for Teaching and Technology and the U.S.-China Center for Research
on Educational Excellence at Michigan State University, as well as the executive director of the Confucius
Institute/Institute for Chinese Teacher Education, 2013 (“Five key questions about the Common Core
standards”, The Washington Post, January 8, Available Online at
http://zhaolearning.com/2013/01/02/five-questions-to-ask-about-the-common-core/, accessed 7/2/15,
KM)
What makes one globally competitive?
With only a few exceptions (e.g., North Korea), geographical distance and political boundaries no
longer divide the world in terms of economic activities. Virtually all economies are globally
interconnected and interdependent. Employment opportunities are thus no longer isolated to specific
locations. Jobs can be outsourced to distant places physically or performed by individuals remotely. In a
world where jobs can be and have been moved around globally, anyone could potentially go after any
job he or she desires. Whether she can be employed depends largely on two factors: qualifications and
price. All things being equal, those who ask for a lower price for the same qualifications will get the
job.
With over seven billion people living on Earth today, there is plenty of competition. But due to the vast
economic disparities in the world, there exists tremendous differences in labor cost. The hourly
compensation costs in manufacturing in 2010 varied from $1.90 in the Philippines to $57.53 in Norway,
according to data released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2011 (Bureau of Labor Statistics,
2011). If a Norwegian were doing exactly the same job as a Filipino, it is very probable that his job would
be gone soon. For the Norwegian to keep his job, he’d better be doing something that the Filipino is
unable to do.
If all children are asked to master the same knowledge and skills, those whose time costs less will be
much more competitive than those with higher costs. There are many poor and hungry people in the
developing world willing to work for a fraction of what workers in developed countries need. Thus for
those in developed countries such as the United States to be globally competitive, they must offer
something qualitatively different, that is, something that cannot be obtained at a lower cost in
developing countries. And that something is certainly not great test scores in a few subjects or the socalled basic skills, because those can be achieved in the developing countries. Yet the Common Core
claims to be benchmarked with internationally high-performing countries, i.e., countries with high
scores.
Can you be ready for careers that do not exist yet?
Old jobs are being replaced by new ones rapidly as old industries disappear due to technological
changes and existing jobs move around the globe. For example, existing firms in the U.S. lost on average
over one million jobs annually in the period from 1977 to 2005, according to a report of the Kauffman
Foundation, while an average of three million jobs were created annually by new firms (Kane, 2010). As
a result, there is no sure way to predict what jobs our children will have to take in the future. As the
head of PISA, Andrea Schleicher, recently said: “Schools have to prepare students for jobs that have not
yet been created, technologies that have not yet been invented and problems that we don’t know will
arise” (Schleicher, 2010). If one does not know what careers are there in the future, it is difficult, if not
impossible, to prescribe the knowledge and skills that will make today’s students ready for them.
Are the Common Core Standards relevant?
Jobs that require routine procedure skills and knowledge are increasingly automated or sent to places
where such skills and knowledge are abundant with lower cost. As a result, as best selling author
Daniel Pink observed, traditionally neglected talents, which he refers to as Right-brained directed
skills, including design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning, will become more valuable
(Pink, 2006). Economist Richard Florida noticed the increasing importance of creativity in the modern
economy ten years ago in his best seller The Rise of the Creative Class (Florida, 2012). And economist
Philip Auerswald convincingly proves the case for the need of entrepreneurs to bring the coming
prosperity in his 2012 book (Auerswald, 2012). These are just antagonistic to the core subjects
prescribed by the Common Core and tested by international assessments such as PISA and TIMSS,
which are mostly left-brained cognitive skills.
Does Common Core support global competence?
The world our children will live in is global, not local as before. Given the interconnectedness and
interdependence of economies, the rise of global challenges such as climate change, and the ease of
movement across national borders, one’s birthplace no longer determines his or her future living space
or whom he or she may be working for or with. Thus to be ready to live in this global world requires the
knowledge and abilities to interact with people who are not born and raised in the same local
community. But the Common Core does not include an element to prepare the future generations to
live in this globalized world and interact with people from different cultures.
What opportunities we may be missing?
Globalization and technological changes, while presenting tremendous challenges, bring vast
opportunities. Globalization, for example, greatly expands the pool of potential customers for products
and services. Niche talents that used to only be of interest to a small fraction of people may not be of
much value locally, because the total population of a given community is small. In the globalized world,
the potential customers could number seven billion. Even a small fraction of the seven billion can be
significant, and talents that may be of little value in a given location can be very valuable in another
country. Globalization and technology today enable products and services to reach almost any corner of
the world. But the Common Core, by forcing children to master the same curriculum, essentially
discriminates against talents that are not consistent with their prescribed knowledge and skills.
Students who are otherwise talented but do not do well in these chosen subjects are often sent to
spend more time on the core subjects, retained for another grade, and deprived of the opportunity to
develop their talents in other ways.
In summary, the efforts to develop common curricula nationally and internationally are simply
working to perfect an outdated paradigm. The outcomes are precisely the opposite of the talents we
need for the new era. A well organized, tightly controlled, and well-executed education system can
transmit the prescribed content much more effectively than one that is less organized, loosely
monitored, and less unified. In the meantime, the latter allows for exceptions with more room for
individual exploration and experimentation. The question is what matters in the future: Do we want
individuals who are good at taking tests, or individuals who are creative and entrepreneurial? I
believe the answer is the latter.
Competitiveness” is a myth — there’s no economic basis for their impact.
Krugman 94 — Paul Krugman, Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
1994 (“Competitiveness: A Dangerous Obsession,” Foreign Affairs, March-April, Available Online to
Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe)
It was a disappointing evasion, but not a surprising one. After all, the rhetoric of competitiveness – the
view that, in the words of President Clinton, each nation is "like a big corporation competing in the
global marketplace" – has become pervasive among opinion leaders throughout the world. People who
believe themselves to be sophisticated about the subject take it for granted that the economic problem
facing any modern nation is essentially one of competing on world markets – that the United States and
Japan are competitors in the same sense that Coca-Cola competes with Pepsi – and are unaware that
anyone might seriously question that proposition. Every few months a new best-seller warns the
American public of the dire consequences of losing the "race" for the 21st century. n1 A whole industry
of councils on competitiveness, "geo-economists" and managed trade theorists has sprung up in
Washington. Many of these people, having diagnosed America's economic problems in much the same
terms as Delors did Europe's, are now in the highest reaches of the Clinton administration formulating
economic and trade policy for the United States. So Delors was using a language that was not only
convenient but comfortable for him and a wide audience on both sides of the Atlantic.
Unfortunately, his diagnosis was deeply misleading as a guide to what ails Europe, and similar diagnoses
in the United States are equally misleading. The idea that a country's economic fortunes are largely
determined by its success on world markets is a hypothesis, not a necessary truth; and as a practical,
empirical matter, that hypothesis is flatly wrong. That is, it is simply not the case that the world's
leading nations are to any important degree in economic competition with each other, or that any of
their major economic problems can be attributed to failures to compete on world markets. The
growing obsession in most advanced nations with international competitiveness should be seen, not as
a well-founded concern, but as a view held in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence. And yet it
is clearly a view that people very much want to hold – a desire to believe that is reflected in a
remarkable tendency of those who preach the doctrine of competitiveness to support their case with
careless, flawed arithmetic.
This article makes three points. First, it argues that concerns about competitiveness are, as an empirical
matter, almost completely unfounded. Second, it tries to explain why defining the economic problem
as one of international competition is nonetheless so attractive to so many people. Finally, it argues that
the obsession with competitiveness is not only wrong but dangerous, skewing domestic policies and
threatening the international economic system. This last issue is, of course, the most consequential
from the standpoint of public policy. Thinking in terms of competitiveness leads, directly and indirectly,
to bad economic policies on a wide range of issues, domestic and foreign, whether it be in health care
or trade.
No relative U.S. economic decline — enduring geopolitical strengths will preserve
American power.
Meltzer et al. 13 — Joshua Meltzer, Fellow in the Global Economy and Development Program at the
Brookings Institution, Adjunct Professor at The Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced
International Studies, holds an S.J.D. and L.L.M from the University of Michigan Law School, et al., with
David Steven, Nonresident Senior Fellow for the Managing Global Order Project in the Foreign Policy
Program at the Brookings Institution, Nonresident Senior Fellow and Associate Director of the Center on
International Cooperation at New York University, and Claire Langley, Research Analyst in the Global
Economy and Development Program at the Brookings Institution, 2013 (“The United States After The
Great Recession: The Challenges of Sustainable Growth,” Brookings Institution Global Economy &
Development Working Paper #60, February, Available Online at
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2013/02/us%20post%20great%20recession
%20meltzer%20steven/02%20us%20post%20great%20recession%20meltzer%20steven.pdf, Accessed
08-11-2013, p. 20)
A New Era of Global Leadership
Although the United States is certain to face headwinds in the coming decades, this does not mean
that its stance will be a pessimistic one. Though fears of American decline will continue to surface, a
more confident narrative is likely to predominate at most times. Even during the crisis, a slim majority
of Americans remained optimistic about the country’s future over the next 50 years.148 At the ballot
box, meanwhile, they consistently reward optimistic politicians over negative ones.149 A blind analysis
of the speeches of presidential candidates between 1900 and 1984* showed that the candidate who
sounded least pessimistic was elected on 80 percent of occasions, creating strong incentives for
politicians to emphasize the potential for renewed American leadership.
At the same time, the United States will be able to draw on enduring absolute geopolitical strengths,
even if its relative power continues to diminish due to the economic success of rising powers. It will
continue to benefit from:
• Its position as a dominant security actor, which it seems certain to maintain for at least another
generation, and its privileged position in most global institutions. 150
• Its internal security, which is more robust than that of countries such as India (currently tackling a
Naxalite insurgency in 125 of its 640 districts)151 or China (reported to be spending as much on
domestic security as it does on defense).152
• Its growth potential, especially when compared with the EU, but more generally if it manages to use
its leadership in key export sectors to exploit the purchasing power of a growing global middle
class153 or if one or more of the emerging economies suffers an interruption to its growth.
1AR — Uniqueness — Education Low
The plan solves — education is poor now is because of standardizing education
through “reforms” like Common Core.
Garland 14 – Sarah Garland, Executive editor of The Hechinger Report, former Spencer Fellow in
Education Reporting at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, Joint master’s degree in
journalism and Latin American studies from New York University, 2014 (“US education: How we got
where we are today”, Christian Science Monitor, August 17, Available Online at
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2014/0817/US-education-How-we-got-where-we-aretoday, accessed 7/6/15, KM)
The standardized state of US schools today grew from the Reagan blueprint, ‘A Nation at Risk.’ Why that
legacy matters now.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — On the last day of school in June, Principal Aurelia Curtis was harried. An auditorium full of teachers was waiting for her. But
instead of congratulating them on a good year and sending off three retiring staff members, she was in her office signing the last of the 742 teacher evaluation
forms for her staff of nearly 150 that she had to finish by an end-of-year deadline. Ms. Curtis, a stern but beloved leader who shares her name with Curtis High
School here in Staten Island, N.Y., where she began her career 30 years ago, spends
more time these days filling out intensive
teacher evaluations required by the state than she does talking to her teachers. Or that’s how it often feels. “It has
tied me up in so much paperwork,” she says. “I don’t have the time to have meaningful conversations with teachers.” Likewise, her teachers and
students spend less time in meaningful discussions and more time worrying about the tests that will help
decide those teacher evaluation scores. “We’re trying to quantify everything,” she says. “The new system, is it better? I’m not
convinced.” Yet as the school year opens and students return to the sprawling Gothic building on a hill with views of the Statue of Liberty, Curtis will be starting on
another pile of 700-plus forms meant to tell her which of her teachers are good and which aren’t. The
new evaluation system, along with
many of the other changes roiling American education, can be traced directly back to a set of old ideas
– as old as Curtis’s tenure at Curtis High. The push for new teacher evaluations, new standards, new curricula, and
new tests began with “A Nation at Risk,” a report published in 1983 that busy educators like Curtis usually don’t have much
time to think about. But in many ways, the report has defined the careers of a generation of educators like her – and the educations of a generation of American
public school students. “A
Nation at Risk,” commissioned by the Reagan administration in 1981, was a scathing
appraisal of public education. Its authors – a federal commission of leaders from government, business, and education – spent two years
examining American schools, and they were appalled at what they found. Standardized test and SAT scores were falling. The United States was dropping behind
competitors such as Japan. The public education system was so bad that not only were US students unprepared to join an increasingly high-tech workforce, 23
million Americans were functionally illiterate. Worst of all, the report concluded, Americans were complacent as their schools crumbled, threatening the very “fabric
of society.” One of the most famous lines in the report said: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational
performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” The
document set off panic in a once self-satisfied
nation and launched a movement to transform the public education system. A generation later, its
effects are powerful. The excoriation of American schooling is what most people remember, but its actual legacy is ingrained in public
education today. The report’s five proposed solutions – improving content, raising standards,
overhauling the teaching profession, adding time to the school day and year, and improving
leadership and fiscal support – are clear in current reform. They can be seen in the spread of the
Common Core standards , a set of streamlined but intense new standards introduced in 2009 that, though controversial, are still in use in more than
40 states; in new teacher ratings based partly on standardized test scores; and in the invention and rise of charter schools with longer school days and no union
contracts. Initially embraced by a coalition of conservatives and liberals, the
solutions offered in “A Nation at Risk” stoked a backlash
among many on the left who argued that its criticisms of public education were over the top and that its solutions ignored poverty
and inequity in the system. But the Republican-driven revolution is being driven home, as never
before, by a Democratic president. The Obama administration admits there’s a connection. Education
Secretary Arne Duncan has said the report was “influential” in the administration’s education reform
strategy. • • • So why are ideas from a report that once provoked fury among many on the left having their heyday now? Milton Goldberg, who was the
executive director of the National Commission on Excellence in Education, which issued “A Nation at Risk,” believes the answer is simple. “When we did the ‘Nation
at Risk,’ we collected dozens and dozens of research papers and recorded testimony all over the country,” he says. “We finally came to the conclusion that those
five things, they’re the essential legs of a five-legged footstool that you must address in order to improve education.” “The legs of that stool haven’t changed very
much. What’s changed is what you do about them,” added Mr. Goldberg, now chancellor of Jones International University, a for-profit institution in Centennial,
Colo. Indeed, the fallout from “A Nation at Risk” has not always been what its writers expected. Before
“A Nation at Risk,” the federal
government’s role in education was minimal, as the report’s authors believed was proper, and Reagan had even wanted to abolish the
federal Education Department. The government had mainly focused on finishing the work of desegregation. Afterward, the federal
government became one of the main drivers of reform, and “A Nation at Risk” became the blueprint.
And it never mentioned charter schools or school choice. Now, there are nearly 6,000 charters nationwide, up from 1,500 in the year 2000, and
thousands of district schools are being remade in the same image thanks to state and federal policies that borrow heavily from ideas in “A Nation at Risk.” But as
the report and the movement it fueled become reality, they’re sparking a another backlash among those
who say the country has embraced the worst of “A Nation at Risk” – an overhyped sense of crisis and
business-focused mentality – and turned its back on the report’s best ideas about empowering teachers, raising
many policy prescriptions from
expectations for students, and identifying and training better school leaders. “For more than 30 years, U.S. education leaders have been like a dog chasing its tail,”
Diane Ravitch, an education historian and assistant education secretary under President George W. Bush, wrote in an e-mail interview. “What
happened is tragic. And it started with ‘A Nation at Risk.’ ”
has
1AR — Uniqueness — Competitiveness Low
Competitiveness is at an all-time low – lack of small businesses means the economy
will continue to decline
Matthews 14 - Chris Matthews is a writer for Fortune and News magazines, 2014 (The slow decay of
American economic competitiveness, Fortune, 9-8-2014, available online via
http://fortune.com/2014/09/08/us-economic-competitiveness/, accessed on 7-8-2015)//CM
A new survey from Harvard Business School paints a worrying picture for the health of small business in America. While the American
economy is adding jobs at a faster pace than at any point since the end of the financial crisis and is
growing faster than many of its developed peers, it’s still not close to full strength. Harvard Business
School’s 2013-2014 survey on competitiveness queried thousands of Harvard alumni to get a sense of what
business leaders feel is holding the economy back, and the findings were released Monday. Fortune spoke
with Michael Porter, professor and lead researcher on the competitiveness survey, about the survey’s findings. The interview has been edited
for length and clarity. Fortune: Can you summarize the findings of this year’s survey? Michael Porter: The big message here is that if
the
economy is going to grow and thrive in the long run, you have to be competitive. We define competitiveness as
consisting of two things: You have to provide an environment in which firms operating in the U.S. can win in
the marketplace, but at the same time we have to do that in a way that allows income and the
standard of living of the average citizen to go up. Fundamentally, competitiveness depends on doing
those things together. If you’re doing one but not the other, it’s unsustainable. The big finding we’ve
seen in our surveys in recent years, and which was reinforced in this report, is the divergence between the fate of
businesses, particularly large businesses, and the average worker. What we’ve been able to show in this work is that
actually it’s not only the difference between the high skill citizen and the average citizen that’s diverging; there are also big differences in
performance between large businesses and small businesses. Small
business is declining as a force for job creation in
America, and we’re seeing less new business formation in the economy. And I think the reason for this is that
small businesses are disproportionately affected by high regulatory costs, legal costs, a deteriorating
infrastructure, and high corporate taxes. The report shows that business leaders are concerned about the tax code,
infrastructure, and worker skills in America: all problems that require political solutions. Does the business community have a plan to address
these issues amid political gridlock? Corporate taxes are probably the single biggest issue [in which] a policy change could make an immediate
and substantial difference in the trajectory of the economy. It’s partly the corporate tax rate itself, which is the highest in the OECD, but also
this issue of repatriation, where we have so much capital stuck abroad because of the international tax regime we have. Businesses are ready to
do a deal where you bring down the corporate tax rate to something reasonable in the mid twenties and you eliminate virtually all or most
deductions in a revenue-neutral way. The business community isn’t holding out for lower taxes overall. They just want a more rational tax code
that provides certainty and makes it easier to invest in the U.S. rather than elsewhere. Unfortunately, the political will isn’t there. Is there
anything the business community can do to help end this gridlock in Washington? The business community is very wary of entering the political
fray right now. The business leaders I talk to are tired of Washington. They see more downside than upside when it comes to speaking out and
then getting criticized, so business kind of has a bunker mentality. But business right now isn’t presenting a very organized and forceful
advocacy of the sort of policies we need and outline in this report, and that’s unfortunate. We believe that business must deal with some of
these issues themselves as businesses, rather than waiting for government. But, ultimately, government has to make some big changes too, and
how to mobilize business in that process is something we’re struggling with. Your report raises the issue of the so-called “skills gap” in the
American labor market. We hear from business leaders that American workers don’t have necessary skills, yet businesses also seem unwilling to
raise wages or provide much training in order to encourage workers to build those skills. What’s going on here? The
stunning and
disappointing [finding] from this survey was that businesses will go to great lengths to avoid hiring
full-time people. They’d rather outsource, they’d rather use automation, and the first question is “why?” I think
the answer to that is the same structural competitiveness issues that we’ve been talking about: high corporate taxes, high
regulatory and compliance costs, and high healthcare costs. And there is also a perception of this skills gap, but the
discussion about this skills gap has been too abstract. In fact, the skills businesses need are very specific to region and industry. There’s not one
big labor market, but many different micro markets for skills all across the country. The problem is that
businesses don’t
communicate their needs very well, so young people don’t know what skills they need to succeed.
Companies haven’t been doing a good job of workforce planning and communicating their needs, and
business has been a passive player in the market for skills. What this report has found is yes, there is a skills problem,
but it’s not something that you can deal with at the national level because of all the micro markets. And it’s not something that can be solved
just by the demand side or the supply side. It seems like larger businesses are thriving and are much more optimistic than small businesses
when it comes to competitiveness in the U.S. Is this a new phenomenon? This is a relatively new finding since this is the first year we grouped
respondents by the size of the company they worked for. What we found is the smallest businesses were much more pessimistic about the
business environment than larger firms. Small businesses are absolutely the bedrock of the American economy. They create more jobs than
other businesses, and it’s a core aspiration of many Americans to own their own businesses. And well before the beginning of the recession, we
were seeing troubling trends that run counter to the role small business has typically played in the economy. Small business has for years now
been accounting for a smaller share of new jobs.
We’re seeing the formation of small businesses declining. We see
the closing of small businesses increasing. And this is not just a result of the downturn. These are
ongoing trends. So, why would this be? Our narrative here is that the U.S. for years been the most competitive
economy on earth, with great infrastructure, an educated workforce, and a strong middle class. As our
relative strengths in these areas have begun to disappear, it’s small businesses that are the canary in
the coal mine, because large businesses have the ability to look overseas for better opportunities. This
divergence between the fates of large and small business is just one more sign that relative competitiveness in the U.S. is declining. Many of the
solutions the report suggests, like improvements to the education system and infrastructure, will require investment from both the private and
public sector. Are business leaders willing to support these investments? Businesses
are investing quite a bit, just not in the
United States. I think the appetite will return if we start to see some signs of progress on budget and tax reform. I think that would be
decisive. I think a lot of business leaders are holding back because there’s not a lot of confidence in the
future. I think there’s a fatalistic idea that nothing’s going to change, and so incrementally, if we want to invest, let’s do it overseas where we
don’t have these problems and growth is stronger. That said, there are some tailwinds out there, like the recent boom in domestic energy
production. U.S.-based businesses will see huge cost benefits because of this trend, which, by the way, was set in motion because of American
technology and innovation. There’s also a tailwind as a result of rising labor costs abroad; in China, for example. So, we have the opportunity to
be more cost-competitive because of these trends. I think if we
can start to see some headway on these critical policy
questions, we’d see businesses [become] more willing to invest and support investment from the
public sector.
1AR — Link Turn — Common Core Hurts Competitiveness
Current U.S. education typically fails to prepare students for national security jobs –
without these jobs, we risk lower levels of national security
Council on Foreign Relations 12 – The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is an independent think
tank dedicated to being a resource for its members in order to help them better understand the world
and the foreign policy choices facing the United States and other countries, 2012 (“U.S. Education
Reform and National Security,” CFR Independent Task Force Report No. 68, March 2012, available online
via http://www.cfr.org/united-states/us-education-reform-national-security/p27618, accessed on
7/8/15)//CM
Education has historically given all Americans—rich and poor, black and white—opportunity. It has
allowed individuals to achieve their dreams, and it has fueled the continued innovation, growth,
prosperity, and security of this nation. Today, however, as America’s young citizens are
simultaneously confronted with growing economic inequalities and an increasingly global and
competitive world, elementary and secondary (K-12) schools are failing to provide the promised
opportunity. Measured against global standards, far too many U.S. schools are failing to teach students
the academic skills and knowledge they need to compete and succeed. Many are also neglecting to
teach civics, the glue that holds our society together. This failure and its consequences are not
theoretical; they are real and already having a noticeable impact on individual students, particularly
the neediest students for whom education is the only “intervention” capable of putting them on track
to a better life, as well as on U.S. competitiveness, readiness, and future prospects. In short, America’s
failure to educate is affecting its national security. Consider the following points: – Despite sustained
unemployment, employers are finding it difficult to hire Americans with necessary skills, and many
expect this problem to intensify. For example, 63 percent of life science and aerospace firms report
shortages of qualified workers.1 In the defense and aerospace industries, many executives fear this
problem will accelerate in the coming decade as 60 percent of the existing workforce reaches
retirement age.2 – Most young people do not qualify for military service. A recent study on military
readiness found that 75 percent of U.S. citizens between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four are
not qualified to join the military because they are physically unfit, have criminal records, or have
inadequate levels of education.3 The 25 percent of students who drop out of high school are
unqualified to serve, as are the approximately 30 percent of high school graduates who do graduate
but do not know enough math, science, and English to perform well on the mandatory Armed Services
Vocational Aptitude Battery.4 – The U.S. State Department and intelligence agencies are facing critical
language shortfalls in areas of strategic interest. Fewer than half of State Department officers in
language-designated positions in Iraq and Afghanistan met the department’s language requirements,
for example, and shortfalls in strategically important languages such as Chinese, Dari, Korean, Russian,
and Turkish are substantial.5 In many ways, the United States remains a global leader: its scholars win
the most Nobel Prizes; its companies hold the most science and technology patents; and its armed
services are, by many measures, the strongest in the world. However, no country in the twenty-first
century can rest on its laurels or be truly secure by military might alone. Human capital will determine
power in the current century, and the failure to produce that capital will undermine America’s
security.
1AR — Competitiveness = Myth
“Competitiveness” is the wrong focus — it’s a bankrupt metaphor.
Krugman 11 — Paul Krugman, Columnist for the New York Times, Professor of Economics and
International Affairs at Princeton University, and Recipient of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics, 2011
(“The Competition Myth,” New York Times, January 23rd, Available Online at
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/24/opinion/24krugman.html, Accessed 08-11-2013)
Meet the new buzzword, same as the old buzzword. In advance of the State of the Union, President
Obama has telegraphed his main theme: competitiveness. The President’s Economic Recovery Advisory
Board has been renamed the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. And in his Saturday radio
address, the president declared that “We can out-compete any other nation on Earth.”
This may be smart politics. Arguably, Mr. Obama has enlisted an old cliché on behalf of a good cause, as
a way to sell a much-needed increase in public investment to a public thoroughly indoctrinated in the
view that government spending is a bad thing.
But let’s not kid ourselves: talking about “competitiveness” as a goal is fundamentally misleading. At
best, it’s a misdiagnosis of our problems. At worst, it could lead to policies based on the false idea
that what’s good for corporations is good for America.
About that misdiagnosis: What sense does it make to view our current woes as stemming from lack of
competitiveness?
It’s true that we’d have more jobs if we exported more and imported less. But the same is true of
Europe and Japan, which also have depressed economies. And we can’t all export more while
importing less, unless we can find another planet to sell to. Yes, we could demand that China shrink its
trade surplus — but if confronting China is what Mr. Obama is proposing, he should say that plainly.
Furthermore, while America is running a trade deficit, this deficit is smaller than it was before the
Great Recession began. It would help if we could make it smaller still. But ultimately, we’re in a mess
because we had a financial crisis, not because American companies have lost their ability to compete
with foreign rivals.
But isn’t it at least somewhat useful to think of our nation as if it were America Inc., competing in the
global marketplace? No.
Krugman is right — “competitiveness” is economically bankrupt.
Schrage 94 — Michael Schrage, writer, consultant and research associate at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, 1994 (“The Myth of a 'Competitive' Economic Policy,” Los Angeles Times, March
10th, Available Online at http://articles.latimes.com/print/1994-03-10/business/fi-32358_1_economicpolicy, Accessed 08-11-2013)
An American economy that cares a great deal about boosting domestic productivity requires policymakers who care very little about global competitiveness.
A Zen koan for the nationalistic '90s? The sound of one Keynesian clapping? A lyric for aspiring
autarkists?
None on the above. It's the startling pronouncement of MIT's Paul Krugman, one of the country's
most brilliant young economists, a nonpartisan academic with a reputation for intellectual honesty
and a cruel tongue.
You might recall that Krugman was widely quoted criticizing industrial-policy economist Laura D'Andrea
Tyson's research when President Clinton named her chairwoman of his Council of Economic Advisers.
Alternating between statistical scalpels and macroeconomic machetes, Krugman bloodily eviscerates
"competitiveness" as a policy doctrine without any kind of economic validity.
What supply-side "economics" was to Reaganomics, Krugman asserts, competitiveness has become to
Clintonomics: a sort of psuedo-rational pastiche that Nobel Prize-winning chemist Irving Langmuir once
described as "pathological science"--that is to say, no science at all.
"To make a harsh but not entirely unjustified analogy," he says in his essay "Competitiveness: A
Dangerous Obsession" in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, "a government wedded to the ideology of
competitiveness is as unlikely to make good economic policy as a government committed to
creationism is to make good science policy, even in areas that have no direct relationship to the
theory of evolution."
"Gee, we must be making progress," smiles Dan Burton, president of the Council of (sigh)
Competitiveness, which was formed by frustrated high-tech executives in the wake of the Ronald
Reagan Administration's rejection of its own presidential commission on the topic. "In 1987,
competitiveness was dismissed as a buzzword. Today, it's graduated to being a dangerous obsession."
Might Krugman be the one with the dangerous obsession? Not after you see the numbers. His
arguments would command respect even without his impeccable credentials. They're important
because he takes the global competitiveness champions like Tyson, U.S. Trade Representative Mickey
Kantor, Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich and health care guru Ira Magaziner on their own terms,
impatiently redoes their arithmetic for them and makes a strong case that competitiveness issues
amount to little more than a rounding error in the $6-trillion U.S. economy.
1AR — Alt Causes to Competitiveness
Even if skills are key to competitiveness, Common Core does not fill the gap –
outsourcing and micromarkets prevent solvency.
Porter 14 – Interview between Chris Matthews and Michael Porter, who is Bishop William Lawrence
University Professor at The Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, based at the Harvard Business
School. Porter is a leading authority on competitive strategy and the competitiveness and economic
development of nations, states, and regions. Porter's work is recognized in many governments,
corporations and academic circles globally. He chairs Harvard Business School's program dedicated for
newly appointed CEOs of very large corporations, 2014 (“The slow decay of American economic
competitiveness”, The Washington Post, September 8, Available Online at
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jul/22/common-core-can-make-america-competitive/,
accessed 7/2/15, KM)
Your report raises the issue of the so-called “skills gap” in the American labor market. We hear from
business leaders that American workers don’t have necessary skills, yet businesses also seem unwilling to raise
wages or provide much training in order to encourage workers to build those skills. What’s going on here? The stunning and
disappointing [finding] from this survey was that businesses will go to great lengths to avoid hiring
full-time people. They’d rather outsource, they’d rather use automation, and the first question is “why?” I think
the answer to that is the same structural competitiveness issues that we’ve been talking about: high
corporate taxes, high regulatory and compliance costs, and high healthcare costs. And there is also a
perception of this skills gap, but the discussion about this skills gap has been too abstract. In fact, the skills businesses need are
very specific to region and industry. There’s not one big labor market, but many different micro
markets for skills all across the country. The problem is that businesses don’t communicate their needs very well, so young
people don’t know what skills they need to succeed. Companies haven’t been doing a good job of workforce planning and communicating their
needs, and business has been a passive player in the market for skills. What
this report has found is yes, there is a skills
problem, but it’s not something that you can deal with at the national level because of all the micro
markets. And it’s not something that can be solved just by the demand side or the supply side.
1AR — No Economy Impact
No short-term impact to slow growth — any effect on military power is long-term.
Morgan 11 — Iwan Morgan, Professor of U.S. Studies and Head of U.S. Programmes at the Institute of
the Americas at University College London, former Professor of U.S. Studies at the Institute for the Study
of the Americas at the School of Advanced Study at the University of London, Professor of American
Governance at London Metropolitan University, and Fulbright Educational Exchange Lecturer at Indiana
University-Purdue University at Fort Wayne, holds a Ph.D. in International History from the London
School of Economics, 2011 (“The American Economy and America’s Global Power,” The United States
after Unipolarity, Published by the London School of Economics, December, Available Online at
http://www.lse.ac.uk/IDEAS/publications/reports/pdf/SR009/morgan.pdf, Accessed 08-11-2013, p. 30)
In immediate terms, it is clear that the United States is far from any tipping point where it has to scale
back its military power very significantly because of economic and debt problems at home. True, its
supporting rather than lead role in the NATO intervention in Libya owed something to the Obama White
House’s desire to contain defence costs while America is still actively engaged against the Taliban in
Afghanistan and has just started to run down its Iraq commitments. In Obama’s Fiscal Year (FY) 2012
budget plan, defence outlays are also scheduled to decline from 5.1 percent of GDP in FY 2011 to 3.4
percent of GDP in FY 2016. Nevertheless, the savings will largely result from the running down of
commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq and waste elimination rather than the reduction of core
strength. Even if a new crisis demanded expansion of military spending in the course of the next
decade, the United States should be able to meet that need without imposing a strain on its economy.
No risk of relative decline — the U.S. is comparatively stronger than other nations.
Sharma 12 — Ruchir Sharma, Head of Emerging Markets at Morgan Stanley, Columnist for Newsweek,
the Wall Street Journal, and the Economic Times of India, 2012 (“Comeback Nation: Why the U.S.
Economy Is Much Stronger Than You Think,” The Atlantic, August 3rd, Available Online at
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/comeback-nation-why-the-us-economy-ismuch-stronger-than-you-think/260634/, Accessed 08-11-2013)
Usain Bolt is the most dominant sprinter the world has seen in a century, perhaps more, so when he
runs at the London games, anything less than victory by a blistering margin will be greeted as a
disappointment. Results are always relative to expectations, and this as true for global economic
competition as for the 100-meter dash. These days, the United States is an underestimated underdog,
while China is still widely seen as something more like Bolt. The expectations gap is crucial to parsing
the confused public discussion of the American recovery, and what it means for America's future.
