I Have a B.S for you.

When I read the below article the light bulb went on as to why Tennessee is suddenly shoving college down the throats of kids who are starving, both literally and metaphorically for knowledge. The push to educate a population in a state that is 47th when it comes to funding for public education is again that Southern dish they serve so well – an oddity. I have never seen such bizarre world when it comes to what defines K-12 schooling in a city that literally is ringed in by Universities, both public and private. Then to have a state that has less that 40% of its populace graduates with higher degrees or any certification beyond 12th grade, a city that is the center of State and Federal Government while having less than 30% of the residents possessing higher education degrees is well another conundrum.

Yesterday I was at an acclaimed (okay they all are for some reason yet to be made clear) middle “prep” that is a STEM school. For a school “prepping” kids for a digital workplace they are sorely lacking in digital training, equipment and well qualified staff. My personal favorite is the unbelievably slow if not stagnant internet service. Nashville has contracted with Google to become one of the Google cities and like everything here it is mired in complication. Perhaps Google can install sidewalks when they lay down high speed internet wires.

As for high schools they are rechristened “academies” with a focus on voc-tech and the confusion that surrounds those two industries unless you are creating a driverless car or a robot to drive them as I am avoiding those schools like the plague. They are fraught with gang problems, homicides, violence and even a counterfeit ring. Well the FBI has time on its hands now they are not investigating the Clinton e-mails.

And then there is cost. The reality is that if you do graduate the jobs that require advanced degrees are not as plentiful as promised and the reality is that they are located in expensive dense urban cities. So you go to your local University or College, get the “right” kind of degree, move across country and whatever salary you are earning is paying living expenses, then the degree dip and well the disposable income that is promised to the new hire is less disposable and more necessary to live. Hence we are seeing less housing being purchased and cars being purchased by the new class of 2016 and are delaying the whole idea of family and what that encompasses. I also see very little recreational travel or pursuit of knowledge outside that of what defines work, planes are crowded but few are actually exploring, simply traveling and seeking new frontiers. Today’s travelers are business or bust and when I get on a plane today I shudder at what asshole white man will be sitting next to me with his laptop, phone and his busy busy bullshit. It is as if we cannot have one moment of silence or conviviality of any kind. And the whole moment of silence thing is my private joke as under Tennessee state law all schools are required to have a moment of silence. Why I have no clue? Do many abide by it? No. I work and live in the South, I used to think I talked a lot then I came here. I speak less and even less loudly so something good came out of it.

Colleges should move to work with their local high schools, all of them should have running start or some type of advanced placement for those kids who fall into highly capable so that the local public schools could use that time and those resources to help those in greater need – English Language Learner, Special Ed and kids who are just falling through cracks. By allowing Colleges to assume some actual teaching and learning they could better prepare kids to enter college at the appropriate age and hit the ground running, without having to add years and in turn costs to attain that degree. It would be a win win for everyone. But wait as they say here, “Who’s going to pay for it.” Ah yes that proverbial age old question that means we don’t want the Government to do anything except war and stuff, private industry can do the rest. Funny they aren’t paying for Education or training staff anymore as they used to so who is going to? Ask the retiring Howard Schultz of Starbucks how is that bogus degree plan working out?

Supply of U.S. high school graduates is stagnating, posing challenge for colleges

Nick Anderson
The Washington Post
December 6 at 12:01 AM 

The nation’s total output of high school graduates peaked in 2013 at nearly 3.5 million and is projected to stagnate for most of the next decade, but the Hispanic share is expected to boom, according to a new report.

The demographic shifts point to major recruiting challenges for colleges following an era of steady growth in high school graduates that started in the late 1990s. While that growth had provided a solid pipeline for schools focused on serving traditional students between the ages of 18 to 22, the supply of these students appears to be dwindling or leveling off in Maryland, Virginia and elsewhere.

As a result, many colleges have been forced to rethink how to fill seats and educate incoming students who are more likely than their predecessors to be the first in their families to pursue a bachelor’s degree.

The report from the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, released Tuesday, illuminates potential mismatches in supply and demand for higher education. Some states, particularly in the Midwest and Northeast, have lots of colleges and a declining number of high school graduates. Other states in the South and West have the opposite problem. The South, in particular, is an engine of growth: The output of high school graduates from Texas alone is projected to rise 19 percent from 2013 to 2025.

Overall, the report shows that the U.S. high school class of 2013, public and private, was about 3.47 million; the nation’s graduating class is not expected to reach that level again until 2024. The report also found that the number of Hispanic graduates from public schools is projected to rise 43 percent from 2013 to 2025, while the number of white graduates is expected to decline 6 percent. The number of private high school graduates is expected to fall 18 percent in that time.

Joseph Garcia, the commission’s president, said the trends could imperil schools that fall short of recruiting targets, especially small colleges.

“It puts some of these institutions at risk,” Garcia said Monday. With the number of private school graduates and white students ebbing in many places, he said, colleges that relied for generations on certain “feeder schools” could be forced to get creative.

“You can’t use your same old techniques,” he said. “You need to change your approach.”