Since the crisis of 2008, most Americans have come to expect gloom rather than gold in the near future.
The long-term US growth rate is now burdened by our huge debts, and is slowing to 2.5 percent, down
from 3.4 percent between 1950 and 2007. This fall is stoking a premature sense that American
preeminence is already over. Polls show that a majority of Americans think China is already the world's
"leading" economy, even though it is still about one third the size of the U.S. economy. The reality is
that, at 2.5 percent growth, the US remains the fastest-growing rich economy, and is in fact regaining
some of the recent ground lost to newcomers like China.
America's performance should be measured against the current competition, not against the records
it set in the 1990s or 2000s. All the big emerging markets are slowing, most notably China, which has
lowered its growth target to under 8 percent for the first time in many years and may well fall under 7
percent. It is hard to grow at a sprinter's pace when you are hitting middle age, growing careful and a bit
fat. China is all three, having recently reached an average real income of more than $5,000, with a total
GDP of more than $7 trillion, and a new taste for welfare state programs. Every "miracle economy,"
from Japan in the 1970s to South Korea in the 1990s, slowed at this real income level.
Unhappily, for those who like to imagine that globalization can produce "win-win" finishes, China's
slowdown will be America's gain. The story of American growth slipping by a point will pale in
comparison to the three or even four point slip in China. If the U.S. grows 2.5 percent this year, and
China slips to 7 percent, the United States should regain the title it lost to China in 2007: that of the
single largest contributor to global growth.
This year, the United States will also grow faster than the global average for the first time since 2003,
the year an unprecedented boom in emerging market growth began. For the next four years, emerging
market growth doubled to over 7.0 percent, creating the widespread perception that the rich nations of
the West were being overtaken by the rise of the poor. Now, the historic norm is reasserting itself -- the
big emerging nations are slowing dramatically, and the coming years are once again likely to produce
more laggards than winners. As of 2007 the emerging markets were on average growing three times
faster than the United States; now they are growing only twice as fast.
Evidence of an American revival, against both developed and emerging world competition, is
mounting, driven by the traditional strengths of the American economy—its ability to innovate and
adapt quickly. America's worst worries – heavy debt, slow growth, the fall of the dollar and the decline
of manufacturing – will look much less troubling when compared to its direct rivals. While US growth
has slowed by a full point so has growth in Japan and Europe, leaving the United States on top of the
league of rich nations.
1AR — They Say: “Education Turns Corporate Control”
Common Core does not solve income inequality — it just distracts from the root cause
of corporate control. Only the plan breaks the corporate stranglehold on American
education.
Krugman 15 – Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize-winning American economist, Op-Ed columnist at The New
York Times, Professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public
and International Affairs at Princeton University, Centenary Professor at the London School of
Economics, ranked among the most influential economic thinkers in the US, 2015 (“Knowledge Isn’t
Power”, The New York Times, February 23, Available Online at
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/23/opinion/paul-krugman-knowledge-isnt-power.html?_r=0,
accessed 7/7/15, KM)
Regular readers know that I sometimes mock “very serious people” — politicians and pundits who solemnly repeat conventional wisdom that
sounds tough-minded and realistic. The trouble is that sounding serious and being serious are by no means the same thing, and some of those
seemingly tough-minded positions are actually ways to dodge the truly hard issues. The prime example of recent years was, of course, BowlesSimpsonism — the diversion of elite discourse away from the ongoing tragedy of high unemployment and into the supposedly crucial issue of
how, exactly, we will pay for social insurance programs a couple of decades from now. That particular obsession, I’m happy to say, seems to be
on the wane. But my sense is that there’s
a new form of issue-dodging packaged as seriousness on the rise. This
time, the evasion involves trying to divert our national discourse about inequality into a discussion of
alleged problems with education. And the reason this is an evasion is that whatever serious people may want to believe,
soaring inequality isn’t about education; it’s about power. Just to be clear: I’m in favor of better education. Education is
a friend of mine. And it should be available and affordable for all. But what I keep seeing is people insisting that educational
failings are at the root of still-weak job creation, stagnating wages and rising inequality. This sounds serious
and thoughtful. But it’s actually a view very much at odds with the evidence, not to mention a way to hide
from the real, unavoidably partisan debate. The education-centric story of our problems runs like this: We
live in a period of unprecedented technological change, and too many American workers lack the skills to cope with that change. This “skills
gap” is holding back growth, because businesses can’t find the workers they need. It also feeds inequality, as wages
soar for workers with the right skills but stagnate or decline for the less educated. So what we need is more
and better education. My guess is that this sounds familiar — it’s what you hear from the talking heads on Sunday morning TV, in opinion
articles from business leaders like Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, in “framing papers” from the Brookings Institution’s centrist Hamilton
Project. It’s repeated so widely that many people probably assume it’s unquestionably true. But it isn’t. For one thing, is the pace of
technological change really that fast? “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters,” the venture capitalist Peter Thiel has snarked.
Productivity growth, which surged briefly after 1995, seems to have slowed sharply. Furthermore, there’s
no evidence that a skills
gap is holding back employment. After all, if businesses were desperate for workers with certain skills, they would presumably be
offering premium wages to attract such workers. So where are these fortunate professions? You can find some examples here and there.
Interestingly, some of the biggest recent wage gains are for skilled manual labor — sewing machine operators, boilermakers — as some
manufacturing production moves back to America. But the notion that highly skilled workers are generally in demand is just false. Finally,
while the education/inequality story may once have seemed plausible, it hasn’t tracked reality for a
long time. “The wages of the highest-skilled and highest-paid individuals have continued to increase steadily,” the Hamilton Project says.
Actually, the inflation-adjusted earnings of highly educated Americans have gone nowhere since the late
1990s. So what is really going on? Corporate profits have soared as a share of national income, but
there is no sign of a rise in the rate of return on investment. How is that possible? Well, it’s what you would
expect if rising profits reflect monopoly power rather than returns to capital. As for wages and salaries, never mind
college degrees — all the big gains are going to a tiny group of individuals holding strategic positions in
corporate suites or astride the crossroads of finance. Rising inequality isn’t about who has the knowledge; it’s
about who has the power. Now, there’s a lot we could do to redress this inequality of power. We could levy higher taxes on
corporations and the wealthy, and invest the proceeds in programs that help working families. We could raise the minimum wage and make it
easier for workers to organize. It’s not hard to imagine a truly serious effort to make America less unequal. But given the determination of one
major party to move policy in exactly the opposite direction, advocating such an effort makes you sound partisan. Hence the desire to see the
whole thing as an education problem instead. But we should recognize that popular evasion for what it is: a deeply unserious fantasy.
STEM DA
2AC — STEM DA
1. Squo solves—STEM camps for young girls are solving for the lack of female
representation in the STEM field now
Yang 15 — Sarah Yang, 7-16-2015 ("Camp gives middle school girls hands-on experience in engineering,"
UC Berkeley News, 7-16-2015, Available Online at http://news.berkeley.edu/2015/07/16/girls-inengineering-camp/, Accessed 7-21-2015)
UC Berkeley’s Girls in Engineering summer camps, middle schoolers go from robots to cow legs to
edible juice caviar, all in one whirlwind week. Girls assemble and test their Pi-Bot at UC Berkeley’s Girls
in Engineering summer camp. (Video by Roxanne Makasdjian and Phil Ebiner) The camps are part of a
pilot program run by the College of Engineering as part of an effort to narrow the gender gap in
science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields. Each summer there are two one-week
sessions with 30 participants for each week. Instructors are professors, postdoctoral researchers, and
graduate and undergraduate students, covering topics ranging from nanotechnology to data science. By
design, nearly all instructors are women. In one workshop, instructor Lavanya Jawaharlal, a UC Berkeley
senior in mechanical engineering and co-creator of the Pi-Bot robotics kit, insisted that the girls master
the “proper names” and functions of the robotic parts they were about to assemble. They went over
terms like chassis, micro-controller and breadboard, a platform used to build electronic circuits. “I like
how they don’t treat us like babies and water things down,” said camper Maddy Jones, 12, a rising
seventh-grader at Montera Middle School. “They talk to us like adults.” The program was launched last
year with funding from the National Science Foundation, UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering and the
Peggy and Jack Baskin Foundation. This year, the program picked up support from Twitter and SanDisk
Corp. There is no cost to attend, but girls must apply. (This year, the organizers received three
applications for every spot available.) Interested girls write short essays about which everyday problem
they’d like to solve and how, or what common object they’d like to improve. The process helps ensure
that participants come armed with an affinity for scientific thinking, even if they have no prior
experience with STEM-based camps. The trick is to show how that problem-solving attitude can turn
into careers in science and technology. “A number of studies have found that around middle school, a
lot of girls start to lose interest in STEM fields,” said the camp’s faculty director, Claire Tomlin, a
professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences. “We have seen unbridled enthusiasm in 10year-old girls, but by high school, we start to have problems recruiting enough girls to participate in
engineering programs. Our goal is to keep the girls from losing interest, to keep the momentum
going.” There are no easy answers as to why interest among girls wanes at this age, but programs like
this one are an attempt to help plug the leaking pipeline to women in STEM fields. “I liked that
everything was hands-on,” said camper Sammy Rogers, 11, a rising sixth-grader at Montera Middle
School. “We got to make food in a materials science class, and we made robots in a robotics class. One
that was really cool, but kind of gross, was an engineering in medicine class where we touched the
bones of a cow leg.” The camp also emphasizes the need for “soft skills,” such as communication and
presentation skills. At the beginning of the session, girls are grouped into teams of five. They are then
asked to identify a problem and discuss ways to solve it. On the last day of camp, they give their
presentation before camp staff and family members. This summer, the campers spent a day at Twitter
headquarters in San Francisco, where they designed and created racing games, and met with female
interns, engineers and executives to get a sense of what a career in engineering entails. “We’ve gotten
feedback that it is exciting for the girls to be on campus, working in labs,” Tomlin added. “We do show
them an academic perspective, but they also need to see the industry side of engineering, which is why
we arranged field trips to local tech companies. Kids don’t usually get to see the insides of these
companies, so the field trips provide a visual of what they could be and do if they pursued a STEM
career.” Organizers hope the effort will foster greater retention of women in the STEM pipeline. While
gender gaps continue in salaries, federal statistics show that women in STEM jobs earn 33 percent
more than those in non-STEM occupations, and experience a smaller wage gap relative to men. Yet in
recent years, tech companies have released survey results that show dismal representation of women
and underrepresented minorities in their employee rosters. “It’s important to remember that
engineers are choosing what problems to solve in our society,” said camp program coordinator Lizzie
Hager-Barnard. “We need the different perspectives women bring to the table in order to maintain
leadership in innovation.” This video is from the 2014 launch of the Girls in Engineering camp. The
program is part of the College of Engineering’s longstanding commitment to increasing the ranks of
women in STEM fields. Campers and their parents are also asked to participate in a broader longitudinal
study about science education led by the Lawrence Hall of Science. The study, which entails the
completion of surveys twice during the camp session, seeks to learn more about girls’ attitudes and
experiences in science education. Camp participants are recruited from a limited number of local
schools. This year, the girls were recruited from Bentley School and Montera Middle School in Oakland,
REALM Charter School in Berkeley and Stanley Middle School in Lafayette. “We try to pull in girls who
may not have had access to STEM-based camps before,” said Hager-Barnard. “Our goal is to have a
diverse group of participants. At least half the schools we picked have a high percentage of kids who
qualify for the free and reduced lunch program.” She added that the hope is to get additional funding
to expand the camp so more girls – and more schools – can participate in the future. “It was nice being
all girls,” said Sammy, who participated in the June session. “That way it’s not awkward. Sometimes it
can be awkward with boys.” “We still would’ve applied, even if the camp included boys, but I do like that
it was all girls,” said Sammy’s mother, Maggie Rogers. As a bonus, the campus setting was familiar turf
for Rogers, who got her bachelor’s degree in English from UC Berkeley. “I know that they’re really trying
to get more women to go into engineering, and I’m grateful to Cal for offering this,” she said.
2. Common Core Standards Do Not Prepare Student For a Career in the STEM Field
Stotsky 13—Sandra Stotsky is professor of education reform emerita at the University of Arkansas.
(“Common Core fails to prepare students for STEM” The Denver Post, December 17th, 2013. Available
online at http://www.denverpost.com/ci_24743742/common-core-fails-prepare-studentsstem?source=infinite Accessed July 8th, 2015.)
When states adopted Common Core's math standards, they were told (among other things) that they would make all high school students
"college- and career-ready" and strengthen the critical pipeline for science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). However, with
the
exception of a few standards in trigonometry, the math standards end after Algebra II, as James Milgram, professor
of mathematics emeritus at Stanford University observed in "Lowering the Bar: How Common Core Math Fails to Prepare High School Students
for STEM," a report that Milgram and I co-authored for the Pioneer Institute. Who was responsible for telling the truth to the Colorado Board of
Education when it adopted these standards in 2010? Who should be telling Gov. John Hickenlooper, business executives, and college presidents
today that Common Core includes no standards for pre-calculus and that high school
graduates taught only to Common
Core's mathematics standards won't be prepared to pursue a four-year degree in STEM? Superintendents, local school
committees, and most parents don't seem to know that under Common Core, their students won't be able to pursue a STEM
career. In fact, they think that Common Core's math standards are rigorous. U.S. government data show that only one out of
every 50 prospective STEM majors who begin their undergraduate math coursework at the pre-calculus level
or lower will earn bachelor's degrees in a STEM area. Moreover, students whose last high school mathematics
course was Algebra II or lower have less than a 40 percent chance of earning any kind of four-year
college degree. It's not as if the lead mathematics standards writers themselves didn't tell the public how low Common Core's high school
mathematics standards were. In 2010, Jason Zimba, a lead writer, said the standards are "not only not for STEM, they are
also not for selective colleges." In January 2010, William McCallum, another lead mathematics standards writer, said, "The overall
standards would not be too high, certainly not in comparison [to] other nations, including East Asia, where math education excels." There are
other consequences to having a college readiness test in math with low expectations. The U.S. Department of Education's competitive grant
program, Race to the Top, requires states to place students who have been admitted by their public colleges and universities into credit-bearing
(non-remedial) mathematics (and English) courses if they have passed a Common Core-based "college readiness" test. Selective
public
colleges, engineering schools, and universities in every state will likely have to lower the level of their
introductory math courses to avoid unacceptably high failure rates. Milgram and I were members of Common Core's
Validation Committee, which was charged with reviewing each successive draft of the standards. We both refused to sign off on the academic
quality of the national standards, but made public our explanation and criticism of the final version of Common Core's standards. It is still
astonishing that Colorado's state board of education adopted Common Core's standards without asking the engineering, science and math
faculty at its own higher education institutions (and the math teachers in our own high schools) to do an analysis of Common Core's definition of
college readiness and make public their recommendations. After all, who could be better judges of what students need for a STEM major? We
clearly need to revise Common Core's mathematics standards as soon as possible so that all American schools are able to
offer the coursework beginning in grades 5 or 6, enabling mathematically able students to aim for a STEM major in college. Unless, of course,
Colorado's towns and cities aren't interested in American-born and educated engineers, doctors or scientists.
3. Alt causes to lack of workers in the STEM sector—Immigration Reform, Not
Common Core, Key to Solving the Skills Gap in the STEM Sector
Marin 15— Rosario Marin, former treasurer of the U.S., is co-chair of the American Competitiveness
Alliance. (“Immigration reform could help fill a growing skills gap” The Orlando Sentinel , February 24th,
2015, Available online at http://www.orlandosentinel.com/opinion/os-ed-immigration-reform-02241520150223-story.html, Accessed 7/8/15
U.S. District Judge Andrew S. Hanen of Texas suspended an executive order granting some 5 million
undocumented immigrants status based on a lawsuit by 26 Republican states challenging its legality.
Whether the order will be upheld or rejected by the courts remains to be seen, but while Congress and
the president grapple for leverage over one another, legislation that would help to positively impact
immigration reform hangs in the balance. The modern U.S. economy is increasingly reliant on
industries that are demonstrating a pronounced dearth of skilled professionals to meet steadily
increasing demand from several sectors, but viable solutions aren't receiving the attention they
deserve. Over the past several years, declining unemployment rates and faster gross domestic project
growth have been welcome indicators that the U.S. economy has been moving in the right direction.
However, not all sectors of the economy have seen the same growth. Indeed, the Federal Reserve's
"Beige Book" survey of current economic conditions points to a restricted labor market throughout the
country in the once-thriving sectors of trucking, computer programming, manufacturing, construction
and energy. At the heart of the matter is a steadily growing "skills gap" between the jobs that
businesses need to fill and the pool of workers who can meet the demand. Coupled with an aging
population, a deficit of necessary skills and able workers is culminating on the U.S. economic horizon.
The obvious solution to this pending dilemma is a far cry from novel, and yet immigration reform is
consistently overlooked. Passing legislation aimed at loosening restrictions on visas for highly skilled
workers in the critical STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and lowerskilled workers in key sectors such as agriculture, construction and hospitality would allow the U.S.
economy to derive the maximum benefit from these programs by filling the skills and population gaps
that continue to hamper its growth. Washington must take the necessary steps to address this skills
deficit by enacting more dynamic legislation that would refurbish the antiquated visa programs for
foreign skilled workers (H-1B), agricultural workers (H-2A), and non-agricultural temporary and seasonal
workers (H-2B). First set in 1990, the H-1B visas are still capped at 85,000 annually, which is less than
half the 172,500 applications submitted by business to acquire employees with the skills they need.
Likewise, the H-2B program, also set in 1990, is so routinely exceeded that Congress must often provide
temporary relief to satisfy a minimum of the demand. Republicans should take the first step forward by
revisiting bipartisan legislation that could mitigate these shortcomings. On skilled workers, measures like
the Immigration Innovation Act of 2015, already introduced this year by Sens. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, Amy
Klobuchar, D-Minn., and others would immediately increase the H-1B cap to 115,000 (with no cap for
those with advanced degrees from U.S. institutions) with the potential to rise as high as 195,000 based
on demand. A House bill introduced by Judiciary Chairman Robert Goodlatte would immediately set the
cap at 195,000, though within that figure is a 40,000 set-aside for STEM graduates. Importantly,
whatever bill is introduced to alleviate the skills gap, we must ensure that all employers can benefit
equally from the skilled-worker program. For agricultural workers, the Senate-passed bill and another
measure introduced by Goodlatte are good starting points, as both bills would create new visa
categories allowing farmworkers to stay in the U.S. for longer periods, and thus providing more certainty
for businesses while enabling some undocumented immigrants to eventually qualify for legal status. For
other temporary workers, the Senate-passed bill would exempt returning seasonal workers from the
annual 66,000 H-2B cap, while creating a new visa category for longer-term temporary workers that
would fluctuate between 20,000 and 200,000 workers per year. With the exception of a 15,000 annual
cap on construction workers, these common-sense changes to temporary worker-visa policies can and
should be adopted. Republicans ought to seize this opportunity to sidestep the amnesty debate in order
to focus on bipartisan issues around which they can unite. Our Republican Party can drive real,
beneficial immigration reform by encouraging skilled and able foreign talent to fill the growing American
economic need.
4. Alt causes to economic competitiveness — fiscal policies, political institutions
Porter & Rivkin 12 — Michael E. Porter, Bishop William Lawrence University Professor at The
Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, based at the Harvard Business School, and Jan W. Rivkin,
Senior Associate Dean for Research and a Professor in the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School, 2012
(“The Looming Challenge to U.S. Competitiveness,” Harvard Business Review, March, Available online at
https://hbr.org/2012/03/the-looming-challenge-to-us-competitiveness, Accessed 7/20/15) JL
Many of the factors that underpin U.S. competitiveness. This set of factors, as identified in the work of Michael
Porter, Mercedes Delgado, Christian Ketels, and Scott Stern, includes macro and micro components. From a macro
perspective, a competitive nation requires sound monetary and fiscal policies (such as manageable government
debt levels), strong human development (good health care and K–12 education systems), and effective political institutions (rule of
law and effective law-making bodies). Macro foundations create the potential for long-term productivity, but
actual productivity depends on the microeconomic conditions that affect business itself. A
competitive nation exhibits a sound business environment (including modern transport and communications
infrastructure, high-quality research institutions, streamlined regulation, sophisticated local consumers,
and effective capital markets) as well as strong clusters of firms and supporting institutions in
particular fields, such as information technology in Silicon Valley and energy in Houston. Competitive nations develop companies that
adopt advanced operating and management practices. In a large country like the U.S., many of the most important drivers of competitiveness
rest at the regional and local levels, not the national level. Though federal policies surely matter, microeconomic drivers tied to regions—such as
roads, universities, pools of talent, and cluster specialization—are crucial. Assessing
the U.S. through this lens, we see
significant cracks in its economic foundations, with particularly troubling deterioration in macro
competitiveness. Problems include levels of government debt not seen since World War II; health care and primary
education systems whose results are neither world-class nor reflective of the large sums spent on them; and a polarized and often
paralyzed political system (especially at the federal level) that makes decisions only when facing a crisis. In micro
competitiveness, eroding skills in the workplace, inadequate physical infrastructure, and rising regulatory complexity increasingly offset
traditional strengths such as innovation and entrepreneurship. Our HBS alumni survey provided an original and timely assessment of overall
competitiveness and the strengths and weaknesses of the U.S. The findings were sobering. (See the chart “Evaluating the U.S. Business
Environment,” in the article “Choosing the United States,” HBR March 2012.) Respondents perceived the United States as already weak and in
decline with respect to a range of important factors: the complexity of the national tax code, the effectiveness of its political system, basic
education, macroeconomic policies, and regulation. Some current American strengths, such as logistics and communications infrastructure and
workforce skill levels, were seen as declining. America’s unique strengths in entrepreneurship, higher education, and management quality were
intact, but these strengths must overcome growing weaknesses in many other areas. Nearly two-thirds of survey respondents said that the
U.S. business environment is falling behind that of emerging economies, while just 8% said that the U.S. is pulling
ahead. Overall, the picture that emerges is an American economy that has some crucial strengths but is weakening, with problems especially
visible in macro factors. How Did America Get Here? To
address America’s competitiveness problem, we must first
understand the intricate and intertwined roots of the current predicament. They stem from changes in the
world economy as well as failures within America itself.
5. Economic decline doesn’t cause war
Jervis 11 (Robert, Professor PolSci Columbia, December, “Force in Our Times” Survival, Vol 25 No 4, p 403-425)
Even if war is still seen as evil, the security community could be dissolved if severe conflicts of interest were to arise. Could the more peaceful
world generate new interests that would bring the members of the community into sharp disputes? 45 A zero-sum sense of status would be one
example, perhaps linked to a steep rise in nationalism. More likely would be a worsening
of the current economic difficulties, which
could itself produce greater nationalism, undermine democracy and bring back old-fashioned beggar-my-neighbor economic
policies. While these dangers are real, it is hard to believe that the conflicts could be great enough to lead the
members of the community to contemplate fighting each other. It is not so much that economic interdependence has
proceeded to the point where it could not be reversed – states that were more internally interdependent than anything seen internationally have
fought bloody civil wars. Rather it is that even if
the more extreme versions of free trade and economic liberalism
become discredited, it is hard to see how without building on a preexisting high level of political
conflict leaders and mass opinion would come to believe that their countries could prosper by
impoverishing or even attacking others. Is it possible that problems will not only become severe, but that people will entertain
the thought that they have to be solved by war? While a pessimist could note that this argument does not appear as outlandish as it did before
the financial crisis, an optimist could reply (correctly, in my view) that the very
fact that we have seen such a sharp
economic down-turn without anyone suggesting that force of arms is the solution shows that even if
bad times bring about greater economic conflict, it will not make war thinkable.
1AR — AT: CC Helps STEM
CCMS Hurts STEM Majors
Phelps and Milgram 14--Richard P. Phelps is editor or author of four books—Correcting Fallacies about
Educational and Psychological Testing (APA, 2008/2009);Standardized Testing Primer (Peter Lang, 2007); Defending
Standardized Testing (Psychology Press, 2005); and Kill the Messenger (Transaction, 2003, 2005)—and founder of
the Nonpartisan Education Review, R. James Milgram is professor of mathematics emeritus, Stanford University. He
was a member of Common Core’s Validation Committee 2009–2010. Aside from writing and editing a large number
of graduate level books on research level mathematics, he has also served on the NASA Advisory Board – the only
mathematician to have ever served on this board, and has held a number of the most prestigious professorships in
the world, including the Gauss Professorship in Germany. (“Common Core Math Will Reduce Enrollment in HighLevel High School Courses” Published by the Pioneer Institute, September 8th, 2014, Available online at
http://pioneerinstitute.org/featured/common-core-math-will-reduce-enrollment-in-high-level-high-school-courses/
Accessed on July 6th, 2015)
Common Core math standards (CCMS) end after just a partial Algebra II course. This weak Algebra II course
will result in fewer high school students able to study higher-level math and science courses and an increase
in credit-bearing college courses that are at the level of seventh and eighth grade material in high-achieving countries, according to a new study
published by Pioneer Institute. Study Finds Common
Core Math Standards Will Reduce Enrollment in High-Level
High School Math Courses, Dumb Down College Stem Curriculum The framers of Common Core claimed the
standards would be anchored to higher education requirements, then back-mapped through upper and lower grades. But Richard P. Phelps and
R. James Milgram, authors of “The Revenge of K-12: How Common Core and the New SAT Lower College Standards in the U.S.,” find that
higher education was scarcely involved with creating the standards. “The only higher education involvement was
from institutions that agreed to place any students who pass Common Core-based tests in high school into credit-bearing college courses,” said
Phelps. “The guarantee came in return for states’ hoped-for receipt of federal ‘Race to the Top’ grant funding.” “Many
students will
fail those courses – until they’re watered down,” he added. Perhaps the greatest harm to higher education
will come from the College Board’s decision to align its SAT tests with Common Core. The SAT has historically
been an aptitude test – one designed to predict college success. But the new test would become an achievement test – a retrospective
assessment designed to measure mastery of high school material. Many high-achieving countries administer a retrospective test for high school
graduation and a predictive college entrance examination. The new test will also be less useful to college admissions officers, since information
gained from the retrospective test will duplicate data they already have, such as grade point average and class rank. David Coleman, the lead
author of Common Core’s English language arts standards, is now president of the College B\\oard and announced the decision to align the SAT
tests with Common Core when he became president. The
change in the nature of the SAT will be most harmful to
low-income students. An achievement test is far less useful as a vehicle for identifying students with
high science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) potential who attended high schools with
poor math and science instruction. Retrospective tests are also more susceptible to coaching, which
provides another advantage to students from families who can afford test preparation courses. Lowincome students will also be hurt the most by the shift to weaker math standards. Since the Common Core math standards only end at a partial
Algebra II course, nothing higher than Algebra II will be tested by federally funded assessments that are currently under development. High
schools in low-income areas will be under the greatest fiscal pressure to eliminate under-subscribed
electives like trigonometry, pre-calculus, and calculus. Research has shown that the highest-level
math course taken in high school is the single best predictor of college success. Only 39 percent of the members
of the class of 1992 who entered college having taken no farther than Algebra II earned a college degree. The authors estimate that the number
will shrink to 31-33 percent for the class of 2012. Two of the authors of the Common Core math standards, Jason Zimba and William McCallum,
have publicly acknowledged the standards’ weakness. At a public meeting in Massachusetts in 2010, Zimba
said the CCMS is “not
for STEM” and “not for selective colleges.” Indeed, among students intending to major in STEM fields,
just 2 percent of those whose first college math course is pre-calculus or lower ever graduate with a
STEM degree. Proponents claim the Common Core standards are internationally benchmarked, but compulsory standards for the lower
secondary grades in China are more advanced than any CCMS material. The highest-achieving countries have standards for different pathways
based on curricular preferences, goals and levels of achievement, and each pathway has its own exit examination.“A
one-size-fits-all
academic achievement target must of necessity be low,” Milgram said. “Otherwise politically
unacceptable numbers of students will fail.”
Multiple Alt Causes to Lack of Women in the STEM Sector—A Lack of Standards in
School is Not One of Them
Welsh 13— Jennifer Welsh is a Senior Editor at Business Insider, covering the science section. She manages and
writes content on businessinsider.com/science. She graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz in
2010 with a graduate certificate in Science Communications and got a Bachelors of Science in Biology from the
University of Notre Dame in 2006. In between, she was a research associate at at startup biotech company in San
Francisco. She's written for Wired Science, The Scientist, Discover Magazine and LiveScience.com, among others.
(“These Are The 7 Things Keeping Women Out Of Science Careers” Business Insider, October 16th, 2013, Available
online at http://www.businessinsider.com/7-things-keeping-women-out-of-science-2013-10 Accessed on 7/8/15)
Ada Lovelace Day, a day meant to honor female scientists as a way to remember Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer, was Oct. 15. In
1842, Lovelace wrote a computer program for a machine that didn't even exist yet. More than 150 years later, women
are still lacking
in science fields. Nationally, women now earn close to 60% of bachelor's degrees overall, but only 20%
of the degrees in computer science, 20% of those in physics, and 18% of those in engineering according to
The New York Times. Why women still aren't well or equally represented in the sciences (or, more specifically women in science, technology,
engineering, and math — STEM) is a complex topic, and there's been a lot of talk about it of lately. Eileen Pollack wrote a wonderful New York
Times Magazine piece on women in science, posted on Oct. 3. We've broken apart some of the points she made and added some other sources
to get a better grip on why there are so few women in science. 1. Teasing in school Even
at the high school level, teachers and
classmates sometimes stereotype girls who are interested in advanced physics and math. Pollack spoke to Yale
physics undergrads and heard these stories: One young woman had been disconcerted to find herself one of only three girls in her AP physics
course in high school, and even more so when the other two dropped out. Another student was the only girl in her AP physics class from the
start. Her classmates teased her mercilessly: "You're a girl. Girls can't do physics." She expected the teacher to put an end to the teasing, but he
didn't. These
kinds of reactions to their presence in these courses pushes young women out. Studies
have shown that countries with greater gender equity had smaller gender gaps in math. When given
the right support women do just as well as men — it isn't an inherent ability difference between the
sexes. "When girls see opportunities for themselves in science, technology, engineering and math, they're more likely to take higher math in
high school and more likely to pursue those careers," researcher Janet Hyde, from the University of Wisconsin, said in a press release. 2. A Lack
of Encouragement Lovelace herself was encouraged to pursue math by her mother, to avoid the "dangerous poetic tendencies" of her father,
the poet Lord Byron, according to The New York Times' Bits blog. This could be why she shed the female stereotype and pursued her STEM
interests. As Pollack, herself a physics major who didn't go into academia, writes: "I didn't go on in physics because not a single professor — not
even the adviser who supervised my senior thesis — encouraged me to go to graduate school." She graduated at the top of her class, but none
of her professors even asked if she was going to graduate school. Studies
have shown that when told that men score
better in math tests than women, women tend to score worse. When told that isn't true, the two
genders scored equally well. This might come from an "internal bias" in the minds of young female
scientists, who may naturally under-rate their intelligence. Whether that's a cultural concoction or a difference in how
female brain responds to encouragement, we don't know yet. "Women need more positive reinforcement, and men need more negative
reinforcement. Men wildly overestimate their learning abilities, their earning abilities. Women say, 'Oh, I'm not good, I won't earn much,
whatever you want to give me is O.K.,'" Yale physicist Meg Urry told Pollack. 3. Stereotypes Females playing STEM-literate characters are
gaining more popularity in the movies — for example, Natalie Portman plays a physicist in the new "Thor" movie and Sandra Bullock stars in
"Gravity" as a female Astronaut. But, in other ways, women are being held back by stereotypes. In the hugely popular
television show "The Big Bang Theory," female scientists are forced into "weirdo" roles, while the non-scientist is the only "normal" female
character. computer science stereotypes and women Cheryan, et. al, Sex Roles, 2013. These stereotypes
also extend into how
we portray male scientists. Research has indicated that when females are exposed to nerdy white-guy
stereotypes, it discourages them from STEM fields. Studies have shown that when young women hear
about a non-stereotypical computer scientist, their interest in the field increases. 4. Childcare Even if
young women make it through a bachelor's and enter academia, they often leave the STEM fields
early in their career. A frequently suggested reason for this is the lack of maternity leave and childcare
after having kids. This is also seen in the long-hour days of technology startups. Tenure-track academics face steep obstacles in reaching
their goals, and taking a "time-out" to have children is still a problem at many institutions. Astrophysicist and MacArthur "genius" grant award
winner Sara Seager, of MIT, says she will use her $625,000 award to pay for childcare to help her concentrate on her work. If this wasn't an
issue facing academics, she wouldn't need to put her winnings toward it. There are indications that having children isn't the main reason
women leave STEM fields mid-career — after all, startups and academia allow flexible days and plenty of work from home opportunities — it
does seem to become an issue for some research-minded women. A study by Berkeley researchers found that 41% of
women
postdocs who had babies retreated from their original goal of being a research professor, versus 20% of
single women. 5. Competition Women are generally less competitive and aggressive than men, and this could impact their desires to follow
through with a career in the sciences at the academic level — when constant competition to publish becomes the major determinant of a
successful career. The push to constantly compete can wear on someone whose personality isn't naturally inclined to be aggressive. "While the
women in our study were undoubtedly high achievers, many felt that the competitiveness of science (e.g., to secure a grant and post), and
especially at the early career stages, results in less weight being given to integrity and meritocracy, making academia an unattractive long-term
career option for those who are less naturally competitive," according to a study by the Wellcome Trust [PDF]. 6. Marginalization Even
if
women do find themselves a faculty position, they are frequently paid less than their male
counterparts, given less lab and office space, get fewer awards for their work, and given access to
fewer resources, an MIT committee found. Women software developers earn 80% of what men do. These figures hold true in larger
studies, including one from the American Institute of Physics looking at 15,000 physicists in 130 countries. "In almost all cultures, the female
scientists received less financing, lab space, office support and grants for equipment and travel, even after the researchers controlled for
differences other than sex," Pollack wrote. 7. Bias This
marginalization is likely the result of bias. Women in the STEM
fields face a constant bias against them, not just from male colleagues, but also from females. For
example, when presented with identical lab manager resumes from either a John or a Jennifer both male and female professors tended to pick
the John as the better candidate, and offer him more money for the position. As Johnathon Mohr points out on twitter, this bias is sometimes
built into the "good old boy" network of tenured professors. If males are the majority of researchers that make it into the later stage of a
research career, then they are making the decisions of who will get tenure, and hired for higher-level positions and awards. This also crops up in
male-driven Silicon Valley, where female entrepreneurs find getting funding hard to do because they aren't perceived as leaders, but as
mothers. Women only start about 8% of venture-backed tech startups. Hope ahead It's not all bad news; more women are making it to college
and graduate levels of STEM. "If you look at the students scoring in the top one in 10,000 in mathematics in 1983, there were 13 boys for every
girl," Steven Ceci of Cornell University, said in a press release. "Since then, until 2007, that gap has shrunk to somewhere between 2.8 and four
boys for every girl." A Berkeley study found that women represented between 20% (engineering) and 71% (psychology) of UC system Ph.D.s in
science (51% of life sciences Ph.D.s). There have even been stronger efforts to encourage women to go into sciences. "Marvel Ultimate Mentor
Adventure," for example, is a new contest created by Marvel around the "Thor" movie premier to encourage girls to reach out to STEM mentors
in their area and interview them. The girls get a trip to Hollywood for a movie screening, but also a week-long STEM adventure. The
problem comes when we want to keep these women in STEM careers, specifically academia, for
longer. Many move out of research and hard-science fields and into more personable and "female"
positions like health care or education. Improvements need to be made at the higher levels of STEM
fields to keep women in these professions.
Common Core directly harms academic readiness for careers in the STEM fields
Stotsky 14— Ms. Stotsky was a member of Common Core's Validation Committee from 2009-10. She is
professor emerita at the University of Arkansas. (“Common Core Doesn't Add Up to STEM Success” WSJ, January 2 nd,
2014, Available online at http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304020704579278060483138096
Accessed 7/20/15)
As a former member of the Common Core Validation Committee and the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, I am
one of the few mothers to have heard the full sales pitch for this latest educational reform, which has been adopted by 45 states. I know the
Common Core buzz words, from "deeper learning" and "critical thinking" to "fewer, clearer, and higher standards." It all sounds
impressive, but I'm worried that the students who study under these standards won't receive
anywhere near the quality of education that children in the U.S. did even a few years ago. President
Obama correctly noted in September 2012 that "leadership tomorrow depends on how we educate our students
today—especially in science, technology, engineering and math." He has placed a priority on
increasing the number of students and teachers who are proficient in these vital STEM fields . And the
president's National Math and Science Initiative is strongly supported by people like Suzanne McCarron, president of the Exxon Mobil
Foundation, who has said she wants to "inspire our nation's youth to pursue STEM careers by capturing their interest at an early age." Yet
the basic mission of Common Core, as Jason Zimba, its leading mathematics standards writer, explained at a videotaped board
meeting in March 2010, is to provide students with enough mathematics to make them ready for a
nonselective college—"not for STEM," as he put it. During that meeting, he didn't tell us why Common Core aimed so low in
mathematics. But in a September 2013 article published in the Hechinger Report, an education news website affiliated with Columbia
University's Teachers College, Mr. Zimba admitted: "If you want
to take calculus your freshman year in college, you
will need to take more mathematics than is in the Common Core." As Stanford mathematics professor James
Milgram noted in "Lowering the Bar," a report the two of us co-wrote for the Pioneer Institute in September, the Common Core deliberately
leaves out "major topics in trigonometry and precalculus." Contrast that with the status quo before the Common Core, when states like
Massachusetts and California provided precalculus standards for high-school students. The implications of this are dramatic. "It
is
extremely rare for students who begin their undergraduate years with coursework in precalculus or
an even lower level of mathematical knowledge to achieve a bachelor's degree in a STEM area," Mr.
Milgram added. Common Core's deficiencies also plague its English standards, though its proponents have been selling the opposite line.
Under the Common Core, complex literary study—literature close to or at a college reading level—is
reduced to about 50% of reading instructional time in high school English class. The rest of the time is to be spent on
"informational" texts, and more writing than reading is required at all grade levels. Excerpts will have to do when reading "The Great Gatsby" so
students can spend more time on the Teapot Dome Scandal. Yes, that's a real suggestion for informational reading from the National Council of
Teachers of English, the professional organization of English teachers that aims to support teachers under the Common Core. In its November
2013 Council Chronicle, a teacher argued that learning about this 1920s government oil scandal is the proper way to "contextualize" Fitzgerald's
Jazz Age characters. But reducing the time students spend studying complex literature means fewer opportunities to learn how to read
between the lines—the fundamental way teenagers learn how to analyze a text. Still, no major English or humanities organizations have
endorsed the Common Core state standards for English language arts. Not so in mathematics. Despite the dramatic mismatch of the Common
Core math standards with the White House goal of preparing more students for a STEM career, all the heads of major professional mathematics
associations expressed "strong support for the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics" in a July 2013 letter solicited and posted by
William McCallum, professor of mathematics at the University of Arizona and a Common Core math standards writer. Other signers include the
presidents of the American Mathematical Society, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the Association for Women in
Mathematics, the Benjamin Banneker Association, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and TODOS: Mathematics for ALL. Why
leaders of these organizations would endorse standards that will not prepare students for college
majors in mathematics, science, engineering and mathematics-dependent fields is a puzzle. But no
educational reform that leads to fewer engineers, scientists and doctors is worthy of the name.
1AR — AT: Women Key to the STEM
Immigrants are critical to filling the STEM worker gap—They are crucial to innovation
and economic competitiveness
McDaniel 13— Paul McDaniel is the Immigrant Entrepreneur and Innovation Fellow at the Immigration Policy Center.
Previously, he served as Project Researcher in the Center for Citizenship and Immigrant Communities at Catholic Legal
Immigration Network (CLINIC). Prior to his work at CLINIC, Paul was a Researcher at the University of North Carolina at
Charlotte where he worked on several community-based research projects with the Department of Family Medicine at
Carolinas Medical Center, Levine Museum of the New South, Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools, Crossroads Charlotte, Latin
American Coalition, and Community Building Initiative. He has worked on reports and presentations about immigrant
entrepreneurship, immigrant settlement and integration in new immigrant gateways and destinations, immigrant access to
education and healthcare, and community receptivity. Paul recently completed his Ph.D. dissertation in Geography and Urban
Regional Analysis from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and holds an M.S. in Geography from the University of
Tennessee, an M.A. in Educational Leadership from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and a B.S. in Geography from
Samford University. (“Immigrants are Key Driver of U.S. Talent and Economic Competitiveness” American Immigration Council ,
July 2nd, 2015 , Available online at http://immigrationimpact.com/2013/07/02/immigrants-are-key-driver-of-u-s-talent-andeconomic-competitiveness/, Accessed 7/8/15)
U.S. workers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields have been important contributors
to American innovation, job creation, rising incomes, and global economic competitiveness throughout the
years. And not surprisingly, immigrants have played a critical role in American innovation through STEM
fields and all parts of the U.S. economy. A new report by Gordon Hanson (University of California, San Diego) and Matthew
Slaughter (Dartmouth) describes these important relationships between talent, economic competitiveness, and immigration in the United
States. In their paper, the authors present data in support of three critical points: First, the contribution of talent to American innovation and
overall competitiveness is as important today as in the past: “Talent
– especially the talent of highly educated STEM
workers – drives much of America’s innovation and economic growth. In the increasingly global
economy, America’s need for talent has become even more acute. Despite the nation’s historic innovation prowess,
concern is rising among leaders that our economic strength is waning.” Second, immigration adds to the talent pool in the
United States, which is as important today as it has been in the past: “Immigration plays a critical role
in helping America meet its steadily growing demand for talent – especially for highly skilled STEM
workers. Immigrants have long made substantial contributions to American innovation, both at the
highest levels and throughout the economy at all stages of discovering and developing new ideas.
Over time, America’s reliance on talented immigrants has been rising, not falling. America attracts immigrants
who achieve very high levels of education and who are strongly inclined toward training in STEM disciplines.” Third, the supply of and
need for STEM talent in the U.S. includes an opportunity for immigrants to continue to help meet that
growing demand: “Even after the Great Recession, America’s need for more talent persists, as it did for decades before. America’s
demand for skilled STEM workers continues to grow – and immigrants continue to help meet this
demand, both directly and more broadly through their expansive contributions to America’s
innovation potential. Post-recession, unemployment in STEM occupations has been falling sharply as the STEM labor market rapidly
tightens.” Immigrants make significant contributions to innovation throughout the country, from the discovery of new ideas, research and
development of new products, and patenting, to starting and leading new and innovative companies that create thousands of jobs in the U.S.
As the report reiterates, immigrants founded or co-founded 25 percent of all U.S. high-tech firms between 1995 and 2005. In 2005, those new
companies employed nearly half a million people and produced more than $50 billion in sales. Beyond the national level, cities and regions
within the U.S. that attract greater numbers of skilled immigrants tend to be more successful at innovation. Furthermore, innovation-intensive
metropolitan areas tend to have higher rates of patenting, lower unemployment rates, and higher demand for high-skilled workers since
patenting growth is correlated with job growth, population growth, and increases in educational attainment. America’s past innovation grew in
part from a robust education system and an environment that allowed for the world’s most talented – native- and foreign-born alike – to thrive.
Based on the evidence of the importance of immigrants to American innovation, we must ensure that
comprehensive immigration reform in 2013 allows immigrants to contribute their talent and skill here in
the U.S. Furthermore, we must guarantee that our education system cultivates a long-term future
workforce of talented individuals with the STEM expertise necessary to allow the U.S. to continue to
be an innovation leader in our global innovation economy.
Immigration reform key to US growth competitiveness
Papademetriou and Sumption 11 — Demetrios Papademetriou, Distinguished Senior Fellow and
President Emeritus of the Migration Policy Institute, PhD in Comparative public policy and international
relations from the University of Maryland, Madeleine Sumption, former Senior Policy Analyst and Director
of Research for the Migration Policy Institute’s International Program, M.A. in Public Policy from the
University of Chicago, 2011 (“The Role of Immigration in Fostering Competitiveness in the United States,”
Migration Policy Institute, May, Available online at www.migrationpolicy.org/pubs/competitivenessUS.pdf, Accessed 7-11-15)
Many aspects of the US immigration system are deeply troubled, however: The small share of
employment-based immigration, together with tight numerical limits that do not adjust to economic demand,
substantial backlogs and delays, and a failure to prioritize effectively between prospective highly skilled
immigrants below the ranks of the most elite, all undermine the job-creating power of US employers and hinder the
system's ability to select effectively from the large pool of workers who would like to gain admission. The economic crisis may have brought
temporary respite from some of the problems described in this paper by reducing employers' demand for immigrant workers in the short term.
But in
the longer term, substantial reforms will be needed if the US immigration system is to facilitate,
not impede, economic growth and competitiveness.
1AR — AT: Gender Gap
Men Do Not Outnumber Women in the STEM Field
Cummins 15— Dr. Denise Dellarosa Cummins is research psychologist and author. She has held
faculty and research positions at Yale University, the University of California, the University of Illinois,
and the Center for Adaptive Behavior at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin. She is a respected cognitive
scientist who has authored numerous scientific articles, and is an elected Fellow of the Association for
Psychological Science. She also gives invited talks about her research at universities and popular venues
all over the world. In her Psychology Today blog, she writes about what she and other cognitive
scientists are discovering about the way people think, solve problems, and make decisions. (“Why the
STEM gender gap is overblown” PBS News Hour, April 17th, 2015, Available online at
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/truth-women-stem-careers/ Accessed on 7/8/15)
There are two universally accepted “truths” about women and STEM careers (science, technology, engineering, and
mathematics). The first is that men outnumber women in in these fields, and the second is that women
are socialized to avoid STEM as career choices, because society considers them “unfeminine.” These beliefs have
spawned a national effort on the part of the National Science Foundation to attract girls and young
women into STEM. The preferred strategy is to attract females by “unbrainwashing them” into accepting STEM careers as appropriate for
women. Why we think the way we do about men, women and work On closer inspection, it turns out that these “truths” are
nothing more than assumptions, and that these assumptions are inconsistent with the facts. Here are the
facts: 1. Men do not outnumber women in all STEM fields Gender equity in STEM means that females account for
50 percent of the individuals involved in STEM fields. When we look at the percentage of STEM bachelor’s degrees
awarded to female students for the last two decades, based on NSF statistics, we find that there is no gender
difference in the biosciences, the social sciences, or mathematics, and not much of a difference in the
physical sciences. The only STEM fields in which men genuinely outnumber women are computer science and engineering. I created the
following graphs, based on NSF data, to show women’s completion of bachelor’s degrees and PhDs in specific fields between 1991 and 2010.
Graph courtesy of the author. Graph courtesy of the author. At the Ph.D. level, women
have clearly achieved equity in the
biosciences and social sciences, are nearly there (40 percent) in mathematics and the physical
sciences, and are “over-represented” in psychology (78 percent). Again, the only fields in which men greatly outnumber
women are computer science and engineering.. When we look at the actual workforce, we see the same pattern. Women are as likely
as men to be biological scientists, medical scientists and chemists. They are much less likely than men to be computer
scientists, but have achieved equity in three out of five areas, with computer science and geoscience being exceptions. Cummins.Labor force 2.
Women and men are equally capable of doing STEM work One explanation for sex difference in STEM fields is that
women just don’t have what it takes to succeed in the “hard” sciences, computer science, or engineering. Some have even argued that women
are not smart enough for these fields. The fact is that men and women score equivalently on tests of raw IQ, with some studies showing women
scoring slightly higher. When it comes to mathematics—a core requirement for science and engineering—women score on average only 32
points lower than men on the SAT— a mere 3 percent difference. While men outnumber women in the “genius” SAT math score range (700-800),
the ratio is not that large (1.6 to 1). Men show only an insignificant five-point advantage over women on the quantitative section of the Graduate
Record Examination, and they score one point lower than women on the analytic section. It is also not the case that more undergraduate men
than women are selected by top engineering programs. Of the top STEM programs in the country, most have male-to-female undergraduate
student ratios close to 1:1. 3. Sex-linked interest preferences are not mere artifacts of socialization One interpretation of the sex difference in
STEM careers (and the workforce in general) is that females are pressured into areas that are more “gender appropriate,” not that they are
choosing to study what is intrinsically more interesting to them. For example, former American Association of University Women senior
researcher Andresse St. Rose, one of the authors of ”Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics,” puts it this
way: Another
common but somewhat misguided explanation for female underrepresentation in STEM
is that while girls and young women may be just as able as young men, they are not as interested in
science and engineering. From early adolescence, girls report less interest in math and science careers than boys do (Turner et al.
2008), and among children identified as mathematically precocious, girls were less likely than boys to pursue STEM careers as adults (Lubinski
and Benbow 2006). Girls’ lower reported interest in STEM may be partially explained by social attitudes and beliefs about whether it is
appropriate for girls to pursue these subjects and careers. The problem with this “blank slate” interpretation of gender differences is that it
doesn’t jibe with results of developmental studies. Newborn girls prefer to look at faces while newborn boys prefer to look at mechanical stimuli
(such as mobiles). When it comes to toys, a consistent finding is that boys (and juvenile male monkeys) strongly prefer to play with mechanical
toys over plush toys or dolls, while girls (and female juvenile monkeys) show equivalent interest in the two. (See this for summary of this
research.) These sex-linked preferences emerge in human development long before any significant socialization can have taken place. And they
exist in juvenile non-human primates that are not exposed to human gender-specific socialization efforts. It is not difficult to see how such early
emerging preferences can end up shaping career choices later on: Women tend to gravitate toward fields that focus on living things and agents,
men to fields that focus on objects. 4. Different
preferences don’t mean women’s are less important The hidden
assumption underlying the push to eliminate gender gaps in traditionally male-dominated fields is
that such fields are intrinsically more important and more valuable to society than fields that
traditionally appeal to women. The hidden assumption underlying the push to eliminate gender gaps in traditionally maledominated fields is that such fields are intrinsically more important and more valuable to society than fields that traditionally appeal to women.
So we must turn women into men so that women can achieve economic parity with men. As Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg
put it in her book “Lean In,” we need to set a goal of getting more women “in the door” of male-dominated, prestigious, and high-paying fields,
even if doing so requires that women act more like men. But what happens when women follow this advice and follow the “lure” of prestige and
wealth offered by male-dominated professions? Kate Bahn, an economics Ph.D. candidate at the New School, put it this way in her blog The Lady
Economist: …I sometimes wonder to what extent my desire to be taken seriously, like one of the boys, played into my decision to become an
economist over, say, a sociologist. and Do other fields perceived as masculine also attract a certain type of woman, like me, who is drawn to the
power and seriousness connoted with masculinity? And what does it say about me, as a staunch feminist, if I’m relying on masculinity to convey
my worth Yes, indeed, what does it say when women must adopt male values wholesale in order to command real social, political, and economic
power? Or perhaps the better question is: Why are the fields that appeal to men so much better compensated than the fields that appeal to
women? My answer to this question is… 5. Men earn more because they believe they are worth more—and women agree Nursing, a traditionally
female-dominated profession surely has more intrinsic value to society than trading stocks, yet nurses make a fraction of what high-frequency
traders make. And nursing did not bring about a global economic crisis that the taxpayer was required to bail out. Yet when the percentage of
male nurses increased from a miniscule 3 percent in 1970 to 10 percent in 2011, something else very interesting developed: a gender pay gap in
the field of nursing. In 2011, the average female nurse earned $51,100, 16 percent less than the $60,700 earned by the average man in the same
job. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that male-dominated professions are high-status and well-paid precisely because they are maledominated, and female-dominated professions are low-status and poorly-paid precisely because they are female-dominated. When men move
into traditionally female-dominated professions, the salaries and status levels of those professions rise because men demand—and get—more
for the work they do. When men move into traditionally female-dominated professions, the salaries and status levels of those professions rise
because men demand—and get—more for the work they do. This is more than just conjecture. The fact that women undervalue themselves (and
by extension, the work they do) has been amply demonstrated in carefully designed experimental economics studies. The two most frequently
studied economics games are the dictator and ultimatum games. In the dictator game, one individual is given full authority to keep or share a
sum of money with another player. On average, women keep less for themselves than men do. In the ultimatum game, one person is allowed to
make an offer as to how the money should be divided, and the other party is given the opportunity to accept or reject the offer. If the offer is
rejected, no one gets any money. Both men and women make lower offers to women than to men. Other studies have found that women
negotiated harder when they were working on behalf of others rather than for themselves, which implies a reluctance to push their own
interests. Rather than rushing to traditionally male professions to shore up our status and our income levels, perhaps we need to reject the
implicit belief that men and whatever men are doing must be important and valuable, and whatever women are doing must be the career dregs
that men fobbed off on us simply because they found that work intrinsically less interesting. The bottom line Women are clearly capable of doing
well in STEM fields traditionally dominated by men, and they should not be hindered, bullied, or shamed for pursuing careers in such fields. But
we also should not be ashamed if our interests differ from men’s. If we find certain careers more intrinsically rewarding than men do, that does
not mean we have been brainwashed by society or herded into menial fields of labor. Instead, we should demand that greater intrinsic and
monetary compensation be awarded to the work we like and want to do.
1AR — AT: CC Good for Students
Common Core Standards have created a host of new issues for special education in
America
Beals 14—KATHARINE BEALS is a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of
Education and an adjunct professor at the Drexel University School of Education. She is the author of
Raising a Left-Brain Child in a Right-Brain World: Strategies for Helping Bright, Quirky, Socially Awkward
Children to Thrive at Home and at School. (“The Common Core Is Tough on Kids With Special Needs” The
Atlantic, February 21st, 2014. Available online at
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/02/the-common-core-is-tough-on-kids-withspecial-needs/283973/ Accessed July 6th, 2015)
In a recent discussion board thread on reading comprehension challenges in autism, a special-education teacher commented
that her students can’t understand the assigned reading passages. “When I complained, I was told that I could add
extra support, but not actually change the passages,” she wrote. “It is truly sad to see my students’ frustration.” Why
must this teacher’s students contend with passages that are too complex for them to understand? She
attributes this inflexibility to the Common Core, new standards—created in 2009 by a group of
education professionals, none of them K-12 classroom teachers or special-education experts—that have
been adopted by 45 states. Though most Common Core goals are abstract and schematic, collectively they constitute a one-size
fits-all approach that, in practice, has severely straightjacketed America’s special-needs students. The
teacher I quoted above—one of the many special-ed instructors I teach at the Drexel University and University of Pennsylvania education
schools—is hardly alone. She’s echoing the concerns of dozens of other special-education teachers I’ve spoken with, most of whom have
already gotten the message from their supervisors or superiors that they must adhere to the standards and give all their students the
designated grade-level assignments. Precocious students, students with learning disabilities, precocious students with learning disabilities: How
does the Common Core suit them? Even before the widespread adoption of the Common Core, it was already
increasingly rare
for even the most intellectually unusual children to be exempted—whether by acceleration, remediation, or
placement in special classrooms—from the course of study followed by their cognitively typical peers. The 2001 No Child Left Behind Act had
schools focusing away from the most academically advanced students (and requires no special programming for them); the 2004 reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act required children with disabilities “to be involved in and make progress in the
general education curriculum.” Increasingly, it’s
the general curriculum for everyone. And now that this general
curriculum is being shaped by dozens of grade-specific Common Core standards, and that teachers
(including special-ed teachers) are increasingly expected to align each day’s lesson with one or more of these
standards, there’s even less room for remediation or acceleration. Restricting students to curricula beyond their
cognitive capacities substantially lowers their achievement. Indeed, those two words appear nowhere in the standards, not even in the one
Common Core document that addresses this subject: a one-and-a-half-pager entitled “Application to
Students with Disabilities.” It says that special-needs students should have the support services,
individualized instruction, and assistive technology they need for the “the rigor and high expectations
of the Common Core State Standards.” It does not, however, state what these services are or how
they would work. As for curricular materials, they might be altered or presented “in multiple ways,” but only “within the framework of
the Common Core.” For students with sensory disabilities like deafness or blindness, the necessary
accommodations—e.g., sign language interpreters or audio books—are obvious. Cognitive disabilities are
different. Yet the document simply states: Some students with the most significant cognitive disabilities
will require substantial supports and accommodations to have meaningful access to certain standards.
So what happens to the approximately six percent of the student population with significant cognitive
disabilities—whether general intellectual disabilities, language impairments, reading impairments, non-verbal learning disabilities, or
autistic spectrum disorders? What happens when their classrooms function under a set of guidelines that
ignore their skills and specific needs? In general, the news isn’t good. Last November, an issue of Education Week ran several
articles on special-needs students and the Common Core. One
article characterizes the English language arts goals as
“largely unmet.” Another reports more than half of teachers surveyed saying they are unprepared to
teach the standards to high-needs students. To see how the Common Core standards play out in practice, let’s look at two
subsets of children with cognitive disabilities: those with language impairments and those with autism. Let’s look at eighth grade in particular,
and at two of the English language arts standards for reading and literature, beginning with R-L 8.2: Determine a theme or central idea of a text
and analyze its development over the course of the text, including its relationship to the characters, setting, and plot; provide an objective
summary of the text. This, like all Common Core goals, is rather schematic. So perhaps there’s a way to tweak things in line with the Students
with Disabilities document. Perhaps one could adjust the material by using a simplified or alternative text at the student’s actual reading level.
RELATED STORY The Common Core Is Tough on Kids Who Are Still Learning English But probably not. As additional Common Core documents
explain, the texts for the different grade levels must be at a certain grade-appropriate level of verbal complexity. The Common Core Myths vs.
Facts page notes, “the Standards require certain critical content for all students, including… America’s Founding
Documents, foundational American literature, and Shakespeare.” And an appendix explains that sample texts, which include The Adventures of
Tom Sawyer for eighth grade, “exemplify the level of complexity and quality that the Standards require all students in a given grade band to
engage with.” So, while one might supplement a text, say, with glossaries and storyboards, one can’t adjust the text itself to match the
student’s reading level. Further showing what special needs students are up against are the sample tasks. For R-L 8.2 above, we have: Students
summarize the development of the morality of Tom Sawyer in Mark Twain’s novel of the same name and analyze its connection to themes of
accountability and authenticity by noting how it is conveyed through characters, setting, and plot. Now
imagine a 14-year-old who
comprehends language at a fourth-grade level. What combination of assistive technology and
supplemental material could possibly provide sufficient access to how accountability and authenticity
play out in the complex paragraphs of Tom Sawyer? What, other than years of remediation in reading comprehension,
could get her through highly relevant sentences like this one, in which Tom takes a lashing from Schoolmaster Dobbins for an infraction actually
committed by Becky Thatcher? Inspired by the splendor of his own act, he took without an outcry the most merciless flaying that even Mr.
Dobbins had ever administered; and also received with indifference the added cruelty of a command to remain two hours after school should
be dismissed—for he knew who would wait for him outside till his captivity was done, and not count the tedious time as loss, either. What,
short of simplifying the text or spoon-feeding its meaning to her, will it take for our language-impaired 14-year-old to grasp this 67-word
sentence, with its complex syntax, words like “flaying,” “indifference,” and an outdated sense of “should,” and the inference needed to grasp
the contextual meaning of “captivity”? One
can only imagine how tough things become once the student gets to
Shakespeare—one author that the standards appear to mandate. Let’s turn to another eighth-grade reading goal, R-L
8.3: Analyze how particular lines of dialogue or incidents in a story or drama propel the action, reveal aspects of a character, or provoke a
decision. Now imagine the challenge for a student with autism—even one whose vocabulary and syntax are age appropriate. Autism is largely a
social disability, with key deficits in understanding character and motivation and in drawing inferences from dialogues—in real life as much as in
reading. Where does the teacher of an autistic student even begin? Some special-education professionals believe they have the answer. In an
article entitled “Core State Standards for Students with Autism: the Challenge for Educators,” published last year in the journal Teaching
Exceptional Children, we find Stephen, an eighth grader with Asperger’s Syndrome (mild autism) who is struggling to meet the R-L 8.3. The
authors describe a goal-aligned text in which a boy stops going to school after being habitually bullied and ostracized. When asked why the boy
quits school, Stephen can’t answer. Presumably, his Asperger’s-related
social deficits make it hard for him to recognize
the students’ bullying and ostracizing as such, and to grasp the emotional and behavioral effects on
the boy. How, the authors ask, can Stephen’s teacher help him meet R-L 8.3? By creating a comic strip that shows the characters’ thoughts,
including a thought bubble for Matt that reads "I am a loser. Everyone hates me. I am never going back to school!" In other words, the teacher
can help Stephen meet the standard by giving away the answer! But the answer to one specific configuration of dialogue, action, and character
does not teach a child with autism how any particular lines of dialogue reveal traits or provoke actions in characters. If it did, we’d have
screaming headlines about a simple cure for one of the core deficits of autism.
Not all students will succeed with America’s
Founding Documents, foundational American literature, and/or Shakespeare. But well-meaning
aspirations for special-needs children can foster deep and widespread denial—in particular among
educators facing high-stakes standards. One of the special-education professors quoted in Education Week, for example, asks,
in reference to students with severe cognitive disabilities, "Why would we take a whole class of citizens and say you don't get to learn the
standards that we say are most important for everyone?" "Most important for everyone": That’s the real problem. Forcing
all students
into the same, age-pegged standards deprives atypical students of optimized learning opportunities
and attainable goals at their level of developmental readiness. Far better for an eighth grader who is four years behind
in language to read texts with vocabulary and sentence complexity just above her current skill level than to struggle through 67-word sentences
in Tom Sawyer using story boards as crutches. Far better for a student with autism to engage with simplified social scenarios that he can work
through on his own than to muddle through complex ones that need to be explained to him piecemeal.
As any of my special-ed
student teachers can tell you, and as research has shown, restricting students to curricula beyond
their cognitive capacities substantially lowers their achievement. The purported goal of the Common
Core is success for all students. But success for all requires openness towards cognitive diversity, and
isn’t so easily standardized.
Removing Common Core Drastically Benefits Children with Disabilities
Ramaswamy 15—Swapna Venugopal Reamaswamy is a writer for Lohud (“Common Core tests 'devastating'
for special-needs kids” Lohud- The Journal News April 7th, 2015. Available online at
http://www.lohud.com/story/news/education/2015/04/06/state-tests-devastating-special-needsstudents/25374391/ Accessed July 8th, 2015)
Parents of children with special needs say the
state tests that measure progress in math and English in grades three
setting them up for failure with a one-size-fits-all approach. They say the tests are
developmentally inappropriate and create anxiety and frustration for their children. They worry that test-prep
is eating into the time spent working on social and life skills. They also don't like their children's performance on tests
being tied to their teacher's evaluations. Many are considering opting out of the controversial Common Core-aligned exams,
through eight are
according to NYS Allies for Public Education, a parent and educator advocacy group. LOHUD.COM View: Common Core hurting students outside
mainstream Cindy Rubino is a mother of four, including John, a second-grader at Lakeland's Benjamin Franklin Elementary School who is on the
autism spectrum. Along with academic difficulties, John — and other students
with special needs — face social challenges
that can challenge their confidence and self-esteem. There was a time, for example, when Rubino learned that John was
sitting by himself at lunch every day. She sought help from the school's social worker, who promptly intervened. As her son struggles to learn life
skills, the last thing Rubino wants is for him be left "defeated" by state tests that she says are not a true measure of his social or academic
growth. "It's
a grueling process for these kids. It's a lot of pressure for typical kids, but for kids who have
daily struggles, it can be magnified," said Rubino, who has decided that all of her kids will opt out of the tests. "It's emotionally
devastating to them ... to feel like they are failures from third grade on." Against the law's spirit Kathryn Merrifield of Mamaroneck, who has a
son with special needs, said the
tests go against the spirit of the federal law for children with disabilities,
which guarantees a "free and appropriate education." Kathryn Merrifield is a mother of three in the Rye Kathryn
Merrifield is a mother of three in the Rye Neck school district, including a son with special needs. “These tests do nothing but make
him feel terrible. It does a lot of damage.” (Photo: Submitted) "He's a bright child but he has to work hard to keep his body calm and block
out sound. How appropriate is it to force him to sit in a chair for hours?" said Merrifield, who also plans to opt all three of her children out of the
tests. "These tests do nothing but make him feel terrible. It does a lot of damage." Students with severe cognitive disabilities are exempt from
testing. Students who are required by the state Education Department to take the tests include those who have a learning disability — such as
dyslexia or ADHD — or who are in the high-functioning range on the autism spectrum. But they are at a disadvantage when taking the tests, said
Jean Kerr, a special-education teacher at Albert Leonard Middle School in New Rochelle. "Children
with disabilities could be
reading two to three grade levels behind their same-aged peers, and taking a test that is above their
actual grade level is developmentally inappropriate," she said. Kerr said accommodations spelled out in a student's
"individualized educational program" — such as having tests read aloud, checking for understanding and repeating or explaining directions — are
not permitted on the state tests. Extended time is allowed. "The test goes against everything we as teachers do in the classroom, which is to
differentiate and individualize to best educate our kids," she said. 'They are failures' Cheryl Smith teaches science at Albert Leonard MiddleBuy
Photo Cheryl Smith teaches science at Albert Leonard Middle School in New Rochelle. “We are telling our kids they are failures.” (Photo: Mark
Vergari/The Journal News) "We are telling our kids they are failures," said Cheryl Smith, who teaches science at Albert Leonard in a collaborative
classroom, in which half the children have special needs. "Tests are supposed to tell you something, but we already know what the outcome will
be for these kids..." Mahopac Middle School English teacher Tom McMahon said he would never consider allowing his son with special needs,
now a first grader, to take the exams. "Michael will have enough struggles in school without being used as a statistic on an exam with no
diagnostic value and no value to his education," he said. "The last thing Michael needs is another test where he cannot possibly achieve success."