Virginia high schools next spring are on track to produce about 87,900 graduates. That’s 2 percent fewer than five years earlier. By contrast, the total in the previous five-year period had grown 11 percent. The number of Hispanic graduates in the commonwealth’s public schools is surging and is expected to top 10,100 next spring, up 34 percent over five years.

Peter Blake, director of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, said the state’s colleges are increasingly focused on helping students finish their degrees. The push for retention and completion helps with enrollment and is also “the right thing to do,” Blake said.

Maryland’s high school class of 2017 is projected to have about 62,000 graduates, down 9 percent compared to the class of 2012. But the number of Hispanic graduates is expected to be about 6,800, up 35 percent.

Robert Caret, chancellor of the University System of Maryland, said the state’s public universities are well positioned to capi­tal­ize on the changing market because they offer quality education at a moderate price. “We just play that huge access role, particularly for first-generation students,” Caret said. “We’re in pretty good shape.”

The 15-state commission has studied the demographics of high school graduates for decades. Its report, “Knocking at the College Door,” is the first update to that research in four years.

Jeff Strohl, director of research for Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, said colleges face major recruiting hurdles. One is persuading students to apply. He cited federal data showing that the share of recent high school graduates enrolled in college fell from 70.1 percent in 2009 to 65.9 percent in 2013.

“The disheartening part is that fewer students are trying to go to college,” he said. Strohl said colleges must resist the urge to keep “fishing in the same pond” of potential students. “They’re going to need to spread their enrollment and recruiting activities outside of the places they’ve already gone,” he said.

Care Package

Yes a training methodology devised in 1910 is relevant in the 21st Century. It might explain the term “dated” in many ways.

Well at least some Doctors are learning how to care for people. Let’s hope its not too late, well for some it is.

A different kind of care package

The Washington Post
By Carolyn Y. Johnson
October 8, 2015

HARRISBURG, Pa. — The doctors-in-training removed their shoes and padded into Glorian Watson’s tidy first-floor apartment in socks and bare feet. They pulled up chairs at her dining room table, plopped down on her love seat and caught up with the cheerful 52-year-old whose body often rebels against her, with digestive issues so severe that she can find herself hospitalized for days or weeks.

These doctors-to-be don’t know much about her illness, Crohn’s disease. They can’t prescribe her medications, order lab tests or admit her to a hospital. Instead, they’re here to learn something that most medical schools never teach but that matters as much: What’s in her fridge? Does she have a ride to an upcoming appointment? Can she afford her drugs and gluten-free diet?

“We learn a lot about barriers to health care that physicians don’t normally think about,” said Christopher Davis, a second-year medical student at Penn State College of Medicine.

U.S. health care is in a revolution that is starting to shake up one of the most conservative parts of medicine: its antiquated model for training doctors.

Once paid a la carte for the procedures and services they perform, physicians are beginning to be reimbursed for keeping their patients healthy. Doctors trained in the science of medicine, the diagnosis and treatment of the sick person in front of them, are increasingly responsible for helping to keep their patients out of the hospital.
Medical student Christopher Davis hugs patient Glorian Watson. Students at Penn State College of Medicine make home visits to learn about the intractable factors that can shape a person’s health. (Sean Simmers/For The Washington Post)

Those changes have been rippling through the health-care system for years in an attempt to address rising costs but were powerfully accelerated by the Affordable Care Act. That has left medical schools scrambling to catch up.

“The irony is that medical education is a bit frozen right now in the tradition that we started almost a century ago,” said Susan Skochelak, group vice president for medical education at the American Medical Association. “It’s just really getting farther and farther behind in helping our young new physicians really know how to work in the current environment.”

That’s changing. Penn State is making its first-year students patient navigators. The University of Texas at Austin is building a medical school from scratch, with an explicit focus on areas beyond the doctor-patient interaction, such as health-care delivery and population health. The AMA is worried enough about the problem that it has been giving out millions of dollars to prod new kinds of teaching, in the hope that doctors’ training can adapt as quickly as the system they will soon join.
Old-school training

The last major upheaval in medical education occurred with the publication of a landmark document called the Flexner Report.

It was 1910.

The document put forth a set of recommendations: Medical students should have two years of basic science and two years of clinical rotations in hospital wards. The basic contour of medical education has been preserved since, even as the amount of information that constitutes medical understanding has exploded exponentially.

Ask doctors and you’ll get different laundry lists of the facts they memorized for tests — the name of each bone in the hand, or all of the biochemical steps of the Krebs cycle involved in metabolism — that they have not used since. Or that they simply look up as needed.

“Our medical education model is based on a very different reality” than the one that exists, said Neel Shah, an assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology at Harvard Medical School who co-wrote a textbook for medical students on a topic once anathema to medical training: costs. “You can’t memorize everything you need to know to be a good doctor; you can’t memorize the catalogue of prices. What you need to be able to do is know where to access information and have frameworks for how to care for patients.”