Tom and Jessica McMahon with their son Michael, who Tom and Jessica McMahon with their son Michael, who has special needs. The Mahopac
father and teacher says his children will not be taking the upcoming state tests. “The last thing Michael needs is another test where he cannot
possibly achieve success.” (Photo: Submitted) McMahon, who also lives in Mahopac, said none of his children will be taking the tests. Rubino,
whose son, John, is now a fourth grader in a collaborative classroom, worries that
teachers won't want to teach those classes
anymore for fear of being rated low. Under the new law, teachers rated ineffective on two rounds of
state tests are required to be rated "ineffective" overall. Two consecutive ineffective ratings can get a
teacher fired. "If the class does poorly on the test, the teachers would be rated ineffective," Rubino said.
"John's teachers are anything but ineffective — they are phenomenal.
Common Core’s one size fits all approach to education mirrors failed policies and
reinforces the federal take over of education
Borowski 13 — Julie Borowski is a contributer to Freedom works, ("Top 10 Reasons to Oppose
Common Core," No Publication, 7-26-2013, Available Online at
http://www.freedomworks.org/content/top-10-reasons-oppose-common-core, Accessed 7-21-2015)
1. Common Core is a Federal Takeover of Education The ultimate goal of Common Core is to have every
school district follow the same national standards. This is a failed educational approach that will
undermine educational quality and choice. States and local communities better know how to design standards based on their
students and parents’ needs than Washington bureaucrats. 2. Common Core is Bad for Parents Parents will not have a say in their child’s
education under Common Core. They will not be able to suggest changes to their local school’s standards or enroll their child in another public
school with better standards. Common Core would limit parental choice and shut their voices out of their child’s education. 3. Common Core is
Bad for Teachers Teachers
would have little control over their classrooms under Common Core. They will
be forced to comply with standards decided upon by federal bureaucrat. This leaves little to no room
for teachers to innovate to meet the unique needs of their students. 4. Common Core is Bad for Taxpayers
Common Core has a hefty price tag that will be paid by taxpayers in states. Washington State Office of
Superintendent of Public Instruction estimates that Common Core will cost the state $300 million.
California Department of Education estimates it will cost $759 million to implement the nationalized standards. Common Core will cost
taxpayers a lot of money while not improving education quality. 5. Common Core is Bad for Students Common
Core is a one-sizefits-all education policy that assumes every students learns exactly the same. A top down and
centrally controlled standards will hurt students’ creativity and learning. Good education policy
realizes that all students have different learning styles, preferences, and paces. 6. Common Core Violates
Privacy The Race to the Top Grants associated with Common Core violates privacy by “data mining”
information about students that will follow them the rest of their lives. The information collected is
more than just test scores and academic progress. Common Core will track information on religious
practices, political beliefs, “sex behaviors and attitudes”, and more. 7. Common Core Resembles Failed No Child Left
Behind Program A main criticism of the failed No Child Left Behind program is that teachers “teach the
test.” This means that students are memorizing rather than learning and critical thinking about
information. Common Core would resemble No Child Left Behind by requiring students to take
national standardized tests to measure their progress. 8. Common Core is Unconstitutional The federal
government should not control education. Since education is not specifically listed in the Constitution,
the authority over education should be left up to the states and the people. This allows localities from New York
City to rural Alabama to design unique curriculums that are best for their students. 9. Common Core Will Require Some States to Move
Backwards Some
states have advanced standards that are designed with students and parents in mind.
Sandra Stotsky, a professor at the University of Arkansas, who served on the committee to validate Common Core standards said, “The
standards dumb American education down by about two grades worth.” Some states would have to move their
standards backwards to comply with Common Core standards. 10. Common Core Is a Failed Education Approach
Washington has tried one-size-fits-all education approaches time and time again. Centralized
education programs have not worked and will never work. The quality of education has only declined
over the past few decades. The solution is to get the federal government out of the education
business.
Common core gender equity claims are false — lower standards impact students
negatively
Berry 14 — Dr. Susan Berry, graduated from the University of Kansas School of Medicine in 1978,
affiliated with Childrens Hospitals & Clinics Of Minnesota and University Of Minnesota Medical Center,
2014 (“Desperate: common core pulled into phony ‘war on women,’” Brietbart, November 25th, Available
online at http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2014/11/25/desperate-common-core-pulled-intophony-war-on-women/, Accessed 7/20/15) JL
With support plummeting for the controversial Common Core standards, it appears at least one university
president is resorting to the phony “war on women” meme to give a boost to the national education
initiative. In an op-ed in Sunday’s Miami Herald, University of Miami president Donna Shalala claimed that the Common
Core standards can “reduce gender-based inequities by ensuring that every young woman receives
the educational foundation she needs to be successful in college and career.” “With Common Core’s more
engaging and challenging standards, we can narrow the gender achievement gap that begins early and worsens
by eighth grade, particularly for black and Hispanic girls,” Shalala wrote. There are many problems with
Shalala’s premise, not the least of which is the fact that, as Neal McCluskey observes at Cato, the collegereadiness “gender gap” in favor of men is “non-existent.” “Walk around a random college campus, and the odds are good
the first student you’ll run into will be female,” writes McCluskey, pointing out that 57 percent of college students are women,
compared to 43 percent men. He notes 56 percent of students taking the Advanced Placement exams are also
young women. However, even if Shalala is suggesting the existence of a gender gap in STEM subjects that tend to attract more males, the
overriding problem is that no one – male or female – will be adequately prepared for STEM careers with
Common Core because the math standards do not address the advanced math necessary for those
careers. As Breitbart News reported in September, a new paper by assessment expert Richard P. Phelps and Stanford University
mathematician R. James Milgram refers to the promises made by the Common Core Math Standards (CCMS) as “empty rhetoric.” “Because the
CCMS are standards for all public school students in this country, regardless of achievement level, they are low standards, topping
out at about the level of a weak Algebra II course,” the authors observe in their report published by the Massachusettsbased Pioneer Institute (PI). “And because this level is to determine ‘college readiness’ as they define it (which is not remotely what our public
four year college and universities currently assume it to be),” the authors continue, “it is
apt to mean fewer high school
students taking advanced mathematics and science coursework before they go to college, more college freshmen with even
less knowledge of mathematics than currently, and more college credit-bearing courses set at an international level
of seventh or eighth grade.” As far as Shalala’s claim that the Common Core standards will narrow the gender achievement gap,
especially for minority women, PI observes how Common Core math will be further harmful to low-income,
high STEM ability students, because with these math standards nothing higher than Algebra II will be
tested by the new federally funded, multi-state assessments developed by consortia PARCC and SBAC. “High schools in low-income
areas will be under the greatest fiscal pressure to eliminate under-subscribed electives like
trigonometry, pre-calculus, and calculus,” PI said in a press release. Shalala’s claim that the Common Core standards are “more
rigorous K-12 education standards” is the same empty talking point that carries no weight simply because no independent studies have been
performed that prove this argument. In fact, in a recent report, also published by PI, visiting Hoosier scholar and former senior policy adviser with
the U.S. Department of Education Ze’ev Wurman cited two studies conducted by Common Core Validation Committee members, who signed off
on the standards in 2010 and then later attempted to find post facto evidence to justify their decisions. According
to Wurman, in both
executed and failed to provide evidence that the Common Core standards
are internationally competitive and reflective of college-readiness. Similarly, Wurman’s research is consistent with
another study published by the Brookings Institution which found that the Common Core standards will
have “little to no impact on student achievement.” Brookings’ 2014 Brown Center report revealed that states whose
studies the research was poorly
standards were less like Common Core performed better on national assessments than those states that had standards more like Common Core.
Shalala’s claim that the Common Core standards will improve education for women is based on a
premise that does not exist and smacks of desperation to boost the image of a failing initiative. “Defense
of the Common Core has too often come in the form of platitudes and ungrounded assertions,” writes McCluskey. “This latest effort hasn’t
improved upon that.”
1AR — AT: CC Good for Minority Women
Common core’s lack of STEM fails to resolve women of minorities
underrepresentation
Bright Education 14 — Bright Education Services and Testing, providing parents/teachers with testing
tools, recognized leader in assessments, cites sources like the AP Board review of demographics and
American Community Survey Reports, 2014 (“Computer science courses still lack minority
representation,” Bright Education Services and Testing, December 19th, Available online at
http://brighted.funeducation.com/News/Common-Core-State-Standards-News/computer-sciencecourses-still-lack-minority-representation, Accessed 7/20/15) JL
Science, technology, engineering and math fields in the U.S. are dominated by men. In fact, according to
the U.S. Census Bureau, men are hired in STEM fields at twice the rate women are. What's more, Hispanics and
blacks have been historically underrepresented in these industries. To combat this, more educational programs and nonprofit organizations have
attempted to pique STEM interest in minority students (in this case, minority includes women, blacks and Hispanics). For instance, the Girl Scouts
of America has created a computer game that teaches players the ins and outs of developing video games. Code.org provides free resources that
teach students how to code. Despite these efforts, computer science is still most popular with boys. Computer science and AP The College
Board recently released data from fall Advanced Placement 2014 testing, and computer science participation
showed that boys dominated the students taking the exam. Some minorities were more represented in 2014 than in
2013, but the gap is still looming. Here's a look at who took the test this fall:Women: 20 percent (up from 19 percent in 2013), Black: 4 percent
(same as 2013), Hispanic: 9 percent (up from 8 percent in 2013), Asian: 30, percent, White: 52 percent Additionally, this percentage breakdown is
a national average. In some states, such as Wyoming and Montana, no Hispanic students took the AP computer science exam. Other states had
virtually no black student representation. Common Core and STEM — The Common
Core State Standards provide
benchmarks for English/language arts and math, which includes only one of the STEM subjects. Many
educators worry that a lack of standards for computer science and technology will fail to encourage
students to explore such subjects - the Next Generation Science Standards offer science benchmarks for participating states.
Fortunately, some states allow students to take computer science courses in place of a math or science credit. If more states adopt
this approach, however, that still does not solve the issue of demographics. "We believe low AP Computer
Science A Exam participation among traditionally underrepresented minority and female students has
been an encouragement and access issue, but are hopeful to see the focus is shifting," Katherine Levin, spokesperson for the
College Board, told Education Week. "Twenty-five states now allow computer science to count towards high school graduation requirements, and
organizations like Code.org are helping to introduce the subject in earlier grades."
Meeting standards are especially hard for minorities—Schools in lower income areas
are subject to achievement gaps due to lack of economic resources
Senior 13 —Jennifer Senior, contributing editor at New York Magazine, advisory board member of the
Austen Riggs Center, anthropology degree from Princeton University, 2013 (“A Simple Way to Boost
Minority Test Scores,” New York Magazine, August 9th, Available online at
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/08/simple-way-to-boost-minority-test-scores.html, Accessed
7/20/15) JL
Two days ago, Bloomberg’s Education Department released some demoralizing statistics: Just 30
percent of the city’s kids in grades three through eight passed the state’s standardized tests in math,
and just 26 percent of them passed the state’s tests in reading. When isolating the grades of minority
students, the numbers were more alarming still: Just 15 percent of African-American students and 19
percent of Latinos passed the math exam, and just 16 percent of both passed the reading exam.
To some extent, these results were expected. Numbers across New York took a dive this year, because
the state, for the first time, tried to tailor its exams to a more rigorous set of national standards called
the Common Core. How the city will address these plunging scores — in 2009, students passed the
English exam at a rate of 77 percent — is a long-term problem, one among many woes for the publicschool system as it tries to ready young New Yorkers for the global economy. But the achievement gap is
especially disturbing, serving to underscore not just the severity of the test-score problem citywide,
but the painful disparities in cultural and economic resources between schools, and between the city’s
families.
1AR — AT: Econ Competitiveness
Multiple Alt Causes to US Economic Competitiveness
Bonvillian 4—William B. Bonvillian is Legislative Director and Chief Counsel to Sen. Joseph Lieberman
of Connecticut. ("Meeting the New Challenge to U.S. Economic Competitiveness." Issues in Science and
Technology 21, no. 1 (Fall 2004). Issues In Science, 2004, Available online at http://issues.org/211/bonvillian-2/ Accessed July 8th, 2015)
The U.S. economy, seemingly a world-dominant Goliath in the mid- and late-1990s, now faces major structural challenges
from a new cast of Davids. The nation confronts a host of new economic challengers led by India and China. The U.S.
economy recently took an unprecedented path when it regained strength during 2003 and 2004 without creating growth in jobs. The
manufacturing sector’s share of the economy continues to shrink. The growing service sector, once
considered immune to global competition, now finds that advances in information and communications
technology have enabled global competition in low-skilled service jobs and the beginning of competition in highskilled service tasks. Underlying these shorter-term developments is a major demographic shift. Historically, the U.S. economy has relied on
steady 1 percent annual population growth to provide additional workers and increased output. In the coming decades, the country will face a
rapid expansion of the nonproductive population of seniors. Furthermore, the aging baby boomers are propped up by a network of entitlement
programs generally indexed to inflation. The Social Security Trustees recently estimated that the Social Security and Medicare programs create
an unfunded liability for the taxpayers of $72 trillion (in net present value terms)—a daunting sum compared to total national wealth estimated
at $45 trillion. A debt on upcoming generations of these dimensions, unsupported by any anticipated revenue stream, is an unprecedented
national problem and has strong implications for the nation’s future ability to invest in growth. This new economic landscape raises a question:
If the current economy faces structural difficulties, what could a renewed economy look like? Where will the United States find comparative
advantage in a global economy? This is a threatening process, and even if the United States finds a way to meet the challenge, the transition
will inevitably create losers as well as winners. The last economic war In the late 1970s and the 1980s, the United States faced strong
competition, especially from Japan, which was making a serious bid to become the largest economy in the world. This competition focused on
the manufacturing sector, particularly consumer electronics, automobiles, and information technology (IT). The United States lost dominance in
consumer electronics but salvaged its auto manufacturing sector, in part through bilateral trade arrangements that set import quotas on
imported Japanese vehicles but allowed Japanese auto production in the United States. The U.S. industry’s light truck platform, which was
protected by tariff from foreign competition, became the basis for the next several generations of U.S. vehicle innovations: minivans, pickups,
and SUV’s. In information technology, the United States retained its lead in advanced computer chips and software. The
United States
benefited from the investments in science education in the Sputnik era and from major Cold War federal R&D
investments. It explored public-private collaboration to bridge the gap between government supported research and private sector
development. The most successful example was Sematech, which helped reverse the country’s declining position in chip technology. The
Defense Department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) came into its own as a unique organization focused on moving
revolutionary technology from the research to the development stage, playing a crucial role in creating the Internet and promoting multiple
generations of IT. New forms of capital support for innovation were developed, facilitating the birth of creative startup companies. The
dramatic growth of the U.S. economy in the mid and late 1990s rode on the IT revolution that boosted productivity throughout the economy.
Although excessive enthusiasm about IT fueled a stock market bubble, the gains in productivity were real and translated into widespread
societal gains in real income across classes, record homeownership, and a decline in poverty rates. The next war The United States faces a very
different competitive situation now. Consider how the China of 2004 differs from the Japan of 1980. Japan, like the United States, was a highwage, high-cost, advanced technology economy. China is a low-wage, low-cost, advanced technology economy, a much more complicated
competitive mix. Japan held an advantage in collaborative industry-government activities, whereas the United States excelled in
entrepreneurism. China provides a good environment for entrepreneurs as well as wielding government power to capture advanced technology
for use in its firms. Whereas Japan had a reliable legal and intellectual property system, China’s legal system is a work in progress and its
intellectual property regime is notoriously lax. China has adopted Japan’s technique of manipulating its currency to gain advantage. The
strategy is to undervalue its own currency to stimulate exports and to buy U.S. government bonds to create leverage in U.S. policymaking.
Japan was a national security ally, whereas China is a potential competitor. Competition with China will be both very different and far more
complicated and demanding than was competition with Japan. On top of this, the United States faces new and growing competitive forces in
India and East Asia as well as continuing strong competition from Japan. India is a particularly interesting challenger, because whereas China is
pursuing a more traditional emphasis on manufacturing-led growth, India is pursuing the emerging global services market. Of course, the
emergence of China and India can provide benefits to the U.S. economy. As they develop as markets, the United States should be able to sell
goods and services to their consumers. But so
far U.S. exports are dwarfed by its imports, and there is no evidence
that this situation will change soon. Not only are the competitors different than in the 1980s, but so are the markets that are in
play. In the 1980s the competition was over manufacturing, but now most sectors, including services, face direct competition, and the
increasing fusion of services and manufacturing is creating a new field of battle. The focus is shifting from machines, capital plant, and natural
resources to talent and knowledge. The competition over quality has expanded to include customization, speed, and responsiveness to
customer requirements. Whereas the best technology was once enough, it is
now necessary to also develop an effective
business model for using the technology. Trade discussions that were once limited to products now incorporate knowledge
management and services. A skilled workforce is no longer a durable asset; workers must be periodically retrained to remain competitively
productive. Whereas low-cost capital was once sufficient, success now requires first-rate efficiency in all elements of the financial system as
well as the ability to recognize and tap intangible knowledge assets. Is the United States ready for these new challengers and new challenges?
Economic growth and innovation A school of economic theory that has developed during the past two decades argues that technological and
related innovation accounts for more than half of historical U.S. economic growth, which makes this a far more significant factor than capital
and labor supply, which are the dominant factors in traditional economic analysis. These economic growth theorists see a pattern shared by
important breakthrough technologies such as railroads, steamships, electricity, telecommunications, aerospace, and computing. The
new
technology ignites a chain reaction of related innovation that leads to a surge in productivity
improvements throughout the economy and thus to overall economic growth. The most recent example is the
productivity boom that occurred in the mid-1990s following the IT revolution that spread through the manufacturing and service sectors. The
United States has been capturing talent worldwide for two centuries and must continue to do so. Yet we are handicapped by this theory.
Innovation may be the true growth god, but the details of this new religion have not been fleshed out. Whereas we have almost
a century’s worth of detailed data on the old gods—capital and labor supply—we have few metrics to understand the dynamics of innovationbased growth. We can look at some macro data, such as R&D
spending and worker education where government
plays a prominent role, but macro data are inherently misleading. We know that some R&D investments are more vital than others, as
are some members of the workforce. In addition, these macro factors are imbedded in a spider’s web of other connected and supporting
strands that make up a complex system. The federal government plays many innovation-related roles, such as in fiscal and tax policy, industry
standards, technology transfer, trade policy, product procurement, intellectual property protection, the legal system, regulation, antitrust, and
export controls. We have only a gestational idea of how to optimize this complex network to spur innovation. And that is only the public policy
side. There is the even more complex private sector role in innovation as well as the interactions between the private and public sectors.
Despite the lack of innovation metrics, the underlying logic of growth theory is compelling. And if innovation is the big factor in growth—and
therefore for much of national well-being—the nation has only one choice: It
must innovate its way to continuing
competitive advantage. The United States must increase the pace of innovation introduction to
shorten the intervals between innovations. Behind this approach is an assumption that a country that leads in an innovation
area can retain competitive advantage in that area for a period of time while it readies the next round of innovation introductions. In a deeply
competitive globalized economy, the length of that advantage period can become progressively shorter, compelling an ever faster innovation
flow. It would be easier to promote an innovation revolution if we had the metrics and benchmarks to better understand a successful
innovation process. A
first step should be to energize business, public policy thinkers, economists, and data
collection agencies to start identifying the data we need to make better policy judgments about
effective innovation systems. However, given the magnitude of the competitive challenge, the country cannot wait for the results of
a perfected innovation model. Enough is already known about the U.S. economy and federal policy to begin strengthening a few key links on
the public policy side of the innovation chain: R&D funding, talent, organization of science and technology, innovation infrastructure,
manufacturing, and services. R&D funding. Measured as a percent of gross domestic product (GDP), federal
R&D support has been
in long-term decline; it is now only half of its mid-1960s peak of 2 percent of GDP. Federal support for the life sciences through the
National Institutes of Health has been rising, doubling between 1999 and 2003 to nearly $28 billion. This means that the physical
sciences have borne a disproportionate share of the federal decline. This trend must be seen in the context of the
upcoming long-term pressure on the federal budget created by tens of trillions of unfunded entitlement liabilities noted earlier. Within a
decade these mandatory entitlements will begin to crowd out nondefense discretionary federal spending such as R&D. The current budget
crunch and ballooning deficit caused by the reduction in federal revenue resulting from economic recession and tax cuts provide a preview of
future budget debates. The budget process, the mainstay of congressional fiscal controls for three decades, has ground to a halt, and the
appropriations system, a fundamental congressional process for well over a century, is systematically breaking down. Congress increasingly is
politically unable to pass underfunded appropriations, so it throws them into massive, last-minute continuing resolutions. Federal budget
deterioration, which will worsen with structural demographic and entitlement pressures, threatens the viability of our federal R&D capacity.
We have an initial signal of that problem as annual appropriations for the National Science Foundation fail to meet authorized levels.
Industry R&D spending, which focuses on development, cannot substitute for the federal investment
in research. Because the two components are related and interdependent, a decline in the robustness
of federal research funding will have ramifications for the private sector’s innovation performance, and
future prospects for federal research spending are grim. Effective political action will be necessary to change the current trend. Much can be
learned from the life sciences, which have assembled a powerful mix of research institutions, industry, and grassroots patient groups working
on a common R&D funding agenda. Federal life science research has increased five-fold since 1970. The physical sciences, despite steady
deterioration in their research portfolios since the end of the Cold War, have yet to organize a comparable advocacy effort, and we cannot
assume that they will. Without a political movement to increase funding, the
nation will have to choose between two
strategies for making the most of declining research funds: random disinvestment or a conscious
program of niche investment. Because the United States funds research through a wide variety of agencies and programs, the
research budget is difficult to understand and manage. Many see this decentralized system as a strength, because it provides diversity and
more opportunities for breakthrough research. However, given a growing pattern of research cutbacks, the fully decentralized system could
result in what is essentially random disinvestment. An alternative would be to focus research investments on the key niche areas likely to be
most productive, focusing on research quality not quantity. The United States has funded science niches many times in the past, from high
performance computing to the genome project to nanotechnology. However, this has always been done within an overall strategy of funding a
broad front of scientific advance to guard against niche failures. If funding is not adequate to support research across a broad front, a niche
strategy could be the best option. This is certainly not the ideal approach—indeed, it is potentially dangerous and risky—but it is preferable to
random disinvestment. It will be made more difficult by the fact that the country does not have a tradition or mechanism for making centralized
research priority decisions across agencies and disciplines. Given the intensifying budget pressure and the political weakness of physical science
advocacy efforts, the scientific world needs to start a frank discussion of research priorities and the painful sacrifices of quantity of research
that will have to be made to maintain quality in key niches. The science community can begin preparing for this task by carefully studying the
National Nanotechnology Initiative, which is the nation’s largest current niche effort, to look for lessons on how best to organize multiagency
and multidiscipline research efforts. Talent. Growth economist Paul Romer of Stanford University has long argued that talent is essential for
growth. His “prospector theory” posits that the number of capable prospectors a nation or region fields corresponds to its level of technological
discovery and innovation. Talent must be understood as a dynamic factor in innovation. A nation or region shouldn’t try to fit its talent base to
what it estimates will be the size of its economy. Instead, its talent base, because of its critical role in innovation, will determine the size the
economy. In the simplest terms, the more prospectors there are, the more discoveries and the more growth there will be. Other nations are
not standing still. The forty leading developed economies have increased their science and engineering research jobs at twice the rate that the
United States has. U.S. universities train an important segment of the science and engineering talent base of the nation’s developing country
competitors, and those nations are encouraging a larger proportion to return. Their own universities in many cases are also rapidly improving.
China graduates over three times as many engineers as does the United States, with engineering degrees accounting for 38.6 percent of all
undergraduate degrees in China compared to 4.7 percent in the United States. The United States now ranks seventeenth in the proportion of
college age population earning science and engineering degrees, down from third place several decades ago. Talent is now understood globally
as a contributor to growth, and a global competition has begun. Yet, despite decades of discussion about the importance of educating more
scientists and engineers, the percentage of U.S. students entering these fields is not increasing. The technological opportunities of the coming
century will require a different type of infrastructure, and government can play a role. The government has been active in education policy
recently. The No Child Left Behind Act demands that schools demonstrate that their students are making adequate progress, which should help
make science and math courses more rigorous. However, the legislation needs to be backed up with adequate funding if it is to succeed with its
ambitious reforms. In addition, U.S. high schools need more programs focused on science and more magnet high schools focused on science.
Congress has passed “Tech Talent” legislation, creating a competitive grant program to encourage colleges and universities to devise innovative
ways to increase the number of science and engineering graduates. Successful efforts could serve as models for programs implemented on a
large scale. If the percentage of undergraduates receiving these degrees increases, it would create a larger pool from which to attract graduate
students. By focusing on a later stage of science education, the Tech Talent program provides a potential shortcut to increase the talent base.
Because turning around the science education system will take at least a decade, the United States must continue to rely on a large number of
foreign-born scientists and engineers. The United States has been capturing talent worldwide for two centuries and must continue to do so to
maintain the robustness of its innovation system. One third of the U.S. citizens who have won Nobel prizes were born outside the country. It is
thus cause for alarm that the number of visas granted to foreign students has fallen sharply since September 11, 2001. A recent survey of
graduate schools showed a 32 percent drop in 2002-03 graduate school applications from foreign students, driven largely by a sharp increase in
visa denials. A much more efficient security review system must be implemented, and scientists and engineers should be actively encouraged to
stay. There are serious short- as well as long-term innovation consequences to this contraction of the talent pool, and it must be turned around
promptly. In addition, science and engineering education must change. The innovation system and process need to become a part of the
curriculum so that students become motivated and prepared to play a role in innovation. Organization of science and technology. The United
States has had the same organizational structure for science since the 1950s. Until the recent creation of the Homeland Security Science and
Technology Directorate, President Eisenhower’s DARPA in 1957 was the last major new R&D agency. Yet the science and technology enterprise
has grown far more complex in the past half century. Solo inventors have been largely replaced by complex organizational networks linking
industry, universities, and government research agencies. A web of communication networks are now available for spreading, applying, and
developing knowledge. Science and innovation are now collaborative activities that no longer heed disciplinary, agency, or sectoral boundaries.
The nation’s technology transfer mechanisms have not kept pace with developments in the generation of knowledge. The federal R&D system
is a prisoner of its history even though changes in the way research is done demand changes in the way it is organized and managed. For
example, NIH is now struggling with strains on a management system that remained unchanged even as its budget was quickly doubling in size.
U.S. federal R&D agencies need to take a searching look at whether they are optimally organized to contribute to innovation, consistent with
their missions. The best innovation organizational models need to be explored and evaluated, performance metrics for innovation contributions
need to be sharpened, and new approaches should be tested. The collaborative science we need for innovation demands new collaborative
organization models. Therefore, we also need to look at past niche science initiatives to determine which cross-agency efforts have worked
best and why. Legislation establishing a stronger coordination and budgeting role for the Office of Science and Technology should be
considered to promote this organizational review. Innovation infrastructure. Technology seeds have to land on fertile fields. Research progress
must be coupled with an effective infrastructure to hasten the pace of innovation. For example, the Internet thrived because it was introduced
into a vibrant computer sector. For the Internet to continue to thrive, it will need to have a high-speed broadband infrastructure. The
Department of Defense (DOD) is now building a worldwide Global Information Grid, an integrated fiber optic and wireless system including a
dense satellite network that will provide the framework for the planned network centric defense system. Its effort to move all transmissions
from all locations at fiber speed might pave the way for a civilian infrastructure able to capture the next generation of IT applications. As
another example, research into greener energy systems will yield the desired benefits only if the underlying power and transportation
infrastructure is able to integrate the new technologies. Infrastructure includes technology standards for new products, accounting standards
that capture the value of knowledge-based enterprises, and technology transition systems that will smooth the introduction of revolutionary
new developments such as nanotechnology into a wide array of applications. Government has an historic role in supporting and encouraging
infrastructure. Much of the economic story of the past two centuries revolves around government support of transportation infrastructure,
from waterways to railroads to highways. The technological opportunities of the coming century will require a different type of infrastructure,
and government can again play a role. Future needs are not obvious, so government has a responsibility to first assess likely developments and
identify its infrastructure role. Competitive private sector solutions must be the preferred infrastructure mechanism, but where public missions
are involved, government incentives should be considered to spur infrastructure markets. Accounting standards that developed in the 19th
century understandably emphasized fixed assets such as plant and equipment in measuring a corporation’s value. For the 21st century
corporation, value resides not only in physical assets but also in talent, intellectual property, and the ability to launch innovation. Measuring the
value of those intangible assets is critical to making wise investment decisions. The European Union has begun a wide-ranging effort to develop
new accounting measurement tools. Some on this side of the Atlantic have been working on this issue of valuing intangibles, but this effort
needs to be expanded. The Securities and Exchange Commission and other federal agencies should spur the accounting profession, economists,
and business thinkers to develop the new metrics needed for an innovation economy. Manufacturing and services. Dazzling prototypes are not
sources of profit. Reliable and cost-competitive products must be manufactured to reap the final reward of innovation. In the 1990s
manufacturing comprised 16 percent of the U.S. economy but contributed 30 percent of U.S. economic growth. Manufacturing jobs on average
pay 23 percent more than service sector jobs, but the United States lost some 2.7 million manufacturing jobs in the recent recession, and few of
these have returned. In addition to providing a good salary, the average manufacturing job creates 4.2 jobs throughout the economy, which is
three times the rate for jobs in business and personal services. As a result of the improved productivity of manufacturing workers, the sector’s
share of employment has fallen far faster than its share of GDP. Although manufacturing has continued to increase productivity since 2000, this
hasn’t translated into the economic gains we need. This is significant because manufacturing is a big multiplier. The Bureau of Economic
Analysis indicates that some economic sectors have a “multiplier effect” where growth in one sector influences others; there is a 2.43 multiplier
for manufacturing,compared to a 1.5 multiplier for business services. Manufacturing remains the currency of the global economy. Selling highvalue goods in international trade is still the way nations and regions become rich. However, the U.S. trade deficit in goods is exploding: It
reached $482 billion in 2003 ($120 billion with China alone) and continues to grow—without causing significant public alarm. For perspective,
remember that the nation agonized over a $22 billion deficit in 1981 and a $67 billion deficit in 1991. The argument that only the low end of
manufacturing is leaving simply is not true; key parts of high-end advanced manufacturing are moving abroad. Manufacturing is also a dynamic
factor in the innovation process. Historically, manufacturing and the design and development stages of innovation have been closely
interrelated and kept geographically close to each other. This is particularly true for newer advanced technologies such as semiconductors.
When manufacturing departs, design and R&D often follow. In recent years, firms have been developing a combined production and services
model, carefully integrating the two to provide unique products and services, and thus enhancing the importance of manufacturing. Without a
strong manufacturing base, it is difficult to realize economic gain from technological innovation. The talent erosion in the manufacturing base is
a particular concern. Economist Michael Porter of the Harvard Business School has argued that if high-productivity jobs are lost to foreign rivals,
long-term economic prosperity is compromised. John Zysman of the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy believes that
manufacturing is critical even in the information age, because advanced mechanisms for production and the accompanying jobs are a strategic
asset whose location can make a nation an attractive place to create strategic advantage. Without a strong manufacturing base, it is difficult to
realize economic gain from technological innovation. Because technology innovation and manufacturing process innovation are closely linked,
the erosion of the manufacturing base will affect the innovation system. To avoid the “hollowing out” of manufacturing, action will be needed
on a range of policies from trade promotion and enforcement, to tax policies to encourage new investment, to programs for improving worker
skills, to DOD efforts to ensure strategic manufacturing capability. Innovation in the manufacturing process, however, might be the most
important: The United States will be able to achieve comparative advantage in critical manufacturing sectors only if it updates the process,
substituting productivity for our higher costs. The nation needs a revolution in manufacturing that taps into developments in distributed
manufacturing, desktop manufacturing, simultaneous inspection and production, small-lot production that is cost-competitive with mass
production, and the use of new materials and methods for practical fabrication of devices and machines at the nano scale. Overall, the country
needs new intelligent manufacturing approaches that integrate design, services, and manufacturing throughout the business enterprise.
Because DOD would be a major beneficiary of the corresponding productivity gains, because it has long played an important role in this field,
and because it has a huge strategic stake in keeping advanced manufacturing leadership in the United States, it makes sense for DARPA to take
a lead in R&D for 21st century manufacturing processes and technologies. DOD’s Mantech programs could support pilot projects and test beds
for evaluating prototypes and results in the defense industrial sector. The nation needs innovation in services as well as manufacturing because
we now face global competitiveness there, too. Services dominate our economy, yet we perform comparatively little services R&D. We need a
new focus on services innovation to retain comparative advantage, so that we are ready for the upcoming global services challenge. From
analysis to action In the 1980s, when the United States faced significant competitive challenges from Japan and Germany, U.S. industry, labor,
and government worked out a series of competitiveness policies and approaches that helped pave the way for the nation’s revitalized
economic leadership in the 1990s. In the mid-1980s President Reagan appointed Hewlett Packard president John Young to head a bipartisan
competitiveness commission, which recommended a practical policy approach designed to defuse ideological squabbling. Although many of its
recommendations were enacted slowly or not at all, the commission created a new focus on public-private partnerships, on R&D investments
(especially in IT), and on successful competition in trade rather than protectionism. This became the generally accepted response and provided
the building blocks for the 1990s boom. The Young Commission was followed by Congress’s Competitiveness Policy Council through 1997.
These efforts were successful in redefining the economic debate in part because they built on the experiences, well-remembered at the time, of
industry and government collaboration that was so successful in World War II and in responding to Sputnik. Those are much more distant
memories in this new century, but we should revisit the Young Commission model. The private sector Council on Competitiveness, originally led
by Young, has assembled a group of leading industry, labor, and academic leaders to prepare a National Innovation Initiative, which could
provide a blueprint for action. Legislation has been introduced in the Senate to establish a new bipartisan competitiveness commission that
would have the prestige and leverage to stimulate government action. The U.S. economy is the most flexible and resilient in the world. The
country possesses a highly talented workforce, powerful and efficient capital markets, the strongest R&D system, and the energy of
entrepreneurs and many dynamic companies. That by itself will not guarantee success in a changing economy, but it gives the country the
wherewithal to adapt to an evolving world. Challenges to U.S. dominance are visible everywhere. Strong economic growth is vital to the U.S.
national mission, and innovation is the key to that growth. The United States needs to fashion a new competitiveness agenda designed to speed
the velocity of innovation to meet the great challenges of the new century. Once that agenda has been crafted, the nation must find the
political will to implement it.
U.S. manufacturing industry key to sustaining economic competitiveness—not the
STEM sector
Rosselet 13— Dr. Suzanne Rosselet is a research fellow at IMD business school in Lausanne, Switzerland. She
specializes in world competitiveness and holds a degree in economics from Stanford University. She previously
served as deputy director of IMD’s World Competitiveness Yearbook. (“US manufacturing is key to competitiveness”
The Christian Science Monitor, February 8th, 2015, Available online at
http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2013/0208/US-manufacturing-is-key-to-competitiveness
Accessed 7/8/15)
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND — US competitiveness in the global economy is slipping. According to the
IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook, the United States fell from its number one slot, mainly due to a
dramatic slide in its Government Efficiency ranking, where it has fallen from 5th place in 2002 to 22nd
today. And the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report puts the US in 7th place, down
from 1st in 2007. If this isn’t worrying enough, 71 percent of more than 10,000 Harvard Business School
alumni surveyed expect US competitiveness to decline over the next three years. In the World Bank’s
Doing Business Report, the US ranks 4th in terms of the ease of doing business, including a dismal 69th
place for the ease of paying taxes. And the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation puts the
US second-to-last on the rate of progress on innovation-based competitiveness since 2000, ahead of
only Italy. But there is some good news: US manufacturing. Until recently, the industry had been in
steady decline, but many signs now indicate that America is now in the midst of a historic
manufacturing revival. But manufacturers are also facing a skills-gap, as workers are unprepared for
the demands of this growing industry. Preparing tomorrow’s skilled workforce should be one of the
Obama administration’s top economic priorities. Developing a long-term plan to train workers for
new manufacturing jobs is vital to boosting US competitiveness. There are several reasons for the
growth in US manufacturing, but one of the main explanations is that outsourcing to low-cost countries
is no longer as tempting as it once was. With labor and transportation costs rising in many of these
countries, American companies are bringing work back to the US and foreign companies are more
attracted to a cost-competitive US base as well. In addition, a natural gas boon will help make US energy
costs some of the lowest in the world. Add to that the benefits of higher quality manufactured goods
and state-of-the-art innovation capabilities, and the US has a fair chance of regaining its historical
leadership in advanced manufacturing. A recent study by the Boston Consulting Group claims that the
US is indeed on course to regain its status as a global industrial powerhouse, suggesting that the
manufacturing resurgence combined with boosting US exports could create between 2.5 million and 5
million jobs by the end of the decade. But meeting the challenges of this “manufacturing revival,”
means closing the skills gap through more, and better-targeted, investment in education and training.
Three recommendations to support advanced manufacturing were proposed in July 2012 by a
committee of the president’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. This multi-stakeholder
committee, made up of business leaders, academics, and scientists, called on President Obama to make
good on his promise to create an “economy built to last” by “enabling innovation,” “securing the
talent pipeline,” and “improving the business climate.” To build, attract, and retain talent, their report
recommends an advertising campaign to promote manufacturing as an exciting career path. It
suggests capitalizing on the skills of returning veterans, investing in community colleges, and creating
partnerships between industry and these colleges, as well as promoting manufacturing fellowships
and internships. These are all key steps, but policymakers and the manufacturing industry should also
encourage workers to re-focus their career choices toward high value-added, knowledge-intensive
manufacturing. And America must shore up its educational curriculum in the areas of science,
technology, engineering, and mathematics. Supplement this with more technical training during and
after high school. The US must also continue to decrease student drop-out rates and keep working to
improve the quality of high school education. Despite the fact that more than half of the world’s 100
leading universities are American (and 8 of the top 10), American high school graduates rank poorly in
international test scores: American 15-year-olds ranked 25th in mathematics, 14th in reading, and 17th
in science (out of 34 countries) on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s
(OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings. No American president should
sleep well with these results. Since many experts acknowledge that advanced manufacturing is the best
bet for creating high-paying jobs, with the additional advantages of contributing to innovation and
reducing the US trade deficit, Mr. Obama would do well to heed the advice of his council. Education and
training are critical to providing an appropriately skilled workforce that will ensure long-term sustainable
growth and restore the US lead in competitiveness indices. But more important than rankings, investing
in the skills of the American people will put struggling lower and middle class Americans back to work.
And with the US unemployment rate still hovering just below 8 percent, that’s an objective worth
fighting for.
Alt causes to economic competitiveness — twelve pillars
WEF 5 — World Economic Forum, 2005 (“Methodology: The 12 pillars of competitiveness,” World
Economic Forum, 2005, Available online at http://reports.weforum.org/global-competitiveness-report2014-2015/methodology/, Accessed 7/21/15) JL
We define competitiveness as the set of institutions, policies, and factors that determine the level of
productivity of a country. The level of productivity, in turn, sets the level of prosperity that can be reached by an economy. The
productivity level also determines the rates of return obtained by investments in an economy, which in turn are the fundamental drivers of its
growth rates. In other words, a more competitive economy is one that is likely to grow faster over time. The concept of competitiveness
thus involves static and dynamic components. Although the productivity of a country determines its ability to sustain a high
level of income, it is also one of the central determinants of its return on investment, which is one of the key factors explaining an economy’s
growth potential. Many determinants drive productivity and competitiveness. Understanding the factors behind this process has occupied the
minds of economists for hundreds of years, engendering theories ranging from Adam Smith’s focus on specialization and the division of labor to
neoclassical economists’ emphasis on investment in physical capital and infrastructure,2 and, more recently, to interest in other mechanisms
such as education and training, technological progress, macroeconomic stability, good governance, firm sophistication, and market efficiency,
among others. While all of these factors are likely to be important for competitiveness and growth, they are not mutually exclusive—two or more
of them can be significant at the same time, and in fact that is what has been shown in the economic literature. This open-endedness is captured
within the GCI by including a weighted average of many different components, each measuring a different aspect of competitiveness. In addition,
Appendix A assesses statistically the robustness of the GCI as an appropriate estimate of the level of productivity and competitiveness of an
economy. The GCI Framework: The 12 Pillars of Competitiveness The components
are grouped into 12 pillars of
competitiveness: First pillar: Institutions The institutional environment is determined by the legal and
administrative framework within which individuals, firms, and governments interact to generate
wealth. The importance of a sound and fair institutional environment has become all the more
apparent during the recent economic and financial crisis and is especially crucial for further solidifying
the fragile recovery, given the increasing role played by the state at the international level and for the
economies of many countries. The quality of institutions has a strong bearing on competitiveness and growth.4 It influences
investment decisions and the organization of production and plays a key role in the ways in which
societies distribute the benefits and bear the costs of development strategies and policies. For example,
owners of land, corporate shares, or intellectual property are unwilling to invest in the improvement and upkeep of their property if their rights
as owners are not protected.5 The role of institutions goes beyond the legal framework. Government attitudes toward markets and freedoms
and the efficiency of its operations are also very important: excessive bureaucracy and red tape,6 overregulation, corruption, dishonesty in
dealing with public contracts, lack of transparency and trustworthiness, inability to provide appropriate services for the business sector, and
political dependence of the judicial system impose significant economic costs to businesses and slow the process of economic development. In
addition, the proper management of public finances is critical for ensuring trust in the national business environment. Indicators capturing the
quality of government management of public finances are therefore included here to complement the measures of macroeconomic stability
captured in pillar 3. Although the economic literature has focused mainly on public institutions, private institutions are also an important element
in the process of creating wealth. The global financial crisis, along with numerous corporate scandals, has highlighted the relevance of accounting
and reporting standards and transparency for preventing fraud and mismanagement, ensuring good governance, and maintaining investor and
consumer confidence. An economy is well served by businesses that are run honestly, where managers abide by strong ethical practices in their
dealings with the government, other firms, and the public at large.7 Private-sector transparency is indispensable to business; it can be brought
about through the use of standards as well as auditing and accounting practices that ensure access to information in a timely manner. Second
pillar: Infrastructure Extensive and efficient infrastructure is critical for ensuring the effective
functioning of the economy, as it is an important factor in determining the location of economic
activity and the kinds of activities or sectors that can develop within a country. Well-developed infrastructure
reduces the effect of distance between regions, integrating the national market and connecting it at low cost to markets in other countries and
regions. In addition, the quality and extensiveness of infrastructure networks significantly impact economic growth and reduce income
inequalities and poverty in a variety of ways.9 A well-developed transport and communications infrastructure network is a prerequisite for the
access of less-developed communities to core economic activities and services. Effective modes of transport—including quality roads, railroads,
ports, and air transport—enable entrepreneurs to get their goods and services to market in a secure and timely manner and facilitate the
movement of workers to the most suitable jobs. Economies also depend on electricity supplies that are free from interruptions and shortages so
that businesses and factories can work unimpeded. Finally, a solid and extensive telecommunications network allows for a rapid and free flow of
information, which increases overall economic efficiency by helping to ensure that businesses can communicate and decisions are made by
economic actors taking into account all available relevant information. Third
pillar: Macroeconomic environment The
stability of the macroeconomic environment is important for business and, therefore, is significant for
the overall competitiveness of a country.10 Although it is certainly true that macroeconomic stability alone cannot increase the
productivity of a nation, it is also recognized that macroeconomic disarray harms the economy, as we have seen in recent years, conspicuously in
the European context. The government cannot provide services efficiently if it has to make high-interest payments on its past debts. Running
fiscal deficits limits the government’s future ability to react to business cycles. Firms cannot operate efficiently when inflation rates are out of
hand. In sum, the economy cannot grow in a sustainable manner unless the macro environment is stable. Macroeconomic stability captured the
attention of the public most recently when some advanced economies, notably the United States and some European countries, needed to take
urgent action to prevent macroeconomic instability when their public debt reached unsustainable levels in the wake of the global financial crisis.
It is important to note that this pillar evaluates the stability of the macroeconomic environment, so it does not directly take into account the way
in which public accounts are managed by the government. This qualitative dimension is captured in the institutions pillar described above. Fourth
pillar: Health and primary education A healthy workforce is vital to a country’s competitiveness and productivity. Workers who are ill cannot
function to their potential and will be less productive. Poor health leads to significant costs to business, as sick workers are often absent or
operate at lower levels of efficiency. Investment in the provision of health services is thus critical for clear economic, as well as moral,
considerations.11 In addition to health, this pillar takes into account the quantity and quality of the basic education received by the population,
which is increasingly important in today’s economy. Basic education increases the efficiency of each individual worker. Moreover, often workers
who have received little formal education can carry out only simple manual tasks and find it much more difficult to adapt to more advanced
production processes and techniques, and therefore they contribute less to devising or executing innovations. In other words, lack of basic
education can become a constraint on business development, with firms finding it difficult to move up the value chain by producing more
sophisticated or value-intensive products. Fifth pillar: Higher education and training Quality higher education and training is crucial for economies
that want to move up the value chain beyond simple production processes and products.12 In particular, today’s globalizing economy requires
countries to nurture pools of well-educated workers who are able to perform complex tasks and adapt rapidly to their changing environment and
the evolving needs of the production system. This pillar measures secondary and tertiary enrollment rates as well as the quality of education as
evaluated by business leaders. The extent of staff training is also taken into consideration because of the importance of vocational and
continuous on-the-job training—which is neglected in many economies—for ensuring a constant upgrading of workers’ skills. Sixth
pillar:
Goods market efficiency Countries with efficient goods markets are well positioned to produce the
right mix of products and services given their particular supply-and-demand conditions, as well as to
ensure that these goods can be most effectively traded in the economy. Healthy market competition, both
domestic and foreign, is important in driving market efficiency, and thus business productivity , by ensuring that
the most efficient firms, producing goods demanded by the market, are those that thrive. The best possible environment for the exchange of
goods requires a minimum of government intervention that impedes business activity. For example, competitiveness is hindered by distortionary
or burdensome taxes and by restrictive and discriminatory rules on foreign direct investment (FDI)—which limit foreign ownership—as well as on
international trade. The recent economic crisis has highlighted the high degree of interdependence of economies worldwide and the degree to
which growth depends on open markets. Protectionist measures are counterproductive as they reduce aggregate economic activity. Market
efficiency also depends on demand conditions such as customer orientation and buyer sophistication. For cultural or historical reasons,
customers may be more demanding in some countries than in others. This can create an important competitive advantage, as it forces
companies to be more innovative and customer-oriented and thus imposes the discipline necessary for efficiency to be achieved in the market.
Seventh pillar: Labor market efficiency The efficiency and flexibility of the labor market are critical for
ensuring that workers are allocated to their most effective use in the economy and provided with
incentives to give their best effort in their jobs. Labor markets must therefore have the flexibility to shift workers from one
economic activity to another rapidly and at low cost, and to allow for wage fluctuations without much social disruption.13 The importance of the
latter has been dramatically highlighted by events in Arab countries, where rigid labor markets were an important cause of high youth
unemployment. Youth unemployment continues to be high in a number of European countries as well, where important barriers to entry into the
labor market remain in place. Efficient labor markets must also ensure clear strong incentives for employees and efforts to promote meritocracy
at the workplace, and they must provide equity in the business environment between women and men. Taken together these factors have a
positive effect on worker performance and the attractiveness of the country for talent, two aspects that are growing more important as talent
shortages loom on the horizon. Eighth
pillar: Financial market development The financial and economic crisis
has highlighted the central role of a sound and well-functioning financial sector for economic
activities. An efficient financial sector allocates the resources saved by a nation’s citizens, as well as
those entering the economy from abroad, to their most productive uses. It channels resources to those
entrepreneurial or investment projects with the highest expected rates of return rather than to the politically connected. A thorough and proper
assessment of risk is therefore a key ingredient of a sound financial market. Business investment is also critical to productivity. Therefore
economies require sophisticated financial markets that can make capital available for private-sector investment from such sources as loans from
a sound banking sector, well-regulated securities exchanges, venture capital, and other financial products. In order to fulfill all those functions,
the banking sector needs to be trustworthy and transparent, and—as has been made so clear recently—financial markets need appropriate
regulation to protect investors and other actors in the economy at large. Ninth
pillar: Technological readiness In today’s
globalized world, technology is increasingly essential for firms to compete and prosper . The technological
readiness pillar measures the agility with which an economy adopts existing technologies to enhance
the productivity of its industries, with specific emphasis on its capacity to fully leverage information and communication
technologies (ICTs) in daily activities and production processes for increased efficiency and enabling innovation for competitiveness.14 ICTs have
evolved into the “general purpose technology” of our time,15 given their critical spillovers to other economic sectors and their role as industrywide enabling infrastructure. Therefore ICT access and usage are key enablers of countries’ overall technological readiness. Whether the
technology used has or has not been developed within national borders is irrelevant for its ability to enhance productivity. The central point is
that the firms operating in the country need to have access to advanced products and blueprints and the ability to absorb and use them. Among
the main sources of foreign technology, FDI often plays a key role, especially for countries at a less advanced stage of technological development.
It is important to note that, in this context, the level of technology available to firms in a country needs to be distinguished from the country’s
ability to conduct blue-sky research and develop new technologies for innovation that expand the frontiers of knowledge. That is why we
separate technological readiness from innovation, captured in the 12th pillar, described below. Tenth
pillar: Market size The size
of the market affects productivity since large markets allow firms to exploit economies of scale.
Traditionally, the markets available to firms have been constrained by national borders. In the era of globalization, international
markets have become a substitute for domestic markets, especially for small countries. Vast empirical evidence shows
that trade openness is positively associated with growth. Even if some recent research casts doubts on the robustness of this relationship, there
is a general sense that trade has a positive effect on growth, especially for countries with small domestic markets.16 Thus exports can be thought
of as a substitute for domestic demand in determining the size of the market for the firms of a country.17 By including both domestic and foreign
markets in our measure of market size, we give credit to export-driven economies and geographic areas (such as the European Union) that are
divided into many countries but have a single common market. Eleventh
pillar: Business sophistication There is no doubt that
sophisticated business practices are conducive to higher efficiency in the production of goods and
services. Business sophistication concerns two elements that are intricately linked: the quality of a country’s overall business networks and the
quality of individual firms’ operations and strategies. These factors are especially important for countries at an advanced stage of development
when, to a large extent, the more basic sources of productivity improvements have been exhausted. The quality of a country’s business networks
and supporting industries, as measured by the quantity and quality of local suppliers and the extent of their interaction, is important for a variety
of reasons. When companies and suppliers from a particular sector are interconnected in geographically proximate groups, called clusters,
efficiency is heightened, greater opportunities for innovation in processes and products are created, and barriers to entry for new firms are
reduced. Individual firms’ advanced operations and strategies (branding, marketing, distribution, advanced production processes, and the
production of unique and sophisticated products) spill over into the economy and lead to sophisticated and modern business processes across
the country’s business sectors. Twelfth
pillar: Innovation Innovation can emerge from new technological and
non-technological knowledge. Non-technological innovations are closely related to the know-how,
skills, and working conditions that are embedded in organizations and are therefore largely covered
by the eleventh pillar of the GCI.
1AR — AT: Econ Decline = War
Econ decline won’t cause war – the 2008 crash disproves their claim.
Drezner 12 Daniel W. Drezner is professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts
University, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a blogger for the Washington Post. He has previously
held positions with University of Chicago, Civic Education Project, the RAND Corporation, and the US Department of the Treasury.
“THE IRONY OF GLOBAL GOVERNANCE: THE SYSTEM WORKED” – This publication is part of the International Institutions and
Global Governance program – October 2012 –
http://i.cfr.org/content/publications/attachments/IIGG_WorkingPaper9_Drezner.pdf
The final outcome addresses a dog that hasn’t barked: the effect of the Great Recession on crossborder
conflict and violence. During the initial stages of the crisis, multiple analysts asserted that the financial crisis would
lead states to increase their use of force as a tool for staying in power.19 Whether through greater internal
repression, diversionary wars, arms races, or a ratcheting up of great power conflict, there were
genuine concerns that the global economic downturn would lead to an increase in conflict. Violence in
the Middle East, border disputes in the South China Sea, and even the disruptions of the Occupy
movement fuel impressions of surge in global public disorder. The aggregate data suggests otherwise, however. A fundamental
conclusion from a recent report by the Institute for Economics and Peace is that “the average level of peacefulness in
2012 is approximately the same as it was in 2007.”20 Interstate violence in particular has declined since
the start of the financial crisis—as have military expenditures in most sampled countries. Other studies confirm that the
Great Recession has not triggered any increase in violent conflict; the secular decline in violence that started with the
end of the Cold War has not been reversed.
Multipolarity makes your arguments untrue—economic decline doesn’t cause war
Thirwell ’10 —MPhil in economics from Oxford U, postgraduate qualifications in applied finance from
Macquarie U, program director in International Economy for the Lowy Institute for International Policy
(Mark, September 2010, “The Return of Geo-economics: Globalisation and National Security”, Lowy
Institute for International Policy, google scholar,)
Summing up the evidence, then, I would judge that while empirical support for the Pax Mercatoria is not conclusive, nevertheless it’s still
strongly supportive of the general idea that international integration is good for peace, all else equal. Since there is also even stronger evidence
that peace is good for trade, this raises
the possibility of a nice virtuous circle: globalisation (trade) promotes peace, which
in turn promotes more globalisation. In this kind of world, we should not worry too much about the big power
shifts described in the previous section, since they are taking place against a backdrop of greater economic integration which should help
smooth the whole process. Instead of ending this section on that optimistic note, however, it’s worth thinking about some reasons why the
Pax Mercatoria might nevertheless turn out to be a poor, or at least overly optimistic, guide to our future. The first is
captured by that all important get-out-of-gaol-free card, ‘all else equal’. It’s quite possible that the peace-promoting effects of international
commerce will end up being swamped by other factors, just as they were in 1914. Second, perhaps the theory itself is wrong. Certainly, a realist
like John Mearsheimer would seem to have little time for the optimistic consequences of the rise of new powers implied by the theory. Here’s
Mearsheimer on how the US should view China’s economic progress, for example: ‘ . . . the United States has a profound interest in seeing
Chinese economic growth slow considerably in the years ahead . . . A wealthy China would not be a status quo power but an aggressive state
determined to achieve regional hegemony.’ 62 Such pessimistic (or are they tragic?) views of the world would also seem to run the risk of being
self-fulfilling prophecies if they end up guiding actual policy. Finally, there is the risk that the shift to
indirectly undermine some of the supports
a multipolar world might
needed to deliver globalisation. Here I am thinking about some simple variant on
economy needs a leader (or ‘hegemon’) that is
both able and willing to provide the sorts of international public goods that are required for its smooth functioning:
open markets (liberal or ‘free’ trade), a smoothly functioning monetary regime, liberal capital flows, and a lender of
last resort function. 63 Charles Kindleberger argued that ‘the 1929 depression was so wide, so deep, and so long because
the international economic system was rendered unstable by British inability and US unwillingness to assume
the idea of hegemonic stability theory (HST) – the proposition that the global
responsibility for stabilizing it’, drawing on the failures of the Great Depression to make the original case for HST: ‘ . . . the
international economic and monetary system needs leadership, a country that is prepared . . . to set
standards of conduct for other countries and to seek to get others to follow them, to take on an undue share of the burdens
of the system, and in particular to take on its support in adversity...’ 64 Kindleberger’s assessment appears to capture a rough empirical
regularity: As Findlay and O’Rourke remind us, ‘periods
of sustained expansion in world trade have tended to coincided with the
dominant “hegemon” or imperial power’. 65
Thus periods of globalisation have typically been associated with periods of hegemonic or imperial power, such
as the Pax Mongolica, the Pax Britannica and, most recently, the Pax Americana (Figure 9). The risk, then, is that by reducing the
economic clout of the United States, it is possible that the shift to a multipolar world economy might
undermine either the willingness or the ability (or both) of Washington to continue to supply the international
public goods needed to sustain a (relatively) smoothly functioning world economy. 66 That in turn could
undermine the potential virtuous circle identified above.
infrastructure of law and order necessary to keep trade routes open being provided by a
Politics DA
Politics — Plan Popular
There’s overwhelming bipartisan support to end Common Core – the GOP views
Common Core as too much government interference and the Dems perceive it as too
much standardized testing.
Garland 14 – Sarah Garland, Executive editor of The Hechinger Report, former Spencer Fellow in
Education Reporting at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, Joint master’s degree in
journalism and Latin American studies from New York University, 2014 (“US education: How we got
where we are today”, Christian Science Monitor, August 17, Available Online at
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2014/0817/US-education-How-we-got-where-we-aretoday, accessed 7/6/15, KM) ** “A Nation at Risk” = Education report created in 1983 that is the
foundation for standardized education
But bipartisan criticism has also grown. The agenda might match almost perfectly with a document
promoted by the Reagan administration, yet on the right, perceptions that the federal government is
muscling in on local education decisions has fueled a revolt against Common Core, in particular. And to
many on the left, the Obama administration appears to be doubling down on the standardized testing
that critics say was a misinterpretation of “A Nation at Risk.” The backlash has threatened the viability
of the new policies. Originally, 45 states adopted Common Core, but several have dropped out in the
past year. Many jurisdictions are also balking at the testing component of Common Core and the new
teacher evaluations. And for the policies to stick, schools will need to log more rapid gains in achievement than the incremental
progress of the past three decades. But supporters of the changes are hopeful. “These huge shifts toward standards and outcomes, and the one
toward giving people choices, are here to stay,” says Mr. Finn. “There’s reason to be pleasantly optimistic that we’re going to make gains.”
“They’ll never be as fast or as big to satisfy most of us who are impatient,” he added. “I don’t see any point in time where we can say we’ve
turned the corner, [but] we’re getting closer to the corner.” • • • The ideas for reform espoused in “A Nation at Risk” are just a part of what
schools need to go from mediocre to great, according to educators at both Curtis High and Boston Collegiate. As different as the schools are,
administrators and teachers at both schools have similar concerns about what’s been lost in the push to set standards and measure
performance. The two schools cite similar strategies behind their own success: high expectations but also an intense focus on the needs of
disadvantaged students – both in school and out of school – and support systems to address those needs. They also point to a tight-knit culture
among teachers, and administrators who carefully cultivate trust with their faculty. And both schools cite their significant racial and ethnic
diversity, which exposes students to different people, ideas, and backgrounds, a priority that faded in many American schools as the effort to
desegregate ended in the years after “A Nation at Risk.” “There’s
not one 100 percent solution, there’s one hundred 1
percent solutions,” says Arielle Zern, an algebra teacher at Boston Collegiate. “I don’t think there are just these few
things that we change at every school and we improve every single school in the nation.” Goldberg is happy
about the recent progress on the main policy prescriptions of “A Nation at Risk,” but he’s also realistic that it isn’t enough to realize the report’s
ultimate goals – that could take several decades more and ideas beyond the five solutions. “I can’t let go of the fact that we still have a high
dropout rate, that we still have a growing gap in college achievement and college attainment between whites and minorities,” he says. “There’s
a lot that we know that we don’t do. Why don’t we do it? Because it’s hard.”
Common Core is more controversial than Obamacare — opponents come from every
part of the political spectrum.
Strauss 13 — Valerie Strauss, education columnist for the Washington Post, 2013 (“Five myths about
the Common Core,” Washington Post, December 13th, Available Online at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-the-common-core/2013/12/13/da05f8325c40-11e3-be07-006c776266ed_story.html, Accessed 06-30-2015)
The reality is that resistance to the Common Core is coming from every political direction. On the
right, the tea party has indeed been vocal. Though the Core has support from the likes of former
Florida governor Jeb Bush, conservative Republicans have mounted a sustained attack. Glenn Beck
warned his listeners: “You as a parent are going to be completely pushed out of the loop. The state is
completely pushed out of the loop. They now have control of your children.”
On the left, Diane Ravitch , the most vocal critic of school reforms that focus on standardization, has
suggested that federal promotion of the Common Core “may well have been illegal.”
In the middle are educators, students and parents concerned about how the Core has been designed,
written and implemented. They worry that teachers haven’t had time to absorb the standards and
figure out how to teach them. They say prewritten lessons aren’t a good solution, because they take
away teachers’ ability to individualize learning according to student needs. Randi Weingarten, the
president of the American Federation of Teachers union and a supporter of the Core, has said: “You
think the Obamacare implementation is bad? The implementation of the Common Core is far worse.”
Common Core is hated across the aisles — GOP hates federal and Dems hate
standards.
Perkins 13 — Tony Perkins, Head of the Family Research Council, 2013 (“Common Core’s Uncommon
Opponents,” Accuracy in Academia, December 5th, Available Online at
http://www.academia.org/common-cores-uncommon-opponents/, Accessed 06-30-2015)
If there’s one thing education experts agree on, it’s that Common Core isn’t creating a lot of common
alliances! In an interesting political twist, the President’s national standards seem to be producing
plenty of strange partnerships. Republicans and Democrats are reaching across the aisle for and against
the policy, while tea partiers hatch odd coalitions with teachers unions and President Obama saddles up
with Exxon-Mobil. The coalitions around Common Core are as diverse as they are unpredictable. “That
wonderful old line [is] that the problem with national standards is: Republicans don’t do ‘national’
and Democrats don’t do ‘standards,” said one leader.
For now, the opposition to the administration’s “feducation” seems to be picking up steam, as states
like Florida, Missouri, Ohio, and Pennsylvania frantically try to roll back Washington’s universal
standards. In Arizona and Idaho, the benchmarks are so unpopular that leaders have tried changing the
program’s name to boost its image (“Arizona’s College and Career Ready Standards” and “Idaho Core”).
Although 45 states and D.C. adopted the Core, Governors like Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal (R) are trying to
stop the federal government’s overreach. “We need Louisiana standards, not Washington, D.C.
standards.”
The public is outraged about Common Core — politicians will respond.
Newman 13 — Alex Newman, president of Liberty Sentinel Media, Inc., a small information consulting
firm, degree in journalism from the University of Florida, foreign correspondent for The New American
magazine, writes for several publications in the U.S. and abroad, 2013 ("Strategies to Defeat Common
Core Education Gain Momentum," The New American, September 26th Available Online at
http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/education/item/16627-strategies-to-defeat-common-coreeducation-gain-momentum, Accessed 7-6-2015)
Across the country, opposition to the “Common Core” national education standards that are being
pushed by the Obama administration has been surging in recent weeks. From Florida and Georgia to
Louisiana and Wisconsin, politicians are no longer able to ignore the growing public outrage —
especially because it transcends traditional political divides and has united a powerful coalition of
libertarians, conservatives, Republicans, Democrats, Tea Party activists, progressives, liberals, parents,
teachers, experts, and more. Various strategies to defeat the scheme are being tested, and some are
already proving successful.
Plan popular – politicians don't want to be associated with Common Core and
teacher’s unions oppose – this is especially true in the context of the upcoming
Presidential elections.
Bidwell 14 – Lawrence Delevingne, education reporter for U.S. News & World Report, 2014 (“The
Politics of Common Core”, U.S. News & World Report, March 6, Available Online at
http://www.usnews.com/news/special-reports/a-guide-to-common-core/articles/2014/03/06/thepolitics-of-common-core?page=3, accessed 7/8/15, KM)
Ted Cruz made no mistake in highlighting his opposition to a set of educational standards known as Common Core
in his first presidential campaign speech. "Instead of a federal government that seeks to dictate school curriculum through Common Core," he
said to applause from the Liberty University crowd on March 23, "imagine repealing every word of Common Core." Formally known as the
Common Core State Standards, the once low-key, bipartisan effort to improve math and literacy education has quickly
transformed into a major issue for many conservatives like Cruz, now a Republican U.S. senator from Texas, as they
believe it's just another example of government overreach. It's also a way for Cruz and other
politicians likely to vie for the Republican Party nomination—including Rand Paul, Chris Christie, Bobby Jindal and Scott
Walker—to differentiate themselves from potential front-runner Jeb Bush. The former Florida governor is a longtime Common Core supporter, a topic detractors could seek to tie to his establishment credentials and political moderation. That
combination of factors has virtually assured that Common Core will be an important topic of debate ahead of voting in November 2016. "It will
be a major issue because of its symbolic importance," said Tom Loveless, who researches education policy as a fellow at the Brookings
Institution, a politically centrist think tank. "It's red meat for the kinds of conservative activists that a number of the contenders on the
Republican side want to appeal to." From bipartisan to blow up Until a few years ago, Common Core seemed like a benign push to make sure
American public school students were competitive in English and math. Shaped by Democratic and Republican governors and education
leaders, the benchmarks were adopted voluntarily in 45 states and the District of Columbia. But Common
Core has fast become
controversial. Conservatives pundits like Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin helped spread the notion of a
Washington takeover of schools after some federal funding was linked to Common Core. On the left, teachers unions
that once backed Common Core expressed concerns on its recent rollout, worried that it added to overtesting of students
and unfair evaluations of instructors. Primary action Attention to Common Core will be most visible during the presidential
primaries, according to experts. The key to that is Bush, a longtime supporter of improving educational standards in his time as Florida governor
from 1999 to 2007. As conservative opposition to Common Core has grown, Bush has been forced to defend his stance. "Raising expectations
and having accurate assessments of where kids are is essential for success, and I'm not going to back down on that," Bush said during a
congressional fundraiser in Iowa in March, according to The Associated Press. That position has put him at odds with most other likely
opponents. Take Jindal, the Louisiana governor, for example. After initially supporting the standards, Jindal sued the Obama administration in
August over Common Core, claiming that the federal grants to states related to the Race to the Top program were unconstitutional because
they forced states to adopt the standards. (Program grants were for general standards improvement, although much of the money distributed
was related to Common Core.) Like Jindal, several other big names initially supported Common Core—or gave it tacit approval—but have now
turned against the standards or backed away from them. Examples include Wisconsin Gov. Walker, New Jersey Gov. Christie and former
Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. Besides Cruz, other likely candidates who are against Common Core include Kentucky Sen. Paul, Florida Sen.
Marco Rubio and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry. "They're
all sort of moving away from it," said Neal McCluskey, associate
director of the Center for Educational Freedom at libertarian think tank Cato Institute. "I don't think you want to be called a
flip-flopper, but even worse is to be associated with a policy that people really don't like. "
“Obamacore” is massively unpopular – Republican opposition to Common Core is
even stronger than the Obamacare fights.
Bidwell 14 – Lawrence Delevingne, education reporter for U.S. News & World Report, 2014 (“The
Politics of Common Core”, U.S. News & World Report, March 6, Available Online at
http://www.usnews.com/news/special-reports/a-guide-to-common-core/articles/2014/03/06/thepolitics-of-common-core?page=3, accessed 7/8/15, KM)
Strong opposition to the standards, particularly from conservative Tea Party members, could be a reaction to failed
attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, points out Michael Petrilli, executive vice president of the
Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a supporter of Common Core. "For many Tea Party folks, they are incredibly frustrated
that they can't repeal Obamacare or get their states to pull out of it," Petrilli says. "So this is a target where maybe
they can blow off some steam. They actually could succeed in getting a state to pull out of the Common Core because it isn't a
federal mandate." While opposition to the standards was smoldering, increased federal support for the educational standards seemed to light
the fuse, Petrilli says. " In
one word, it's Obamacore ," Petrilli says. "That is their argument, that this is to education what
Obamacare is to health care." As the issue of Common Core began gaining traction among conservatives, the Republican National
Committee succeeded in passing an anti-Common Core resolution in April 2013, saying it "recognizes the CCSS for what it is – an inappropriate
overreach to standardize and control the education of our children so they will conform to a preconceived 'normal.'" Since then, even
staunch supporters of the standards have said that there's a need for adjustment – at least in the
implementation. "When I said that the roll out of these standards were worse than the roll out of
Obamacare, that's a real problem, particularly since I'm a big believer in the critical thinking skills that this strategy is supposed to
do," says Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.
Repealing Common Core is politically and socially popular – there’s a strong incentive
to support the plan.
Summers 14 – Juana Summers, congressional reporter on NPR's Washington Desk, former reporter
for POLITICO with a focus on political and campaign coverage, 2014 (“The Politics Of The Common
Core”, NPR, June 20, Available Online at http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2014/06/20/323677251/thepolitics-of-the-common-core, accessed 7/8/15, KM)
Backlash Jindal's attempt to drop the Core comes amid a backlash in many states against the academic
standards. The move is likely to boost his profile among conservative voters and Tea Party supporters
if he mounts a 2016 presidential bid. Critics of the Core argue that the standards are an overreach by the federal government — that they
create a national curriculum, undermine teacher autonomy and local control, and put too much emphasis on standardized testing. Supporters
say too many states have long used subpar standards and that the Common Core are a necessary gut check to better prepare kids for college
and the global economy. "The standards themselves shouldn't be controversial," says Carissa Miller of the Council of Chief State School Officers,
which developed the Common Core in 2009 along with the National Governors Association. "Higher standards for kids are something that most
people believe in." Miller points out that, despite the turmoil in Louisiana, "the Common Core State Standards are still strongly enforced in 43
of the original states that adopted them. States are making decisions about how it best meets their needs and adapting in the ways they need
to. But high standards are still in place for those states." The Common Core Map This
year alone, state legislatures have seen
more than 340 bills related to the Core standards. That's according to a tally from the National Conference of State
Legislatures. While much of that legislation made — or sought to make — minor changes to the Core standards, 35 bills (in 11 states)
attempted to revoke state adoption entirely. Jindal is just the latest Republican governor to publicly oppose the Core. In
March, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence signed legislation making his state the first to repeal the standards. Earlier this month, Oklahoma Gov.
Mary Fallin — also a one-time Core supporter — did the same. And South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley
signed a bill last month to replace the standards in 2015. Both North Carolina and Missouri could soon join the list of
former Core states. Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrat, has until mid-July to decide whether to sign a bill passed by the GOP-controlled
Legislature to drop the standards. And, in North Carolina, lawmakers are working to reconcile competing anti-Core bills passed by the House
and Senate. "The
number of bills introduced ... has really changed the atmosphere in many of the
chambers or many of the states; it's spiked the acrimony," says the National Conference of State Legislatures' Daniel
Thatcher. "It's really consumed the education agenda for state legislatures this year in particular." Supporters of the Core welcome a debate
but say the arguments against the Core are rarely about the standards themselves. "It does seem like, on the right, this isn't really about these
standards, that it's not about legitimate concerns that the standards aren't good standards. But the argument about government overreach just
seems to be constructed out of nothing," says Carmel Martin, executive vice president of policy for the Center for American Progress. "The facts
just don't support that spin." Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, suggests it's a little more
complicated than that. Hess says many conservatives are worried about the quality of the standards and that the "government overreach"
argument is a valid fear about "whether the Common Core enterprise represents a slippery slope in which the federal government will play an
increasing role in shaping what schools and school systems do." "There's
a real concern," Hess says, "that no matter how wellU.S. federal system increasing federal involvement just means the federal
government trying to write more rules for states, more rules for school districts, and it is unlikely to
work out as intended." While resistance to Common Core has been most visible among Republicans, particularly in the party's base, a
intentioned, that in the
new poll suggests that GOP voters are evenly divided over the standards. Forty-five percent of conservatives support the standards, while 46
percent are opposed, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released this week. Overall, 59 percent said they either strongly or
somewhat support the standards, while 31 percent said they strongly or somewhat oppose them. Hess, of the American Enterprise Institute,
says the wording used in the poll likely influenced those results. The poll included no mention of the role of the federal government. "This is
exactly like abortion for 40-odd years following Roe v. Wade. If you ask about a woman's right to choose, you get 70 to 80 percent of Americans
saying they favor the choice," he says. "If you frame it about the vulnerable fetus, you can get 70 to 80 percent saying there ought to be some
restrictions."
Republican Congress members oppose Common Core – it’s politically useful, especially
for Presidential candidates.
Summers 14 – Juana Summers, congressional reporter on NPR's Washington Desk, former reporter
for POLITICO with a focus on political and campaign coverage, 2014 (“The Politics Of The Common
Core”, NPR, June 20, Available Online at http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2014/06/20/323677251/thepolitics-of-the-common-core, accessed 7/8/15, KM)
Voting Against The Core Many Republican lawmakers who now find themselves in competitive primaries are
using the Common Core as a wedge issue against their challengers. And it has become an important
issue among potential Republican presidential contenders looking to win over conservatives who are
worried about the power of the federal government. Jindal's break with the Core stands in stark contrast to another
conservative who's been burnishing his presidential credentials: former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who has long been an outspoken champion
of the Common Core and unwavering in his support of the standards. On Monday, Bush's Foundation for Excellence in Education urged states
to move forward with implementing Core-based assessments. "We believe that, if properly implemented, these high-quality math and English
language arts standards will raise the academic bar in American classrooms," said a statement from the foundation, "ensuring children are
ready for life after high school, whether that involves enrolling in college or pursuing a career." Most
other potential 2016
Republican candidates have spoken out against the Common Core. That list includes Florida Sen.
Marco Rubio, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Texas Gov. Rick Perry and former
Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum.
There’s overwhelming bipartisan opposition to Common Core – states’ rights, fear of
corporate control, and teachers’ unions.
Martin 14 – Jonathan Martin, national political correspondent for The New York Times, former senior
political writer for Politico, 2014 (“Republicans See Political Wedge in Common Core”, The New York
Times, April 19, Available Online at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/us/politics/republicans-seepolitical-wedge-in-common-core.html, accessed 7/8/15, KM)
The Republican revolt against the Common Core can be traced to President Obama’s embrace of it, particularly his linking the adoption of
similar standards to states’ eligibility for federal education grants and to waivers from No Child Left Behind, the national education law enacted
by President George W. Bush. It underlines the ascendance of a brand of conservatism notably different from that of the most recent President
Bush. Less than 15 years after No Child Left Behind passed with just 34 House Republicans opposed to it, the
conservative center of
gravity is shifting toward a state-centric approach to education. “When I arrived on Capitol Hill in 2001, not only was
the Republican administration not devolving power to the states, the No. 1 priority of the administration was a massive expansion of the
federal Department of Education,” recalled Mr. Pence, who, as a congressman, opposed No Child Left Behind. The opposition to the Common
Core also captures another shift since the Bush administration: While long contemptuous of an expanding federal government, some
Republican activists are growing wary of big business, too, including figures like Bill Gates, the billionaire Microsoft
founder whose foundation supported the development of the standards. “There is a legitimate concern about large
institutions, be they government or others, who haven’t really delivered the America everybody thought we were on our way
to,” acknowledged John R. McKernan Jr., a former Maine governor who leads the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation. But, he said, that
fear is “totally misplaced” when it comes to the Common Core. But would-be presidential candidates are paying more heed to the conservative
activists holding packed meetings in their states and flooding them with emails. “The Republican Party is getting more and more responsive to
the grass roots, and that is a very healthy thing for the party and the country,” Mr. Cruz said. Jeb Bush said the pivot seemed more like
pandering. In remarks this month during an event at his father’s presidential library, he affirmed his support for the Common Core. “I guess I’ve
been out of office for a while, so the idea that something that I support — because people are opposed to it means that I have to stop
supporting it if there’s not any reason based on fact to do that?” he said. “I just don’t feel compelled to run for cover when I think this is the
right thing to do for our country.” With a knowing grin, he added, “Others that supported the standards all the sudden now are opposed to it.”
Some other former Republican governors who pushed the adoption of the Common Core agree with Mr. Bush. “There is a great deal of
paranoia in the country today,” said Sonny Perdue, a former governor of Georgia, who was also instrumental in creating the program. “It’s the
two P’s, polarization and paranoia.” Supporters of the Common Core, which outlines skills that students in each grade should master but leaves
actual decisions about curriculum to states and districts, say that it was not created by the federal government and that it was up to the states
to decide whether to adopt the standards. But opponents say Mr. Obama’s attempt to reward states that adopt the standards with grants and
waivers amounts to a backdoor grab for federal control over what is taught in schools. “Standards inevitably influence the curricula being
taught to meet those standards,” Mr. Cruz said. It is not just conservatives who have turned against the Common Core: The leaders
of
major teachers unions are also pushing back because of the new, more difficult tests aligned to the
standards that are being used to evaluate both students and teachers. “You have this unlikely
marriage of folks on the far right who are convinced this is part of a federal takeover of local
education, who have joined hands with folks on the left associated with teachers unions who are
trying to sever any connection between test results and teacher evaluation,” said Gov. Bill Haslam of Tennessee,
a Republican who supports the Common Core. But it is on the right that the anger is growing. A recent forum on the Common Core in
Columbus, Ohio, drew 500 people, most of them concerned parents, said Jane Robbins, a senior fellow at the American Principles Project, a
conservative group opposed to the program. Such meetings reflect discontent that is bubbling up at the local level, where some county
Republican committees are moving to punish legislators who do not oppose the standards. “I think the establishment in the party has been
slow to recognize how big this is,” Ms. Robbins said.
Public misperceptions about Common Core make it politically popular to oppose the
standards.
Clement and Brown 15 – Scott Clement, survey research analyst for The Washington Post that
specializes in public opinion about politics, election campaigns, and public policy, and Emma Brown, an
expert in national education, 2015 (“Poll: Widespread misperceptions about the Common Core
standards”, The New York Times, February 20, Available Online at
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/us/politics/republicans-see-political-wedge-in-commoncore.html, accessed 7/8/15, KM)
Many Americans are confused about the Common Core State Standards, according to a new poll that
finds widespread misperceptions that the academic standards — which cover only math and reading — extend to
topics such as sex education, evolution, global warming and the American Revolution. A 55 percent majority said the Common Core covers at
least two subjects that it does not, according to the survey that Fairleigh Dickinson University conducted and funded. Misperceptions were
widespread, including among both supporters and opponents of the program and peaking among those who say they are paying the most
attention to the standards. The Common Core is a set of guidelines that describe what children should learn and be able to do in math and
reading from kindergarten through 12th grade. It began as a bipartisan, state-led effort and does not contain classroom curricula: States and
school districts decide how to teach the skills and knowledge that the Common Core describes. The
poll findings show that
advocates for the Common Core face a major public relations challenge as they seek to bolster
support for the national academic standards, which have been adopted in more than 40 states but have become a target for
some conservatives and many parents across the country. “People are receiving bad information,” said Blair Mann, a
spokeswoman for the Collaborative for Student Success, a pro-Common Core group that is funded in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation, which donated hundreds of millions of dollars to develop the new standards. “There are a million different Web sites that you can
go to that have the ‘truth’ about the Common Core that are just perpetuating these myths.” Mann
blamed politicians such as
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R), both of whom have presidential
aspirations, for spreading misinformation for political gain. Paul’s political action committee sent a fundraising e-mail
last month criticizing the standards as “anti-American propaganda, revisionist history that ignores the faith of our Founders.” Jindal also
suggested in a recent speech about Common Core that the standards address U.S. history lessons. “What happens when American history is not
the American history that you and I learned about, but rather it becomes a history of grievances, of victimhood?” Jindal said. Asked to explain,
Shannon Bates Dirmann, a spokeswoman for Jindal said: “Governor Jindal wasn’t talking about current curriculum, but what type of curriculum
to expect if the federal government continues to control what our children learn from Washington. President Obama and bureaucrats in D.C.
have proven over the last several years that they do not believe in American exceptionalism, and if they continue to garner control over K-12
education that view could be passed to our children.” Paul has said he is a proponent of state and local control when it comes to educational
standards. “Common Core is a prime example of federal overreach into academic standards which have been traditionally set by the states and
localities,” said Sergio Gor, a spokesman for Paul. “As educators, parents and other experts are finding out, the standards of Common Core are
just the tip of the iceberg in a much larger federal education agenda. It would be dishonest to say that the Common Core State Standards do
not inform curricula, textbooks and assessments. A distorted and problematic view of American history is evident in Common Core aligned
textbooks and the readings it recommends and omits.” The issue could play a role in the upcoming 2016 presidential primaries, separating
candidates like Jindal, Paul and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie — who recently changed from supporting Common Core to saying he has “grave
concerns” about it — from Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, a longtime advocate for the standards who has maintained his support for them. Previous
polls have found mixed support , with wide-ranging results depending on question wording. In this poll, which described it simply as the “new
Common Core Standards initiative,” 17 percent approved while 40 percent disapproved. A significant portion of respondents — 42 percent —
offered no opinion. The wide uncertainty is unsurprising for an issue that large swaths of the public, not having children in school, has ignored.
Just more than half of respondents said they’ve heard “just a little” or “nothing at all.” But misperceptions were more common among those
who said they were paying more attention. Sixty percent of those who said they have heard “a lot” about Common Core incorrectly said that
the standards cover at least two of the four subjects that it does not cover. Among those who report having heard nothing about the program,
only 45 percent said Common Core includes at least two such programs. Forty-four percent of all respondents incorrectly said that the
standards address sex education, and about the same share said that the standards include teachings on evolution, global warming and the
American Revolution. Fewer than one in five respondents correctly said that those subjects were not included in Common Core. The poll found
similar levels of confusion about Common Core’s content among Democrats and Republicans, supporters and opponents of the program and
among people of different education levels. No matter their level of misperceptions, more
people disapprove of Common Core
than approve. And even among those who have the most misperceptions, disapproval is not especially steep. For instance, among poll
respondents who incorrectly thought the standards include all four subjects tested in the poll, 36 percent disapproved of the standards,
compared to 24 percent who approved. But the impact of Common Core confusion on the program’s popularity differed across political groups.
Republicans who incorrectly believed Common Core covers teaching on evolution, sex education and global warming were more apt to
disapprove of the program. But among Democrats and independents, support did not grow or fall with greater levels of knowledge. The
Fairleigh Dickinson Public Mind poll was conducted Dec. 8-15 by live interviewers among a random national sample of 964 adults reached on
conventional and cellular phones. The overall margin of sampling error is plus or minus three percentage points, and is higher for results among
subgroups.
Federalism DA
2AC — Federalism Net Benefit
Turn — State repeal of Common Core increases federal control
The Daily Oklahoman 14 — The Daily Oklahoman, 2014 (“Repeal of Common Core would increase
federal control,” The Daily Oklahoman, March 19th, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via LexisNexis)
OPPONENTS of Common Core often claim that its academic standards represent a federal takeover of
schools. No real evidence exists to support that claim. Instead, the initiative most likely to increase
federal control of Oklahoma schools is actually the move to repeal state Common Core math and
language arts standards. Here's why: Oklahoma was granted a waiver from the federal No Child Left
Behind law.
The waiver was based in part on the state adopting either Common Core academic standards or equally
rigorous alternatives. Immediate repeal of Common Core standards could therefore result in the loss
of that waiver. The consequences would be dramatic. Under NCLB, schools failing to meet certain
student-achievement benchmarks lose control of up to 20 percent of Title I funds, federal cash used
for low-income children. More than 1,700 of 1,784 Oklahoma schools have yet to meet those
benchmarks. "We applied for a waiver, which allows us to continue to use our Title I money at the
district's discretion," said Amber England, government affairs director of the Oklahoma branch of Stand
for Children. "If we lose our No Child Left Behind waiver, 20 percent of Title I funds will be directed by
the feds." Thus, she notes, Common Core repeal means lawmakers would be "ceding more federal
control," not increasing local control. Some schools use Title I funds for teacher salaries, so Common
Core repeal could translate into teacher layoffs. In addition, state government and local districts have
spent millions implementing Common Core standards since 2010. If lawmakers order an immediate
repeal, "all that money goes out the window." Stand for Children, which works to ensure all children
have access to a quality education, has been a vocal supporter of Common Core standards. In a meeting
with The Oklahoman's editorial board, the group warned the unintended consequences of repeal aren't
limited to finances. For teachers, repeal would mean they wasted three years implementing Common
Core standards, only to be undermined at the last minute. England says such disrespect and instability
could lead more teachers to leave the profession in a state already facing a teacher shortage." When
teachers don't know what's expected of them, they're less likely to want to stay in a hard environment
and work," she said. Some lawmakers appear aware of these problems. Although a bill passed the House
calling for revision of the standards, it delayed that process until 2016 when a review was already
scheduled. The bill also requires any new standards adopted to essentially match or exceed Common
Core standards. Those provisions are intended to preserve Oklahoma's No Child Left Behind waiver. Still,
given the potential for enormous negative consequences, why push this change at all? Although
lawmakers voted in 2010 to adopt Common Core standards, some now claim massive voter opposition
has prompted a reassessment. Yet polling shows the majority of Oklahomans have no strong feelings
about the standards. Only 29 percent hold unfavorable views. Once voters are given a straightforward
description of the standards, 78 percent shift to a favorable view. And opponents rarely criticize the
actual standards. Most opposition is based on innuendo, conjecture, misinformation and disinformation.
It would be beyond ironic if, in responding to the unfounded fears of a minority about federal control,
state lawmakers actually opened the door for far greater federal control of Oklahoma schools while
wasting millions of taxpayer dollars and undermining teachers in the process.
Terrorism DA
2AC — Terrorism DA
Education key to long term prevention of terrorism.
Council on Foreign Relations 12 – The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is an independent think
tank dedicated to being a resource for its members in order to help them better understand the world
and the foreign policy choices facing the United States and other countries, 2012 (“U.S. Education
Reform and National Security,” CFR Independent Task Force Report No. 68, March 2012, available online
via http://www.cfr.org/united-states/us-education-reform-national-security/p27618, accessed on
7/8/15)//CM
The 9/11 Commission highlighted four U.S. shortcomings that opened the door to the terrorist
attacks. One of these was a failure of imagination on the part of U.S. security agencies.113 In 2001,
the failure to spot and connect the dots was catastrophic for the United States. The Task Force
believes that all young people—those who aim to work in national security and those who aim to work
in corporations or not-for-profit organizations—must develop their imaginations from an early age.
This is increasingly important as information becomes more and more abundant and as the world
becomes more interconnected and complex. The United States has traditionally led the world in patent
applications, inventions, and innovation. The Task Force members believe that to retain this important
competitive edge, lessons in creativity— whether in the arts or in creative analysis or imaginative
problem solving, must begin in early elementary school. These vital skills should be incorporated into
extracurricular programs as well as woven into lessons of math, literacy, language, science, and
technology and tested through interdisciplinary simulations. The same goes for civics. As detailed in
this report, students in the United States are not currently learning the basic rights and responsibilities
of citizenship, which is leaving them both globally unaware and oblivious to the opportunities they
have as U.S. citizens. The Task Force believes that this fundamental knowledge set should be
integrated into students’ formal and informal instruction, starting in the earliest days of their
educations.
Counterplans
AT: States CP
2AC — States Counterplan
Perm: do both.
Perm shields the net benefit — states would get the [credit/blame] for the opt out.
States would lose hundreds of millions of education dollars if they reject Common
Core and testing.
Petrilli and Brickman 14 — Michael J. Petrilli, executive vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham
Institute, an education-policy think tank, where he contributes to its Flypaper blog and weekly Education
Gadfly newsletter, and Michael Brickman, national policy director for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute,
where he is a commentator on education-reform issues and a regular contributor to the Flypaper blog
and other publications, 2014 ("Common Core: The Day After," Voices, a publication of the Governing
Institute, April 28th, Available Online at http://www.governing.com/gov-institute/voices/col-whathappens-when-states-reject-common-core-education-standards.html, Accessed 7-6-2015)
Like a dog that finally catches the bus he'd been chasing forever, what happens when opponents of the
Common Core State Standards finally succeed in getting a state's policymakers to "repeal" the
education initiative? Early signs from Indiana and elsewhere suggest that the opponents' stated goals
are likely to get run over.
We acknowledge, of course, that Common Core critics aren't monolithic, even on the right. Libertarians
want states to reject standards, testing and accountability overall; conservative opponents urge states
to move to what they see as "higher" standards. Both factions would like to remove the taint of federal
influence from state-based reform. (On that point, we concur.) On the left, the National Education
Association sees an opportunity to push back against a policy it never liked in the first place. The union is
using the standards as an excise to call for a moratorium on teacher evaluations as states move to
Common Core-aligned tests. Still others worry about the standards being "too hard." (On these points,
we do not concur).
So how's it going? Indiana has hit the reverse button hardest, enacting a bill that requires the state
board of education to adopt revised standards. Oklahoma seems on the brink of doing much the same
thing. No state is rejecting standards and testing entirely. That is partially because they would lose
hundreds of millions of dollars of federal education funding and partially because few lawmakers trust
the education system to do right by all kids once it's free from external benchmarks and measures.
(Sorry, libertarians.)
Can’t solve Critical Thinking — cuts in education funding force schools to eliminate
programs, turning critical thinking.
Bryant 11 — Jeff Bryant, associate fellow for Campaign for America’s Future, former front page
blogger for OpenLeft.com and independent communications consultant, 2011 (“Starving America’s
Public Schools: How Budget Cuts and Policy Mandates are Hurting our Nation’s Students,” National
Education Association, Available Online at
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCcQ
FjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fourfuture.org%2Ffiles%2Fdocuments%2Fstarving-schools-
report.pdf&ei=Ud6dVeCKKoXDggTa4oGADA&usg=AFQjCNHLXOra85oXprlX72aaTfIELA0EA&sig2=D6WKAnU51ZseE0mSmRAtNw, Accessed 07-08-2015)
3. Well-Rounded Curriculum
In a recent address to the National PTA, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan spoke about the
importance of students receiving a well-rounded education. “The President and I reject the notion that
arts, history, science, writing, foreign language, [End of p. 13] physical education, geography, and civics
are ornamental offerings that can or should be cut from school when times are tough,” he said. “In fact,
in the information age, a well-rounded curriculum is not a luxury but a necessity.”22
He was obviously preaching to the choir here, as most parents and teachers understand that children
need a 21st century education that includes classes in the arts, music, health and physical education,
social studies, and vocational training.
Here again, the research supports parents’ and teachers’ observations. A report released in 2011 by
Common Core, a respected Washington education advocacy organization, confirmed the importance of
a well-rounded education.
The report, Why We’re Behind: What Top Nations Teach Their Students But We Don’t, examined the
curriculum and assessments in nine countries that have have outperformed the U.S. on the Program
for International Student Assessment, or PISA. The report found that a standard feature of those
countries’ school systems is the demand that students receive a broad and diverse education.
According to the report, “the common ingredient across these varied nations” was a “dedication to
educating their children deeply in a wide range of subjects.”23
The report concluded, “Too many American schools . . . are by contrast sacrificing time spent on the
arts and humanities.”
Since passage of No Child Left Behind, the federal policy that mandated rigid accountability measures
for student achievement in reading and math, schools have spent substantially more instructional
time preparing for tests in those subjects— at the expense of science, social studies, art, music, and
physical education.24 Budget austerity measures can only exacerbate that negative trend.
Can’t solve Corporate Control — when the government makes budget cuts in
education, corporations step in – this leads to bias and incomplete curricula – Chevron
proves.
CSW 10 – Climate Science Watch, nonprofit public interest education and advocacy project dedicated
to holding public officials accountable for using climate research effectively and with integrity in dealing
with the challenge of global climate disruption, with a primary focus is on U.S. national policy
developments, 2010 (“Corporate funding in public education – is anyone watching?”, CSW, December
23, Available Online at http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/2010/12/23/corporate-funding-in-publiceducation-is-anyone-watching/, accessed 7/8/15, KM)
California’s new environmental education program, the Education and the Environment Initiative (EEI), is another victim of the state
budget crisis. Although the K-12 program was developed with state funding, the state is not providing further support. In order to
implement EEI, the program is soliciting $22 million in outside funding from governmental, business, and philanthropic sources. We’ve been
looking into this issue out of concern for the ramifications of increasing
private, particularly corporate, sponsorship of
public education, and for the lack of oversight by outside groups. The Education and the Environment Initiative will
have a wide reach; it is being positioned to serve as a national model, and the new standardized K-12 environmental curriculum will reach 6.2
million students statewide and “countless families, communities, and businesses in our state and beyond.” In a previous post, we discussed the
state energy reader (“The Energy Source Buffet”), which downplays the impacts of burning fossil fuels and doesn’t address climate change. We
received a response from the California EPA, and are continuing to research the program and the issue of corporate funding in education.
Corporate funding in science education is widespread in California and nationwide, and in energy education
specifically, a number of large energy corporations and industry associations have produced their own
materials for distribution in schools. Large corporate energy interests have made substantial
investments in K-12 education programs, giving out grants, bringing teachers to conferences and workshops for training, and
handing out classroom materials, all without significant oversight by environmental non-profit or watchdog
organizations of the ramifications for curriculum content. In one major example, Chevron Corporation is a large funder
of science education and “community engagement investments” in California. Through Chevron’s California Partnership, an initiative
announced in 2009, “more than 20 nonprofit organizations and multiple public school districts across California have received investments,”
totaling approximately $28 million. In one example, Chevron awarded $1 million to community development organizations in Richmond,
California, the site of one of its oil refineries that has been in “high priority violation” of Clean Air Act compliance standards since at least 2006
and has had disproportionately high health impacts on Richmond residents. Chevron is also a sponsor of the National Energy Education
Development Project (NEED), a nationwide program working to “provide energy education curriculum and training to every appropriate
classroom in the nation.” The project has been in existence for 30 years, and is sponsored by a range of energy interests, including large energy
corporations and industry groups like BP, ConocoPhillips, the American Petroleum Institute, Pacific Gas and Electric, and Halliburton. Supported
by a grant from BP’s A+ for Energy Program, NEED’s California program provides educators with access to grants, NEED training, and NEED
curriculum. BP and NEED hosted seven Energy Conferences for Educators in 2005. Chevron
has also purchased and is
promoting “Energy4Me” energy education materials “presented by” the Society of Petroleum Engineers for distribution in
schools. The “Energy4Me” kit includes classroom activities and presentations, teaching aids, and speaker resources. Materials are available free
to teachers when an “energy professional gives a classroom presentation,” or when teachers attend a “science teacher professional
development workshop,” with substitute reimbursement provided. Teachers
can also be provided with the “Oil and
Natural Gas” book, which “shows kids how petroleum and natural gas shapes our world,” or an "Energy
Sources of the World!" booklet that discusses the pros and cons of different energy sources. Materials from this energy education module were
distributed by Chevron representatives at the recent California Science Teachers’ Association conference. The front of the "Energy Sources of
the World!" booklet reads: “A Gift from the People of Chevron.” The ramifications of corporate energy funding in academic research have been
studied and written about recently, but to our knowledge the same scrutiny hasn’t been extended to the influence of corporate money in K-12
education programs, at least outside of the professional education community. Should “gifts from Chevron” be anywhere near the classroom?
The conflict of interest involved in for-profit corporations sponsoring education programs in subject
matters coinciding with their business interests is clear, but the issue hasn’t been fleshed out, especially with more
nuanced cases like EEI, where corporate support will come after the program has been developed. We’ll be continuing to write about EEI as an
example of this dynamic in action, and welcome any feedback.
Uniform 50-state fiat is a voting issue — it’s mechanism disconnected from literature,
hurting students’ civic knowledge — magical thinking about state capabilities fosters a
race to the margins of domestic topics, sidestepping core surveillance controversies —
dramatically weakens students’ expertise and decision-making competence. Our
interpretation: the neg gets to devolve responsibility and incentivize state behavior,
but they cannot fiat uniform 50-state action — reject the team to preserve
competitive equity.
Equality DA —
Repealing Common Core takes away states necessary Title I funding
Fisher 13 — Sierra Fisher, Clerk at Karczewski Bradshaw LLP, J.D. and Magna Cum Laude at Texas Tech
School of Law, former Policy Analyst, Texas House of Representatives, B.A. in Government and
Communications from The University of Texas at Austin, 2013 (“Compulsory Accountability Renders The
No Child Left Behind Act Unconstitutional: The Texas Education Agency's Ultimate Tool To Ensure Its
Waiver From The Department Of Education,” Texas Tech Administrative Law Journal (14 Tex. Tech.
Admin. L. J. 467), Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)
Congress is struggling to amend the ESEA-operating under its current title NCLB- leaving states and
school districts stuck with a ten-year-old law [*478] that needs retooling. n123 As a result, President
Obama and the Department of Education agreed to grant state education agencies waivers exempting
states from some of the NCLB's requirements, including obtaining 100% proficiency by the year 2014.
n124 In exchange for the reprieve, the Department of Education "require[s] states to adopt standards
for college and career readiness, focus improvement efforts on 15 percent of the most troubled schools,
and create guidelines for teacher evaluations based in part on student performance." n125 States that
adopted the Core Curriculum State Standards Initiative (Common Core)-the national curriculum the
Department of Education pushes that Texas and other states refuse to utilize-meet the college
readiness standards requirement. n126 However, the states that adopted their own curriculum can
meet the standard only if their university systems approve the curriculum as college-ready. n127 These
waivers force states to implement the Common Core or forgo the necessary flexibility to continue
receiving their Title I funds. n128 Critics speculate whether or not the waiver process is an attempt to
force national curriculum, which infringes on states' rights to develop and implement their own
curriculum standards. n129 Some states are not in the position to choose between Title I funding and
their desired curriculum, forcing a concession into national curriculum. n130
Title I funding provides assistance to low-income families
Deparment of Education 14 — United States Department of Education, 2014 ("Title I, Part A
Program," No Publication, 6-4-2014, Available Online at
http://www2.ed.gov/programs/titleiparta/index.html, Accessed 7-8-2015)
Program Description
Title I, Part A (Title I) of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, as amended (ESEA) provides
financial assistance to local educational agencies (LEAs) and schools with high numbers or high
percentages of children from low-income families to help ensure that all children meet challenging
state academic standards. Federal funds are currently allocated through four statutory formulas that
are based primarily on census poverty estimates and the cost of education in each state.
Ensuring equal education opportunities for disadvantaged children is a moral
obligation
Hayes 12 — Kelli A. Hayes, PhD in Applied Philosophy Ethics from Stellenbosch University, 2012 (“Our
Moral Obligations To Disadvantaged Children,” Dissertation for Stellenbosch University, 2012, Available
Online at http://scholar.sun.ac.za/handle/10019.1/71680, Accessed 07-08-2015)
There are, however, six pragmatic reasons for individuals to help disadvantaged children. First, such
assistance strengthens the economy by increasing growth, improving labor productivity, and reducing
the budget deficit. Next, it increases civil participation. Furthermore, investing in disadvantaged
children improves national security and reduces population growth. It also [End of p. 312] enhances
quality of life by increasing innovation and technology, reducing crime, and improving health. Finally,
reciprocity provides another pragmatic reason to assist disadvantaged children.
Although pragmatic arguments are necessary for convincing certain skeptics, it is the moral arguments
that contain the most important reasons for assisting disadvantaged children. As a result, the
dissertation first explored the nature of moral obligations and, specifically, obligations of beneficence.
Interestingly, globalization lessens the impact of the geographical distance and more closely links
humanity. Due to both this and the moral arbitrariness of nationality, special obligations do not override
the arguments contained in this dissertation, and the case for cosmopolitanism remains strong.
Having established this, the dissertation continued by exploring the moral arguments for helping
children and examining the institutional and individual aspects of fulfilling such obligations, concluding
although institutions are important, individuals maintain ultimate responsibility. People have
obligations to children due to both the benefit of being in society as well as the nature of moral luck.
What do these obligations entail? They entail establishing a substantive equality of opportunity for
children, and can be grounded in ideas of equal moral status and the common morality. It is
acceptable that the latter is incompletely theorized grounding, and disagreement over these ideas
actually enhances them.
With the philosophical case for the central premise established, what are the specific obligations
individuals have to children? To answer this question, one must understand the idea of a child’s best
interests and *his [or her] need for nutritious food, clean drinking water, adequate sanitation, good
healthcare, decent shelter, a proper education, and love and guidance. It is important to note these
obligations are indivisible and can be fulfilled through time, money, or in-kind donations.
[*Edited for gendered language]
2AC — Funding Competitiveness DA
Education funding cuts cause economic decline and competitiveness — lack of quality
of education including high-level technical and analytical skills
Leachman and Mai 14 — Michael Leachman, Director of State Fiscal Research with the State Fiscal
Policy at Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, former policy analyst for nine years at the Oregon
Center for Public Policy (OCPP), a member of the State Priorities Partnership, Ph.D. in sociology from
Loyola University Chicago, and Chris Mai, Research Assistant at Center on Budget and Policy Priorities,
Master of Public Policy from the University of Virginia's Frank Batten School and a B.A. in Foreign Affairs
from the University of Virginia, 2014 ("Most States Still Funding Schools Less Than Before the
Recession," Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, October 16th, Available Online at
http://www.cbpp.org/research/most-states-still-funding-schools-less-than-before-the-recession,
Accessed 7-8-2015)
The cuts undermine education reform and hinder school districts' ability to deliver high-quality
education, with long-term negative effects on the nation's economic competitiveness. Many states
and school districts have undertaken important school reform initiatives to prepare children better for
the future, but deep funding cuts hamper their ability to implement many of these reforms. At a time
when producing workers with high-level technical and analytical skills is increasingly important to a
country's prosperity, large cuts in funding for basic education threaten to undermine the nation's
economic future.
Large cuts to state education budgets cause economic decline — job loss and no
technical or analytical skill training
SCAD 14 — a group of multidisciplinary designers at Savannah College of Art and Design for the Design
Management Design Futures class of Winter 2014, 2014, (“The Future of Education in the American
South,” Design Futures, Available Online at http://www.slideshare.net/laurennp/the-future-ofeducation-in-the-american-south?from_action=save&from=fblanding, Accessed 07-08-2015)
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR THE SOUTH
• States’ large cuts in education spending have serious consequences for the economy, in both the
short and long term. Local school districts typically have little ability to make up for lost state funding
on their own. As a result, deep state funding cuts lead to job losses, slowing the economy’s recovery
from the recession.
• Such cuts also counteract and sometimes undermine important state education reform initiatives at
a time when producing workers with high-level technical and analytical skills is increasingly important
to a country’s prosperity. State education budget cuts prolonged the recession and have slowed the
pace of economic recovery by reducing overall economic activity.
• Special programs are also being cut as a result – including those that assist students with special
needs as well as Advanced Placement courses, extracurricular activities and special academic
programs for science, foreign language and technology.
• Cuts to education has yielded a downward spiral effect, as hundreds of thousands of educators have
lost their jobs. They also force the termination of school programs and services, which hinder
education reform efforts that are often disproportionately focused on low-income communities,
furthering the education and achievement gap among students of varying economic backgrounds.
2AC — CP Links to Politics
CP Links to Politics: the cuts to grant money generated are politically divisive –
splinters democrats
Education Week 14 – Education Week offers weekly news on the American education system,
including nonpartisan reviews of local state and federal education policies. 2014. “Tensions Surface as
States Queue Up for Early-Ed. Grants” November 5, Available for access via LexisNexis. Accessed on 0714-2015)
Although a majority of states put in for a share of the $250 million the U.S. Department of Education
has allotted for a grant competition to expand preschool, even so popular a program could not escape
some partisanship.
Some high-profile GOP governors — in Indiana, Louisiana, and Wisconsin—either didn't
apply for the federal money or threatened not to do so. And Democratic politicians who support the
Preschool Development Grant program have, in some cases, used that as a way to criticize political
opponents.
In all, eight states and Puerto Rico are competing for a share of the $80 million in grants that are
allotted for states that are just launching preschool programs. An additional 27 states are seeking a
share of $160 million for "expansion" of already-existing programs. The remaining $10 million will be
used for technical assistance and program monitoring.
The number of applicants matched a prediction that U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan made in
San Francisco last month, at an event to drum up support for the administration's early-learning
initiatives.
"I think we're going to get in something like 35 or 36 states applying, which I think is amazing," Mr.
Duncan said. "Realistically, we'll probably fund six, eight, nine, something like that. That's the challenge.
There's always so much more demand, and there'll be so many more great states that we want to fund
than we're going to have dollars available. So we'll go as far as we can down the funding slate, but again,
as a nation, this has to become a greater priority."
Political Battles
But the grant offer got a particularly rocky reception in a few states.
This is especially true in the context of Bobby Jindal – a presidential candidate with
political swing.
Education Week 14 – Education Week offers weekly news on the American education system,
including nonpartisan reviews of local state and federal education policies. 2014. “Tensions Surface as
States Queue Up for Early-Ed. Grants” November 5, Available for access via LexisNexis. Accessed on 0714-2015)
The friction started with Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana—a Republican not up for re-election
but widely considered a likely 2016 presidential contender—who fired off letters early this
month to the Education Department and to his state education chief, John White, asking for
assurances that the state would not be required to use the money to promote the Common Core
State Standards. Mr. Jindal, an early common-core supporter, has reversed course. He filed a lawsuit
in August against the Obama administration, calling the standards a federal overreach.
Mr. Jindal said in an Oct. 11 letter that Louisiana's early-learning standards appear to be connected to
the common core, prompting Mr. White to respond in an Oct. 12 missive that, "The early-learning
standards equip children with skills like how to hold a pencil, how to identify a color, and how to be
polite. Children equipped with these skills will be prepared for any kindergarten using any standard."
The governor's office eventually agreed to sign the application.
Indiana was among the states that had signaled an intent to apply for the funds, a step that's not a
prerequisite for grant programs, but offers the Education Department a clue about the popularity of a
given program. However, with the application complete and ready to be transmitted, Republican Gov.
Mike Pence, who has supported a state-funded preschool pilot program, said he would not move
forward. Instead, the state should focus on its own preschool pilot program just starting in five counties,
he said.
His change in position brought a stinging public rebuke from Glenda Ritz, the state's elected
superintendent of public instruction. "Gov. Pence's about-face with little or no notice to those who had
worked in concert with his administration on the grant application is bad for our state and our children,"
she said, in a statement carried in the Indianapolis Star.
Capacity Concerns
Wisconsin did not indicate any intent to apply for the funds, and state Democrats used that to criticize
Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican. Wisconsin has accepted federal funding for early education before; the
state applied for Early Learning Challenge grant funds and was awarded $34 million in 2013.
Opponents of Gov. Walker said that the failure to apply for the new funds showed a general neglect of
federal funding opportunities. "Playing political games with these federal grant opportunities, while
neglecting our infrastructure, ignoring our most vulnerable citizens, and running up a projected $1.9
billion deficit is inexcusable," said U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan, a Democrat from Wisconsin.
However, Laurel Patrick, a spokeswoman for the governor, said that Mr. Walker deferred to the state
education department and department of children and families regarding the grant. But Tom McCarthy,
a spokesman for the state Department of Public Instruction, said the agency did not advise the governor
to forgo the grant.
The election-year timing of the grant may have played a role in the wrangling in some cases, but
governors may have also been facing some specific state political issues, said Sara Mead, an early
childhood policy analyst with Bellwether Education Partners in Washington. For example, in Indiana,
Mr. Pence had proposed a larger preschool program, but had to overcome opposition in his own party
to get the smaller program now underway.
2AC — PreK DA
Status quo federal funding is key to maintain and broaden access to early childhood
education – especially in minority and lower income communities.
DOE 14 – US department of education, internally quoting Arnie Duncan who serves as the Secretary of
Education for the Barack Obama Administration. “18 States Awarded New Preschool Development
Grants to increase Access to High-Quality Preschool Programs” DOE Press Release, Available at
http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/18-states-awarded-new-preschool-development-grantsincrease-access-high-quality-preschool-programs. Accessedon
"Expanding access to high-quality preschool is critically important to ensure the success of our
children in school and beyond," said Secretary Duncan. "The states that have received new Preschool
Development Grants will serve as models for expanding preschool to all 4-year-olds from low- and
moderate-income families. These states are demonstrating a strong commitment to building and
enhancing early learning systems, closing equity gaps and expanding opportunity so that more children
in America can fulfill their greatest potential."
Under the grant program, states with either small or no state-funded preschool programs were
eligible for development grants, while states with more robust preschool programs, or that have
received Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC) grants, were eligible for expansion grants.
Twelve states that have not previously received funding from RTT-ELC will receive funding from the
jointly-administered Preschool Development Grant program (see list below).
Through these Preschool Development Grant awards, more than 33,000 additional children will be
served in high-quality preschool programs that meet high-quality standards in the first year of the
program alone. States receiving grants will develop or expand high-quality preschool programs in
regionally diverse communities—from urban neighborhoods to small towns to tribal areas—as
determined by the state. Preschool programs funded under either category of grants must meet the
criteria for high-quality preschool programs. To support states in planning their budgets, the U.S.
Departments of Education and Health and Human Services developed annual budget caps for each
state that is eligible to receive a Preschool Development Grant. The departments developed grant
funding categories by ranking every state according to its relative share of eligible children and then
identifying the natural breaks in the rank order. Then, based on population, budget caps were
developed for each category.
The grants were part of more than $1 billion in new federal and private sector investments in early
childhood education announced by President Obama during today's White House Summit on Early
Education. The President also announced a new public awareness campaign called "Invest in US" in
partnership with the First Five Years Fund.
Early childhood education is key for economic development and supporting the
economy, preventing crime and solving for high prison populations
Rolnick 03 – Arthur J Rolnick is a Senior Fellow and Co-Director of the Human Capital Research
Collaborative at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, the University of Minnesota. Rolnick is working
to advance multidisciplinary research on child development and social policy. He previously served at
the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis as a senior vice president and director of research and as an
associate economist with the Federal Open Market Committee—the monetary policymaking body for
the Federal Reserve System. Rolnick’s essays on public policy issues have gained national attention; his
research interests include banking and financial economics, monetary policy, monetary history, the
economics of federalism, and the economics of education. His work on early childhood development has
garnered numerous awards, including those from the George Lucas Educational Foundation and the
Minnesota Department of Health, both in 2007; he was also named 2005 Minnesotan of the Year by
Minnesota Monthly magazine. “Early Childhood Development: Economic Development with a high
Public Return”
Market failures can occur for a variety of reasons; two well-documented failures are goods that have external effects and those with public
attributes. Unfettered markets will generally produce the wrong amount of such goods. Education
has long been recognized as
a good that has external effects and public attributes. Without public support, the market will yield
too few educated workers and too little basic research. This problem has long been understood in the
United States and it is why our government, at all levels, has supported public funding for education. (According to the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, for example, the United States in 1999 ranked high on
public funding of higher education.2 ) Nevertheless, recent studies suggest that one critical form of education, early childhood
development, or ECD, is grossly underfunded. However, if properly funded and managed, investment in ECD yields
an extraordinary return, far exceeding the return on most investments, private or public. A convincing
economic case for publicly subsidizing education has been around for years and is well supported. The
economic case for investing in ECD is more recent and deserves more attention. Public funding of education has deep roots in U.S. history. John
Adams, the author of the oldest functioning written constitution in the world, the constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1779,
declared in that document that a fundamental duty of government is to provide for education.3 Publicly funded schools have been educating
children in the United States ever since. Today
over 85 percent of U.S children are educated in publicly funded
schools. John Adams argued for public funding of education because he realized the importance of educated voters to the well-being of a
democracy. We suspect that he also understood the economic benefits that flow to the general public. Investment in human capital
breeds economic success not only for those being educated, but also for the overall economy. Clearly
today, the market return to education is sending a strong signal. Prior to 1983, the wages of a worker with an
undergraduate degree exceeded a worker with a high school degree by roughly 40 percent. Currently,
that difference is close to 60 percent. The wage premium for an advanced degree has grown even more. Prior to 1985, the
wages of a worker with a graduate degree exceeded those of a worker with a high school degree by roughly 60 percent. Today, that
difference is over 100 percent. Minnesota represents a good example of the economic benefits that
flow from education. Evidence is clear that our state has one of the most successful economies in the country because it has one of the
most educated workforces. In 2000, almost a third of persons 25 and older in Minnesota held at least a
bachelor’s degree, the sixth highest state in the nation. To ensure the future success of Minnesota’s
economy, we must continue to provide a highly educated workforce. Knowing that we need a highly
educated workforce, however, does not tell us where to invest limited public resources. Policymakers must identify the educational
investments that yield the highest public returns. Here the literature is clear: Dollars invested in ECD yield extraordinary public returns. The
quality of life for a child and the contributions the child makes to society as an adult can be traced
back to the first few years of life. From birth until about 5 years old a child undergoes tremendous
growth and change. If this period of life includes support for growth in cognition, language, motor skills, adaptive skills and socialemotional functioning, the child is more likely to succeed in school and later contribute to society.4 However, without support
during these early years, a child is more likely to drop out of school, receive welfare benefits and
commit crime. A well-managed and well-funded early childhood development program, or ECDP,
provides such support. Current ECDPs include home visits as well as center-based programs to supplement and enhance the ability of
parents to provide a solid foundation for their children. Some have been initiated on a large scale, such as federally funded Head Start, while
other small-scale model programs have been implemented locally, sometimes with relatively high levels of funding per participant. The
question we address is whether the current funding of ECDPs is high enough. We make the case that it is not, and that the benefits achieved
from ECDPs far exceed their costs. Indeed, we find that the return to ECDPs far exceeds the return on most projects that are currently funded
as economic development. The question we address is whether the current funding of ECDPs is high enough. We make the case that it is not,
and that the benefits achieved from ECDPs far exceed their costs. Indeed, we find that the return to ECDPs far exceeds the return on most
projects that are currently funded as economic development.Many of the initial studies of ECDPs found little improvement; in particular, they
found only shortterm improvements in cognitive test scores. Often children in early childhood programs would post improvements in IQ
relative to nonparticipants, only to see the IQs of nonparticipants catch up within a few years.5 However, later studies found more long-term
effects of ECDPs. One often-cited research project is the High/Scope study of the Perry Preschool in Ypsilanti, Mich., which demonstrates that
the returns available to an investment in a high-quality ECDP are significant. During the 1960s the Perry School program provided a daily 2 1/2hour classroom session for 3- to 4-year-old children on weekday mornings and a 1 1/2-hour home visit to each mother and child on weekday
afternoons. Teachers were certified to teach in elementary, early childhood and special education, and were paid 10 percent above the local
public school district’s standard pay scale. During the annual 30-week program, about one teacher was on staff for every six children.6
Beginning in 1962, researchers tracked the performance of children from low-income black families
who completed the Perry School program and compared the results to a control group of children who did not participate.
The research project provided reliable longitudinal data on participants and members of the control
group. At age 27, 117 of the original 123 subjects were located and interviewed.7 The results of the research were significant despite the
fact that, as in several other studies, program participants lost their advantage in IQ scores over nonparticipants within a few years after
completing the program. Therefore
a significant contribution to the program’s success likely derived from
growth in noncognitive areas involving social-emotional functioning. During elementary and secondary school,
Perry School participants were less likely to be placed in a special education program and had a significantly higher average achievement score
at age 14 than nonparticipants. Over
65 percent of program participants graduated from regular high school
compared with 45 percent of nonparticipants. At age 27, four times as many program participants as
nonparticipants earned $2,000 or more per month. And only one-fifth as many program participants
as nonparticipants were arrested five or more times by age 27.8
Prison population reform is the internal link to solving for broader change. The CP
would only worsen social movements.
Gregg 13 – Carl Gregg, graduate of Furman University, he receivedhis BA in Philosophy, in 2003 he graduated Brite University in Fort
Worth, Texas, earning his M. Div.In 2009 he received his Diploma in spiritual direction from University of California SF. (“The New Jim Crow:
Mass Incarceration in an Age of Colorblindness” Article published through Frederick Oversight. Accessed
08-21-2015)
And at least in my opinion, a commitment to principles such as “The inherent worth and dignity of
every person” and “Justice, equity and compassion in human relations” requires working for a shift
from a Criminal Justice System primarily characterized by Punitive Justice to one primarily
characterized by Restorative Justice — that is, a focus less on punishment than on rehabilitation,
restoring right relationship for all concerned, and on repairing the problems that contribute to crimes
being committed in the first place. For example, in the U.S., we spend “more on prisons than police,”
but those numbers were reversed before the rise of the Prison-Industrial Complex began in this
county. And communities such as New York City have been able in recent years to decrease prison
populations and crime rates through increased police work, although those statistics are complicated
by use of “stop and frisk rules” that disproportionately stop and frisk people of color.6 We relatedly
need to do a much better job about teaching, promoting, and protecting our Fourth Amendment rights:
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable
searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause....”
Disturbingly the trend in recent years has been many court rulings that seem to many to undermine
the Fourth Amendment and encourage unreasonable search — including rampant racial profiling,
contributing to a disproportionately high rate of incarceration for racial minorities (63-64, 69). To
name one further possibly response to The New Jim Crow, as some of you know, many decades ago this
congregation became a lifetime member of the NAACP, “The National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People.” I know that some of you have been involved at various points in working with the
NAACP. And we have invited the President of the local branch of the NAACP to our discussion this
evening. My understanding is that he plans to attend, and that he has spread the word as well to
some of his contacts. I do not know whether other members of the NAACP will attend, but if this
congregation were to become serious about anti-racist work, a strong first step might be for some of us
to start attending NAACP meetings to hear from people of color directly about their stories, their
struggles, and their ongoing work for racial justice.
[insert econ decline impact]
1AR — Early Education Solves preK
Early Childhood Education really does solve for poverty and crime. Obama’s Federally
funded programs are especially important.
Kristof 13 – Nichola Kristoff has been a olumnist for the NT Times since 2001. Kristof has won two
Pulitzer Prizes for his coverage of Tiananmen Square and eh genocide in Darfis \, along with
humanitarian awards such as the Anne Frank Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He graduated
Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard College and then studied law at Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship,
graduating with first class honors. 2013. (“Do We Invest in Preschools or Prisons?” The New York Times,
October 27. Available vie LexisNexis or at NyTimes.com. Accessed on 07-16-2015)
Growing mountains of research suggest that the best way to address American economic inequality,
poverty and crime is -- you guessed it! -- early education programs, including coaching of parents who
want help. It's not a magic wand, but it's the best tool we have to break cycles of poverty.
President Obama called in his State of the Union address for such a national initiative, but it hasn't
gained traction. Obama himself hasn't campaigned enough for it, yet there's still a reed of hope.
One reason is that this is one of those rare initiatives that polls well across the spectrum, with support
from 84 percent of Democrats and 60 percent of Republicans in a recent national survey. And even if
the program stalls in Washington, states and localities are moving ahead -- from San Antonio to
Michigan. Colorado voters will decide next month on a much-watched ballot measure to bolster
education spending, including in preschool, and a ballot measure in Memphis would expand preschool
as well.
''There's this magical opportunity'' now to get a national early education program in America, Education
Secretary Arne Duncan told me. He says he's optimistic that members of Congress will introduce a
bipartisan bill for such a plan this year.
''When you think how you make change for the next 30 years, this is arguably at the top of my list,''
Duncan said. ''It can literally transform the life chances of children, and strengthen families in important
ways.''
Whether it happens through Congressional action or is locally led, this may be the best chance America
has had to broaden early programs since 1971, when Congress approved such a program but President
Nixon vetoed it.
The massive evidence base for early education grew a bit more with a major new study from Stanford
University noting that achievement gaps begin as early as 18 months. Then at 2 years old, there's a
six-month achievement gap. By age 5, it can be a two-year gap. Poor kids start so far behind when
school begins that they never catch up -- especially because they regress each summer.
One problem is straightforward. Poorer kids are more likely to have a single teenage mom who is
stressed out, who was herself raised in an authoritarian style that she mimics, and who, as a result,
doesn't chatter much with the child.
Yet help these parents, and they do much better. Some of the most astonishing research in povertyfighting methods comes from the success of programs to coach at-risk parents -- and these, too, are
part of Obama's early education program. ''Early education'' doesn't just mean prekindergarten for 4year-olds, but embraces a plan covering ages 0 to 5.
The earliest interventions, and maybe the most important, are home visitation programs like NurseFamily Partnership. It begins working with at-risk moms during pregnancy, with a nurse making regular
visits to offer basic support and guidance: don't drink or smoke while pregnant; don't take heroin or
cocaine. After birth, the coach offers help with managing stress, breast-feeding and diapers, while
encouraging chatting to the child and reading aloud.
These interventions are cheap and end at age 2. Yet, in randomized controlled trials, the gold standard
of evaluation, there was a 59 percent reduction in child arrests at age 15 among those who had gone
through the program.
Something similar happens with good pre-K programs. Critics have noted that with programs like
Head Start, there are early educational gains that then fade by second or third grade. That's true, and
that's disappointing.
Yet, in recent years, long-term follow-ups have shown that while the educational advantages of Head
Start might fade, there are ''life skill'' gains that don't. A rigorous study by David Deming of Harvard,
for example, found that Head Start graduates were less likely to repeat grades or be diagnosed with a
learning disability, and more likely to graduate from high school and attend college.
Look, we'll have to confront the pathologies of poverty at some point. We can deal with them cheaply
at the front end, in infancy. Or we can wait and jail a troubled adolescent at the tail end. To some
extent, we face a choice between investing in preschools or in prisons.
1AR — Education Funding Links
Common Core repeal risks hundreds of millions in federal funding for each state
crippling quality education
Charleston Daily Mail 15 — Charleston Daily Mail, 2015 ("Bill to repeal Common Core draws
concern from state school board," Byline Samuel Speciale, February 24th, Available Online at
http://www.charlestondailymail.com/article/20150224/DM01/150229598, Accessed 7-10-2015)
Repealing the standards may be even more harmful though.
Federal law, under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, requires states to have education
standards and aligned student assessments. States that are not compliant risk forfeiting federal
funding.
Pasdon said she and others within her party are aware a repeal of Common Core, if not done correctly,
could jeopardize the $362 million the federal government allocates to West Virginia. In drafting the
bill, she said the goal was getting rid of the standards in a way that doesn’t risk that funding and still
ensures students are held to high academic standards.
The set of national math and English standards has been controversial since they were adopted in 2010
by more than 40 states. Created through a partnership of governors and state school officials in 2009,
Common Core guarantees public school students across the country get the same basic education.
After the standards were released, the U.S. Department of Education supported the standards and,
with the help of President Barack Obama, offered $4.3 billion in competitive grants to adopting states.
Pasdon’s bill asserts that the federal government coerced states into adopting Common Core by
issuing money and waivers, calling it an “inappropriate usurpation of state sovereignty over public
education.”
While many Common Core opponents make that claim, state Department of Education officials have
long defended the standards, which they retooled to better reflect West Virginia students. They also
renamed them the Next Generation Content Standards.
State Superintendent Michael Martirano and school board members have repeatedly said West Virginia
must “stay the course” in implementing the standards because they help students learn on a deeper
level and compete internationally.
In a statement released Tuesday evening, Martirano said there will be “significant consequences,
which will ripple through our state’s education structure and cripple high-quality teaching” if the state
board is forced to repeal the standards.
Repealing common core risks up to 581 million dollars in funding for a single state
Arizona Daily Sun 15 — Arizona Daily Sun, 2015 ("Ducey: Keep Common Core," Byline Howard
Fischer, March 23rd, Available Online at http://azdailysun.com/news/local/ducey-keep-common-core---for-now/article_af5755f5-d280-59ef-8378-0020fa96e127.html, Accessed 7-10-2015)
But it was Ducey's direction to the board to review -- and not scrap -- the standards, that was the key
point.
"I am calling on this board to make right the situation,'' he told them.
Ducey's complaints about federal intervention aside, there is real money at issue here.
In a briefing paper, state Department of Education said federal law requires Arizona to assess students
according to standards. Failure to comply places about $324 million at risk, with the possible loss of
another $257 million.
29 million dollars of Title I funding are also tied to Common Core
Politico 14 — Politico, 8-28-2014 ("Common Core repeal costs Oklahoma its NCLB waiver," Byline
Caitlin Emma, August 28th, Available Online at http://www.politico.com/story/2014/08/oklahomacommon-core-no-child-left-behind-waiver-110421.html, Accessed 7-10-2015)
Stripping the waiver means at most Oklahoma schools, 100 percent of students performing math and
reading at grade level by this school year. The Education Department expects the state to use student
test results from last school year to determine which schools are meeting the bar. Some schools that
fall short aren’t will have to take steps toward improvement, which could include a total restructuring
of the staff or a private or state takeover of the school.
The state will have to set aside about $29 million in federal Title I dollars to pay for tutoring and
school choice.
Education waivers bought state compliance with Common Core — repealing cedes
funding
Arizona Daily Sun 15 — Arizona Daily Sun, 2015 ("Ducey: Keep Common Core," Byline Howard
Fischer, March 23rd, Available Online at http://azdailysun.com/news/local/ducey-keep-common-core---for-now/article_af5755f5-d280-59ef-8378-0020fa96e127.html, Accessed 7-10-2015)
In many ways, Monday's speech amounted to Ducey backing away from his arguments during the
campaign that Arizona does not need Common Core. In fact, when Ducey spoke Monday he suggested
that all the vocal objections to the standards, developed in part by the National Governors
Association, are misdirected and mistaken.
"There's a lot of misunderstanding around this,'' he said. "I think it's because of the very real fact that
Washington, D.C., did get involved in the funding.''
And Ducey said that issue predates Common Core, saying Arizona has to get waivers from the No Child
Left Behind standards approved by Congress in 2001.
"It's purchased obedience from the states for these waivers,'' he said. That, said the governor, is a
separate question from the adequacy of the standards.
Opting out of Common Core costs states tens of millions of dollars — not only do they
lose federal funding, but they also need to rewrite standards and tests and retrain
their teachers.
Times Picayune 14 — New Orleans Times Picayune, Byline Julia O'Donoghue, 2014 ("Education
Department says scrapping Common Core would cost Louisiana," NOLA Times Picayune, March 28th,
Available Online at
http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2014/03/education_department_says_comm.html, Accessed 76-2015)
Louisiana would have to spend millions of dollars if it scrapped the Common Core educational
standards and associated tests for primary and secondary education, according to an internal memo
issued by the state Department of Education.
The state would spend anywhere from $20 million to $25 million to get rid of Common Core, depending
on whether it reverted back to old academic standards and assessments, bought off-the-shelf tests or
developed brand new material afterward. Local school districts would also have to spend millions of
dollars retraining teachers and purchasing new instructional materials, according to the document sent
from Deputy Superintendent Beth Scioneaux to Louisiana Superintendent John White.
"In every case, the cost implications reach well into the tens of millions of dollars," wrote Scioneaux to
White in the memo.
States that reject Common Core testing will lose federal education funding.
Swasey 13 — Christel Swasey, MA in Communications, Certified Teacher, founder of Utahns Against
Common Core, 2013 ("The Federal Fist: No Formula Funding if States Reject Common Core," COMMON
CORE, September 3rd, Available Online at https://whatiscommoncore.wordpress.com/2013/09/03/thefederal-fist-no-formula-funding-if-states-reject-common-core/, Accessed 7-6-2015)
First, the federal government forces Americans to choose between giving our hard-earned educational
tax dollars to them –or going to jail. Next, they promise to give back some of that money –so we can
stretch it tightly across our educational budgets– after the feds pay themselves most of it.
So far, so bad.
Then, the feds threaten that they will withhold even that little bit of our money if we don’t merrily
skip to the illegitimate tune of Common Core.
Do the fact check.
The Department of Education in the Department’s Blueprint for Reform uses these sweet sounding
words: “The goal for America’s educational system is clear: Every student should graduate from high
school ready for college and a career…” Nice. (Note to self: whenever the government says something
deafeningly obvious, to which nobody could raise any argument, beware: watch what the other hand is
doing.)
And meanwhile– the Department slyly alters and sets in stone the new definition of what it will mean in
their documents and funding formulas to be “ready for college and career.”
See their official definition:
College- and career-ready standards: Content standards for kindergarten through 12th grade that build
towards college- and career-ready graduation requirements (as defined in this document) by the time of
high school graduation. A State’s college- and career-ready standards must be either (1) standards that
are common to a significant number of States; or (2) standards that are approved by a State network of
institutions of higher education, which must certify that students who meet the standards will not need
remedial course work at the postsecondary level.
(As far as I know, there is no state that has chosen to use option #2– which is using higher ed to certify
that state standards are college and career ready.)
So, college and career ready standards MUST BE COMMON to a significant number of states?
Why? On whose authority? Since when is “everybody’s doing it” a legitimate reason to jump off a cliff?
What if every state in the USA had lousy standards and yours alone had good ones? (Hello,
Massachusetts!)
What if your state defined college and career readiness in a completely different way than “a significant
number of states” defined it? Why the choke-collar? Why the peer pressure? If Common Core is so
great, why the need for federal bullying?
Is bullying too strong a word? Read on.
Back in 2011, the Department of Education was already promising to punish those who push back
against Common Core, saying:
“Beginning in 2015, formula funds will be available only to states that are implementing assessments
based on college- and career-ready standards that are common to a significant number of states.”
So if your state refused to administer a common core aligned test, you’d lose federal dollars.
Even just rejecting the tests imperils state funding.
Petrilli and Brickman 14 — Michael J. Petrilli, executive vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham
Institute, an education-policy think tank, where he contributes to its Flypaper blog and weekly Education
Gadfly newsletter, and Michael Brickman, national policy director for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute,
where he is a commentator on education-reform issues and a regular contributor to the Flypaper blog
and other publications, 2014 ("Common Core: The Day After," Voices, a publication of the Governing
Institute, April 28th, Available Online at http://www.governing.com/gov-institute/voices/col-whathappens-when-states-reject-common-core-education-standards.html, Accessed 7-6-2015)
What about states that decide to keep the Common Core standards but reject common, comparable,
aligned assessments? A report last year from Indiana's nonpartisan legislative staff predicted tens of
millions of dollars in costs to adopt new tests, plus additional ongoing costs to administer them. And a
new report out of Louisiana suggests a similar fate for the Bayou State if sudden big changes are made
to standards and tests.
Nor do such estimates include the cost to local school districts, which have spent millions getting
ready for the higher standards of the Common Core. If states change their standards yet again, many
districts will be compelled, once more, to recalibrate their materials and professional development -and teachers will once again have to adapt to a new set of standards. This does nobody any good.
State repeal of common core causes teacher layoffs.
The Daily Oklahoman 14 — The Daily Oklahoman, 2014 (“Repeal of Common Core would increase
federal control,” The Daily Oklahoman, March 19th, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via LexisNexis)
OPPONENTS of Common Core often claim that its academic standards represent a federal takeover of
schools. No real evidence exists to support that claim. Instead, the initiative most likely to increase
federal control of Oklahoma schools is actually the move to repeal state Common Core math and
language arts standards. Here's why: Oklahoma was granted a waiver from the federal No Child Left
Behind law.
The waiver was based in part on the state adopting either Common Core academic standards or equally
rigorous alternatives. Immediate repeal of Common Core standards could therefore result in the loss
of that waiver. The consequences would be dramatic. Under NCLB, schools failing to meet certain
student-achievement benchmarks lose control of up to 20 percent of Title I funds, federal cash used
for low-income children. More than 1,700 of 1,784 Oklahoma schools have yet to meet those
benchmarks. "We applied for a waiver, which allows us to continue to use our Title I money at the
district's discretion," said Amber England, government affairs director of the Oklahoma branch of Stand
for Children. "If we lose our No Child Left Behind waiver, 20 percent of Title I funds will be directed by
the feds." Thus, she notes, Common Core repeal means lawmakers would be "ceding more federal
control," not increasing local control. Some schools use Title I funds for teacher salaries, so Common
Core repeal could translate into teacher layoffs. In addition, state government and local districts have
spent millions implementing Common Core standards since 2010. If lawmakers order an immediate
repeal, "all that money goes out the window."
The federal government WILL cut funding. NYC proves.
Burke and Chapman 4/15 – Kerry Burke, Ben Chapman, both staff writers for New York Daily News,
an online and print newspaper. 2015. "Feds could cut aid for NY schools if opt-outs rise", NY Daily News,
available at http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/feds-cut-aid-ny-schools-opt-outs-risearticle-1.2187094, accessed 7-16-2015
PUBLIC SCHOOLS across the state could lose millions in federal funding for education if the current
boycott of standardized testing continues, top educators warn.
More than 100,000 families across the Empire State have already opted out of the standardized
reading exams that began Tuesday, according to one unofficial tally.
If those numbers are accurate, the federal government could move to enact a penalty on the state to
withhold funds worth up to $900 million for city schools alone each year.
Top city and state educators are considering the possibility. "We're reviewing things," said state Board
of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch. "But we hope the federal government decides on another option."
Critics of the Common Core exams believe they are too difficult and should not be used to evaluate
teacher performance. They also believe the tests and prep take up too much time.
If more than 5% of kids sit out the high-stakes reading and math tests this week and next, a federal
law could enable the U.S. government to begin a process of withholding funds for New York public
schools.
1AR — Funding Impacts
Federal funding for education is important to supplement education standards
Michell 09 – Ted Mitchell is currently the under secretary of education. He has served in this post
since his confirmation by the U.S. Senate on May 8, 2014, following his nomination by President Barack
Obama on Oct. 31, 2013. Mitchell is the former CEO of the NewSchools Venture Fund and served as the
president of the California State Board of Education. Through his long career in higher education,
Mitchell has served as the president of Occidental College, vice chancellor and dean of the School of
Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and professor and chair
of the Department of Education at Dartmouth College. 2009. (“Innovation will drive new federal funding
for education”. San Jose Mercury News. Available via LexisNexis. Accessed on 07-14-2015.)
The passage of the stimulus bill last week instantly doubled the federal role in funding schools, with
an unprecedented influx of $95 billion. The question is, in education, what will that money buy?
Most of the answer is jobs: fewer pink slips for teachers, and dirt finally moving on long-stalled
construction projects. Yet in a welcome and farsighted move, the Recovery Act not only shores up the
system, it also invests in fixing it where it's broken.
In California alone, tens of thousands of school jobs are at risk now, and the vast majority of education
spending in the bill rightly targets saving jobs and restoring state budgets. In mere weeks, we likely will
see school building projects finally break ground, after long delays forced by the shutdown of
California's bond authority.
Yet the bill also takes short-term steps toward reform and innovation that will pay long-term
dividends, helping to make America's economy competitive again. Reform is an essential element of
recovery, because an educated work force is the core of our productivity.
That thinking underlies the $5 billion Race to the Top fund, which Education Secretary Arne Duncan will
distribute to states to make critically needed short-term improvements that will lead to major gains for
students. Within that fund is $650 million aimed at innovation to begin correcting the sore lack of
research and development education.
We claim no special insight on the decisions Duncan will make, but it's worth pondering: What does
innovation in education look like?
For starters, the federal government will invest in building data systems, so we can stop driving
without a dashboard and see clearly the progress students are making. Most states today, including
California, cannot accurately track a student's academic performance subject by subject, year by year,
much less week by week. That information is central to smart decision-making for teachers, parents,
administrators and policy makers. Such systems will make every education dollar more effective.
International tests prove that American students lag behind their peers in other industrialized nations.
In part, this is because we don't ask enough of our kids. The Race to the Top fund encourages states to
develop rigorous, internationally benchmarked college- and career-ready standards as well as
thoughtful assessments that go beyond filling in bubbles.
But kids in failing schools need more than just rigorous standards and assessments; they need schools
that work better. Toward that end, the recovery bill includes a "Grow What Works" fund that will
expand innovative programs proven to make a real difference for low-income kids.
That approach will help to scale up organizations and ideas that come from both inside and outside
the traditional system. Organizations like KIPP, Teach For America and Aspire Public Schools have
helped to blaze this trail, creating outstanding public schools and putting thousands of great teachers
in the classroom; this funding will help scale up organizations in that mold. The ideas could range from
new pathways for teacher training to public-private partnerships that fix failing schools. What they will
have in common is a track record of improving education.
After decades of under-investment in innovation, this badly needed funding will foster new
technologies, alter classrooms and, ultimately, help reverse the slide in our international
competitiveness. It's more than just rescuing the schools that got us to where we are today. To fuel a
lasting recovery, we have to build a system that works better.
Federal funding is especially key to states post-recession
Zhand 14 – Dian Zhang, Boston University, The George Washington University, University of
International Business and Economics, Chengdu Foreign Languages School. Dow Jones News Fund
business reporting intern at The Deal, Business Reporting Intern at Dow Jones News Fund. 2014.
(“Funding for K-12 Schools Still Hasn’t recovered from the Recession” Budget and Finance, The Bond
Buyer Vol. 1 No. 1. October 16. Available via LexisNexis. Accessed 07-14-2015)
WASHINGTON-States are still providing less per-pupil funding for schools from kindergarten to 12th
grade than they did before the financial crisis in 2008, according to a report released by the Center on
Budget and Policy Priorities on Thursday. The declines in educational investments might put states and
the country in trouble, when they need well-trained workers with high technology knowledge in the
global economy.
The report collected data on the funding distributed through states' major education funding
formulas, excluding local property tax revenue or any other source of local funding. Additional
adjustments were made in a few states to reflect specific situations. Hawaii, Indiana and Iowa were not
included in the report because of the lack of necessary data, the report stated.
At least 30 states, including Oklahoma, Alabama, Arizona and Idaho, provided less funding per student
for the 2014-15 school year than before 2008, the report found. Among the 30 states, 14 of them
reported a decrease of greater than 10% in educational funding.
Oklahoma had the highest percentage cut in its funding for k-12 schools at 23.6% or $857 per student,
followed by Alabama, with a cut of 17.8%. That state also had the highest dollar cut of $1,128 per
student.
The state funding cuts can be attributed to the slow recovery of state revenues, the rising costs of
state-funded services, reduced federal aid to states, and the states' reluctance to raise new revenues,
according to the CBPP report.
"Cuts have been particularly deep when inflation and other cost pressures are considered," the report
added.
Seventeen states increased funding. North Dakota had the highest percentage increase at 31.6%, at
$1,329 per student. Alaska followed that state with a 16.4% increase and had the highest dollar gain, at
$1,351 per student.
"Most states are providing more funding per student in the new school year than they did a year ago,"
the CBPP said in the report. "But funding has generally not increased enough to make up for cuts in
past years." New Mexico, for instance, has increased its funding for per student by $124, or 1.8%,
compared to one year ago, but that is still 8.1% less than its 2008 level.
State funding cuts for k-12 schools have big consequences for local school districts, which try to make
up for the cuts by scaling back educational services raising more local tax revenue to cover the gap, or
both, according to the CBPP. It's difficult for local school districts to find additional revenues after the
recession, the group said.
In addition, the cuts have slowed the economy's recovery from the recession. Federal employment
data show that teachers and other employees have been cut since mid-2008. There have been 330,000
jobs cut in local school districts between 2008 and 2012, the report found. These job losses have also
reduced the purchasing power of families, thus causing problems for economic recovery.
More importantly, the cuts in educational funding have hindered education reforms and high-quality
education provided by school districts, according to the study. When producing workers with high-level
techniques and analytical abilities are demanded in the future work place, such cuts in funding for basic
education will threaten the nation's economic future, the report concluded.
1AR — Equality DA Links
Education budget cuts force tradeoffs with other “less important” subjects at the
expense of a well-rounded education that balances technical skills with encouraging
creativity, critical thinking, and passion. And, marginalized students are
disproportionately affected by these policies.
Walker 14 – Tim Walker, has over 30 years of experience in the field of education, holds a Master of
Arts degree in human development from Pacific Oaks College, Master’s degree in education, and an
Educational Specialist degree from Point Loma University, 2014 (“The Testing Obsession and the
Disappearing Curriculum”, National Education Association Today, September 2, Available Online at
http://neatoday.org/2014/09/02/the-testing-obsession-and-the-disappearing-curriculum-2/, accessed
7/8/15, KM)
Not that long ago, elementary schools were places where students could discover what they were good at, explore the subjects that appealed
to them, or maybe just be content with enjoying school. But for many elementary school teachers who joined the profession during the last
decade, and especially those who work in high-poverty schools, classrooms that provide vigorous learning opportunities to all students never
existed—thanks, in large part, to the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Today, more than a decade later, the law is uniformly blamed for
stripping curriculum opportunities, including art, music, physical education and more, and imposing a brutal testing regime that has forced
educators to focus their time and energy on preparing for tests in a narrow range of subjects: namely, English/language arts and math. For
students in low-income communities, the impact has been devastating. “Shouldn’t these early grades be a time to discover, play, and explore?”
asks Los Angeles art teacher Ginger Rose Fox. “We talk all the time about making our kids ‘college and career ready’—even at such a young age.
Let’s make them ‘life ready’ first. But I guess that doesn’t fit into our testing obsession.” Like countless educators
across the U.S., Fox
the way critical subjects have been crowded out of schools or even eliminated entirely
by the lethal one-two punch of deep budget cuts and the singular focus on improving reading and math. In Los Angeles alone, one-third of
has witnessed
the 345 arts teachers were given pink slips between 2008 and 2012 and arts programs for elementary students dwindled to practically zero. The
good news is that money has begun to trickle back in—to California, at least. But slowly improving state budgets can only go so far. Breaking
the nation’s fever over high stakes testing is a steeper challenge. Across the nation, the testing obsession has nudged
aside visual
arts, music, physical education, social studies, and science, not to mention world languages, financial
literacy, and that old standby, penmanship. Our schools, once vigorous and dynamic centers for learning, have been reduced to mere test
prep factories, where teachers and students act out a script written by someone who has never visited their classroom and where
“achievement” means nothing more than scoring well on a bubble test. “NCLB has corrupted what it means to teach and what it means to
learn,” explains NEA President Lily Eskelsen García. “Teachers have to teach in secret and hope they don’t get into trouble for teaching to the
Whole Child instead of teaching to the test.” In July, NEA launched a national campaign to bring an end to the testing obsession around the
country, and to move real student-centered learning back to the forefront of public schools. “It’s our job to bring back the arts and Social
Studies and world languages and whatever it is our students need to leave behind the corrupting, unconscionable testing culture of blame and
punish by test scores and move forward with an education that opens their minds to the infinite possibilities of their lives,” García says. The
One-Size-Fits-All Agenda In a 2011 national survey, two-thirds of teachers said many
academic subjects had been crowded
out by an increased focus on math and language arts. About half said art and music were being marginalized, while
40 percent said the same for foreign language; 36 percent for social studies; and 24 percent for
science. The results were particularly striking at the elementary level, where 81 percent of teachers reported that extra time devoted to
math or language arts meant less time for other subjects. Over 60 percent of middle school teachers and 54 percent of high school teachers
reported the same in their schools. The culprit? More than 90 percent of teachers blamed state tests in math and language arts. “I’ve seen
students reduced to tears from these tests,” says Tom McLaughlin, a drama teacher in Council Bluffs, Iowa. “We’re robbing our students of the
joy and adventure of learning.” It wasn’t supposed to be this way. When NCLB was implemented more than a decade ago, its promoters
trumpeted promises about raising accountability and providing adequate resources to lower income students in struggling schools. But the law,
with its sweeping mandates for standardized English and math tests in grades 4-8 and its crushing consequences for schools that fail to make
“adequate yearly progress,” merely created a toxic culture of “teaching to the test” in order to raise test scores. It wasn’t long after its passage
that a narrow, scripted curriculum blanketed schools coast to coast. High-poverty
schools across the nation have been
forced to narrow the curriculum much more drastically than wealthier schools—with worse
consequences for low-income students. While their more affluent peers may routinely visit museums or other cultural
resources, many poor urban and rural students rely on their teachers to expose them to the kind of background knowledge that is essential to
subject mastery. “It has been a disaster for social justice,” wrote E.D. Hirsch, a University of Virginia education professor who
has championed the link between content knowledge and reading comprehension skills, in his book The Knowledge Deficit. But the architects
of these test-driven policies do think they are addressing equity—and that’s frightening, says Richard Milner, a professor of education and
director of urban education at the University of Pittsburgh “We should be appalled. It’s tremendously short-sighted,” says Milner. “They think
they are being responsive to kids who are underserved. But they’re clearly not looking at the lasting damage they are inflicting.” While
opposition to NCLB and testing has strengthened over the past few years, Milner has been underwhelmed by the level of outrage, believing
that the
devastating impact of these policies on students of color in low-income communities hasn’t
been given the national attention it deserves. “It’s really sad when you walk into these classrooms in these urban
communities because these kids sit all day,“ Milner adds. “We’re taking away all the things about school they could
attach themselves to—physical education, arts, history. All because some adult in some office,
somewhere far away, has determined that they don’t need any of that in order to ‘achieve.’” Integrating
Disciplines—But at What Cost? Thanks to the burgeoning STEM movement (science, technology, engineering and math), Brian Crosby believes
science education may soon be removed from the endangered curriculum list. Crosby taught science in the Washoe County School district in
Nevada for more than 30 years, recently leaving the classroom to become a STEM facilitator for the state. “I do think there was what you might
call an ‘oops’ moment,” says Crosby. “Decision-makers basically recognized that you can’t educate students, especially at-risk students, by
hammering reading and math all day long. At least for science, there’s some good news. We’re getting the curriculum ‘un-narrowed’ if you
will.” Unfortunately teachers of other marginalized subjects can’t say the same. In January, Texas lawmakers passed a bill that, among other
things, cut the graduation requirement for social studies from four courses to three. The state’s social studies teachers protested, wondering
aloud how they would counsel their students to choose between classes: World history or world geography? Civics or U.S. history? How do you
make that choice between such valuable courses? If
it’s not outright cutting of requirements, states are commonly
rewriting curriculum to more easily “integrate” sidelined subjects into core areas. Physical education becomes
part of math. Art becomes part of reading. But tossing a ball with numbers on it isn’t really physical education, and writing
about Van Gogh isn’t the same as developing a passion for color or practicing brush technique. While
integrating subjects can foster collaboration between colleagues, a good thing, notes drama teacher Tom McLaughlin, he warns what might be
lost in the long term. “I do think integration can be dangerous if (any one subject) becomes too consumed or morphed into reading or math.
We run the risk of putting these other subjects out of business.” Social studies often falls victim to “subject integration” with reading, notes
Margit McGuire, director of teacher education at Seattle University and a social studies specialist. “It doesn’t foster a very sophisticated
treatment of the subject matter,” she says. Lisa Steiner, a social studies teacher at George Fischer Middle School in Carmel New York, also has
seen her subject receive less time, staff, and professional development opportunities compared to school districts’ chief priorities: math and
English arts. Still, integration can work, she says. “Social studies as a discipline can reinforce core reading and writing skills. I have a background
and certification as a reading specialist, so I see the close relationship between reading and writing in the content areas and it has influenced
my teaching philosophy and approach.” For many music educators, the most compelling case to be made for music in schools is its value as a
stand alone subject—to bring the focus back to the benefits to students, not to their standardized tests. In April, the National Association for
Music Education (NAfMe) began challenge the assumption that music is merely a “supplement” to the core curriculum, and said the
organization would no longer frame the importance of music around its potential to raise test scores. “Every time we profess that students
should have access to music so that their brains become better wired to solve math equations, we provide ammunition to the camp of
‘education experts’ who proclaim that music is an interchangeable, or, even worse, expendable, classroom experience,” explains Christopher
Woodside of NAfMe’s Center for Advocacy and Public Affairs. The Inconvenient Truth: Many Students Can’t ‘Catch Up’ While no one discounts
the very real problem of students who can’t read or do basic math, defenders of the status quo often claim
that glossing over
science, arts and social studies is merely a fleeting elementary school experience—later to be recouped in middle
and later high school. But by then, says Rich Milner, it’s probably too late. “Without learning opportunities,
these kids can’t develop the competencies and skills that will help them transition from elementary
school,” Milner says. “Kids in urban areas are in most need of a well-rounded education and yet they are the ones
who have had it stripped from their classrooms—and they don’t have other avenues available to them that students in suburban communities
have to at least partly supplant what is missing in schools.” Brian Crosby recalls shaking his head in disbelief when he would hear school
discussions asserting that it wouldn’t matter in the long run if certain subjects for at-risk elementary students were suspended so they could
focus on reading and math. “The assumption was, you could catch the students up in middle school because by then they would have a science
teacher,” Crosby explains. “But they couldn’t just catch up. And by the time they got to high school many of these students were so far behind
they were put into remedial classes. And people would wonder why kids were dropping out of school.” What
kind of citizens are
these practices creating? Margit McGuire believes that continually pushing aside U.S. History or Civics robs
low-income students of the opportunity to tell their stories and become invested in democracy. “We
marginalize our students when we don’t allow them to bring their own lived experiences into the classroom,” says McGuire. “Maybe we’ll get
their test score up, but at what cost? We need to help young people, particularly children from impoverished backgrounds, understand or value
our democracy and their role in society. That’s why we have public education.”
1AR — Equality DA Impacts
Education without discrimination or exclusion is a human right
UNESCO No Date — United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, no date ("The
Right to Education," UNESCO, Available Online at http://www.unesco.org/new/en/right2education,
Accessed 7-8-2015)
Education is a fundamental human right and essential for the exercise of all other human rights. It
promotes individual freedom and empowerment and yields important development benefits. Yet
millions of children and adults remain deprived of educational opportunities, many as a result of
poverty.
Normative instruments of the United Nations and UNESCO lay down international legal obligations for
the right to education. These instruments promote and develop the right of every person to enjoy
access to education of good quality, without discrimination or exclusion. These instruments bear
witness to the great importance that Member States and the international community attach to
normative action for realizing the right to education. It is for governments to fulfil their obligations
both legal and political in regard to providing education for all of good quality and to implement and
monitor more effectively education strategies.
Education is a powerful tool by which economically and socially marginalized adults and children can
lift themselves out of poverty and participate fully as citizens.
They Say: “Common Core is Expensive, Too”
It’s much cheaper to keep Common Core — state opt-out is incredibly expensive.
Fordham Institute 13 — Fordham Institute for Advancing Educational Excellence, 2013 ("Indiana
Common Core Implementation: Fiscal Impact Report," Fordham Institute Blog, September 12th, Available
Online at http://edexcellence.net/indiana-common-core-implementation-fiscal-impact-report, Accessed
7-6-2015)
Among the provisions of Indiana’s so-called Common Core “pause” legislation was a requirement that
the state’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) provide an estimate of the cost of implementing
these standards and their assessments. The results are in, along with OMB’s conclusion: “Local schools
had already or were capable of transitioning to new standards with existing levels of funding.” The
report examined a number of scenarios for assessment implementation, comparing annual costs for
adoption of PARCC tests ($33.2M); Smarter Balanced tests ($31.4M); a hypothetical state-developed,
CCSS-aligned assessment ($34.8M plus $23.5M in one-time development costs); and a hypothetical
state-developed assessment not aligned to the CCSS ($34.7M plus $19.1M in one-time development
costs). Yes, you added correctly: Sticking with the Common Core and its assessments is the cheapest
option. This analysis, we suspect, may turn the tide in Indiana and help convince wobbly policy makers
to stay the course. But the impact of this “fiscal impact” study should really be much broader. Leaders in
any state with a raging Common Core controversy should give it a look.
AT: Debate Counterplan
2AC — Debate Counterplan
1. Perm do both
2. The counter plan can’t solve critical thinking: Until Common Core testing and
standards are removed, these standards will continue to ruin critical thinking and
drive students away from education.
Natale 14 — Elizabeth Natale, English and language arts teacher for more than 15 years, in an
Interview with Breitbart News, Byline Dr. Susan Berry, 2014 (“Connecticut Teacher's Op-Ed Against
Common Core Goes Viral,” Breitbart News, January 26th, Available Online at
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2014/01/26/connecticut-teacher-s-op-ed-against-commoncore-goes-viral/, Accessed 06-23-2015)
Breitbart News: Supporters of Common Core say the standards are “rigorous” and teach “critical
thinking,” and will prepare students for “college and career” and a “global 21st century economy.”
You said in your op-ed that Common Core is “a system that focuses on preparing workers rather than
thinkers, collecting data rather than teaching and treating teachers as less than professionals.” What
about this huge discrepancy in how the standards are viewed?
Elizabeth Natale: I’m not opposed to rigor and critical thinking. Given the emphasis on non-fiction
reading, however, I don’t think this curriculum is preparing students for college and career or for the
global 21st century economy. Since when is reading and analyzing fiction irrelevant in the 21st century?
Students need to do this type of critical thinking in their careers, in college, and in the 21st century.
When I worked in public relations at Trinity College in Hartford, the alumni magazine ran a story about
graduates employed on Wall Street. The largest percentage of them were religion majors. Why?
Because religion majors have to think critically. They can be trained to do the work in any sort of
career.
BBN: It seems that many parents still don’t know much about the new standards. Are parents becoming
more informed and, if so, what’s your impression of their reactions to them?
EN: I don’t think the majority of parents know that much about it. I especially don’t think they know
much about the SBAC [Smarter Balance Assessment Consortium] testing. Again, my argument is less
with Common Core than with the associated testing. I have had a few parents write to me about talking
with their children about SBAC for the first time after reading my piece and being shocked at the
negative comments made by their children. Parents should sit down and look at the test with their
children. They should ask their children what they think about it. I also have had a few parents write to
say they are “opting out” when it comes to SBAC testing.
BBN: If a parent came to observe your classroom, would he or she see a difference because of Common
Core, and what would that difference be?
EN: I’m trying to resist changing everything I know is good just because of Common Core, but the test
looms over all of us. We give many more assessments to collect data. We give the student
assessments that are contrived to resemble SBAC testing, which is so counterproductive. I’m more
stressed, and I know the students sense that. I don’t think learning has to be “fun” every minute, but
Common Core and testing is certainly hurting everyone’s ability to be excited.
3.The counter plan won’t result in less corporate control the eradication of these
standards is necessary—Common Core builds workers, not thinkers — in an attempt
to drive “21st Century Skills” it is creating a generation of bored, apathetic
automotons.
Natale 14 — Elizabeth Natale, English and language arts teacher for more than 15 years, 2014 (“Why I
Want To Give Up Teaching,” Hartford Courant, January 17th, Available Online at
http://www.courant.com/opinion/hc-op-natale-teacher-ready-to-quit-over-common-cor-20140117story.html, Accessed 06-23-2015)
Surrounded by piles of student work to grade, lessons to plan and laundry to do, I have but one hope
for the new year: that the Common Core State Standards, their related Smarter Balanced Assessment
Consortium testing and the new teacher evaluation program will become extinct.
I have been a middle school English teacher for 15 years. I entered teaching after 19 years as a
newspaper reporter and college public relations professional. I changed careers to contribute to
society; shape young minds; create good and productive citizens; and spend time with youngsters
lacking adults at home with time, energy and resources to teach them.
Although the tasks ahead of me are no different from those of the last 14 years, today is different.
Today, I am considering ending my teaching career.
When I started teaching, I learned that dealing with demanding college presidents and cantankerous
newspaper editors was nothing. While those jobs allowed me time to drink tea and read the newspaper,
teaching deprived me of an opportunity to use the restroom. And when I did, I was often the Pied Piper,
followed by children intent on speaking with me through the bathroom door.
Unfortunately, government attempts to improve education are stripping the joy out of teaching and
doing nothing to help children. The Common Core standards require teachers to march lockstep in
arming students with "21st-century skills." In English, emphasis on technology and nonfiction reading
makes it more important for students to prepare an electronic presentation on how to make a paper
airplane than to learn about moral dilemmas from Natalie Babbitt's beloved novel "Tuck Everlasting."
The Smarter Balance program assumes my students are comfortable taking tests on a computer, even
if they do not own one. My value as a teacher is now reduced to how successful I am in getting a
student who has eaten no breakfast and is a pawn in her parents' divorce to score well enough to meet
my teacher evaluation goals.
I am a professional. My mission is to help students progress academically, but there is much more to
my job than ensuring students can answer multiple-choice questions on a computer. Unlike my
engineer husband who runs tests to rate the functionality of instruments, I cannot assess students by
plugging them into a computer. They are not machines. They are humans who are not fazed by a D
but are undone when their goldfish dies, who struggle with composing a coherent paragraph but draw
brilliantly, who read on a third-grade level but generously hold the door for others.
My most important contributions to students are not addressed by the Common Core, Smarter Balance
and teacher evaluations. I come in early, work through lunch and stay late to help children who ask for
assistance but clearly crave the attention of a caring adult. At intramurals, I voluntarily coach a ragtag
team of volleyball players to ensure good sportsmanship. I "ooh" and "ah" over comments made by a
student who finally raises his hand or earns a C on a test she insisted she would fail.
Those moments mean the most to my students and me, but they are not valued by a system that
focuses on preparing workers rather than thinkers, collecting data rather than teaching and treating
teachers as less than professionals.
Until this year, I was a highly regarded certified teacher. Now, I must prove myself with data that holds
little meaning to me. I no longer have the luxury of teaching literature, with all of its life lessons, or
teaching writing to students who long to be creative. My success is measured by my ability to bring 85
percent of struggling students to "mastery," without regard for those with advanced skills. Instead of
fostering love of reading and writing, I am killing children's passions — committing "readicide," as
Kelly Gallagher called it in his book of that title.
Teaching is the most difficult — but most rewarding — work I have ever done. It is, however, art, not
science. A student's learning will never be measured by any test, and I do not believe the current
trend in education will lead to adults better prepared for the workforce, or to better citizens. For the
sake of students, our legislators must reach this same conclusion before good teachers give up the
profession — and the children — they love.
4. The plan is necessary to enact actual reform—without the removal of common core
standards the American Education system is going to continue to lag behind. The
counterplan doesn’t ensure that every individual is actively participating and doesn’t
solve for the continual testing that common core mandates. That means that critical
thinking will never effectively be solved for—this directly affects our ability to solve
for things such as climate change and endless wars. Not having young learners move
into positions where they can be effective policy makers etc. means we wont be able
to generate solutions to these issues that threaten the future—that’s Rugh.
Critiques
2AC — Gender K
Hostility to critical thinking also provides a platform for anti-democratic views like the
hatred of women. People make arguments without any sense of social or moral
responsibility.
Giroux 14 — Henry A. Giroux, Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural
Studies Department & Chair in Critical Pedagogy at The McMaster Institute for Innovation & Excellence
in Teaching & Learning, Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University, member of Truthout's
Board of Directors, author of dozens of books on learning and pedagogy including Youth in Revolt:
Reclaiming a Democratic Future, America's Educational Deficit and the War on Youth, Neoliberalism's
War on Higher Education, 2014 (“Data Storms and the Tyranny of Manufactured Forgetting,” Truthout,
June 24th, Available Online at http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/24550-data-storms-and-thetyranny-of-manufactured-forgetting#/, Accessed 06-25-2015)
How else to explain, for instance, a major national newspaper’s willingness to provide a platform for
views that express an unchecked hatred of women - as when The Washington Post published George
Will’s column in which he states that being a rape victim is now "a coveted status that confers
privileges"?[8] Will goes on to say that accusations of rape and sexual violence are not only overblown,
but that many women who claim they were raped are "delusional."[9] There is a particular type of
aggressive ignorance here that constitutes a symbolic assault on women, while obscuring the
underlying conditions that legitimate sexual violence in the United States. Will expresses more
concern over what he calls the "pesky arithmetic"[10] used to determine the percentage of women
actually raped on campuses than the ever-increasing incidence of sexual assault on women in
colleges, the military, and a wide variety of other private and public spheres.
The clueless George Will, evidently angry about the growing number of women who are reporting the
violence waged against them, draws on the persuasive utility of mathematical data as a way to bolster
a shockingly misogynist argument and flee from any sense of social and moral responsibility. While
such expressions of resentment make Will appear as an antediluvian, privileged white man who is truly
delusional, he is typical of an expanding mass of pundits who live in a historical void and for whom
emotion overtakes reason. Increasingly, it appears the American media no longer requires that words
bear any relationship to truth or to a larger purpose other than peddling rigid and archaic ideologies
designed to shock and stupefy audiences.
2AC — Capitalism K
We link turn the K – education is the only proven solution for reducing income
inequality – we are a better option than their idealism.
Crotty 15 – James Marshall Crotty, business of education contributor for Forbes, holds a Master’s in
Liberal Arts from St. John’s College, over three decades of active involvement in American education,
including teaching and/or coaching gigs at Columbia University, LaGuardia College, Stuyvesant High
School, Bronx High School of Science, and the Eagle Academy for Young Men, 2015 (“Education Is
Answer To Income Inequality: Part One”, Forbes, February 27, Available Online at
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2015/02/27/knowledge-is-power/, accessed 7/7/15,
KM)
In an op-ed entitled “Knowledge Isn’t Power,” in the February 23 New York Times, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul
Krugman
argued that “soaring inequality isn’t about education; it’s about power.” Because of my own “preference for
diversity,” I welcome Mr. Krugman’s well-meaning and learned viewpoint. Unfortunately, like other bright, beloved and left-leaning public
intellectuals – such as Krugman’s fellow MIT grad Noam Chomsky (whose remedy for the ills he diagnosed in Manufacturing Consent was a
global system of kibbutzim) – Mr.
Krugman is great at articulating capitalism’s flaws (his take on the contagion effects of
highly leveraged financial institutions was spot on), but weak at prescribing workable real-world remedies. In
eschewing education as a solvency to income inequality, Mr. Krugman argues that we should, instead,
place “higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy, and invest the proceeds in programs that help working families.”
Never mind that those “programs” would inexorably center on job training (i.e., education), unless the
Princeton University Professor merely plans to give a man a fish while failing to teach him how to fish. Income Inequality Mr. Krugman
also proposes “we could raise the minimum wage.” Nothing against this idea in moderation, but studies and
reports show that if we suddenly passed a minimum wage increase sufficient to dramatically ease
income inequality, small business employers (the primary job creators in America) would compensate
by shortening hours, instituting labor-saving capital improvements, reduce the pay of employees earning more than the
minimum wage, and eliminate job training and other non-wage benefits. As these now significantly more
expensive low-skill jobs were outsourced overseas or replaced by investments in new technology, Mr.
Krugman’s working class heroes – especially those without sufficient education to nab the higher-skilled jobs engendered by a
dramatic minimum wage increase – would find themselves back on the unemployment line, worse off than they
were before Mr. Krugman generously intervened on their behalf. In his op-ed, Mr. Krugman kicks education to the curb,
despite his gratitude for it. This is because he sees talk of education as a “dodge” that distracts us
from the real cause of inequality: entrenched corporate power. However, education is not some soporific idly
proclaimed by those seeking to ease their conscience about income inequality. Education empirically works in eradicating
inequality. In fact, it’s the only long-term solution that ever has.