In 1974, Victor Fuchs, a health-care economist at Stanford University, wrote a book called “Who Shall Live?” that described the physician as the captain of the medical team. In the preface to the 1982 edition, he demoted the doctor to co-captain. Today, he said, “they’re just a member of the team. They’re becoming a member of the team who knows a lot more about some things than everybody else but a lot less than other people on the team.”
One school’s approach

To train doctors for this reality, one nascent medical school is taking a particularly radical approach. Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin is rethinking how medicine is taught, adding a nine-month focus on health-care delivery at the time many medical schools would be sending their doctors on their first clinical rotations.

The school, which will enroll its first students next year, has been seeking out firebrands to lead the way. It announced some of the first hires at the festival South by Southwest: two veterans from the creative design firm IDEO, which is best known for developing the Apple mouse and updating the PalmPilot. The school is bringing on Eddie Erlandson, a well-known executive coach who has worked with Coca-Cola, Dell and the Boston Red Sox, to help teach doctors to work together effectively and to be leaders.

Perhaps more subtle, but just as important, is an effort to set up a financial structure that allows the school to avoid what its dean, Clay Johnston, sees as a major conflict of interest: Medical schools generally receive revenue from the prestigious hospitals they own. That means that schools may be hamstrung by the old way of being reimbursed for each procedure or service they provide.

“The more they do, the more they get paid. The higher prices they can generate, the more they get paid. That isn’t what society should want from health care,” Johnston said. “Only medicine has that, and I think because of that, they’ve become defenders of the status quo. . . . We think that can have a corrupting influence on the innovation goals and on their primary responsibility to society.”

The school is funded in part by a property tax increase that was passed by voter referendum and generated $35 million. It also is pursuing compensation agreements with community doctors and health-care facilities that are tied to meeting specific quality goals, not performing the most procedures. So administrators hope to support the school financially with contracts that pay for overall value.

For example, they are pursuing a partnership to reduce pre-term births, which cause many significant health problems and huge costs. The medical school will be reimbursed based on whether it has been successful at reducing pre-term births, not on the volume of the services it provides.

Kevin Bozic, chairman of surgery at Dell Medical School, is setting up an osteoarthritis center that will teach surgeons to work in teams with many other providers to manage disease, not just fix joints. That will require the embrace of a philosophy unusual in a discipline that has often been governed by the idea that “the chance to cut is a chance to cure.” Bozic wants surgeons to think about preventing surgeries, too, and understand that sometimes the best course is not to operate at all.

“We’re really trying to start from scratch here and design it without a lot of the impediments of the existing system,” Bozic said.

But coming up with new curriculum and new ideas means untrodden ground. Dell’s leaders realize they are engaged in an experiment, which means they could succeed or fail.

“Dell has the biggest opportunity to do something. They’ve got the right people, the right support, the right environment,” Shah said. “Wait and see what they’re able to do.”
Support from the AMA

A tectonic shift can’t hang on the success of a handful of bold start-ups, and in 2013, the American Medical Association gave $11 million in grants to medical schools making changes that would narrow the gap between how physicians are trained and how medicine is practiced. This year, the AMA decided to extend the program to hand out an additional $1.5 million.

Penn State was one of the grant recipients and last year rolled out the patient navigator program. First-year students pair up and make home visits, where they are faced with problems that can be far more difficult than figuring out which tests to give and what to prescribe. Students learn about the intractable factors that can shape a person’s health — where he lives, what he eats, what social supports he has — essentially, his life.

At Penn State College of Medicine, second-year student Max Hennessy said a patient with severe arthritis complained to him about her reclining chair, which had been broken for a month. She didn’t have the money for a new one and had been getting up at a precarious angle that increased the risk that she would fall and break her hip again. It turned out that the chair wasn’t plugged in, and the students fixed it.

What Hennessy and others said they are learning is that medicine is even more difficult than what they absorb in class. Many chronic medical problems aren’t solved by a prescription or a doctor’s appointment. The best care in the world won’t make a difference unless the patient is invested in a treatment plan.

Brenda Mayberry, a nurse at PinnacleHealth Medical Group who works with the Penn State students, acknowledged that at first she wasn’t sure whether the program would help. But she has changed her mind. For example, Watson, the Crohn’s disease patient, was admitted to the hospital 10 times in the year before the program started. In the year since, she has been admitted only four times.

21 Foot Rule

That is pretty much going to be my new rule. The two articles discuss the needs for police reform and training. But in reality there needs to be a re-think about the “I feel threatened” thing. If that is your first thought every time you encounter someone it is time to think about a new job or get therapy.

Cop culture is really a large part of the problem. And with an entrenched union seeing boogie men, black of course, around every corner, accuing Mayors and other Politicians as enemies and frankly fearing reform as an upsurption of power, I don’t think change is coming anytime soon. But we have to start somewhere.

I am afraid of cops and I don’t think that will change anytime soon either.

New Approach to Policing Focuses on Strengthening Communties
Today, May 06, 2015, 6 hours ago | Nathalie Baptiste American Prospect

As police officers and members of the communities they’re charged with protecting continue to go head-to-head in the streets, one thing is clear: Policing needs to change. At the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s fifth annual America Healing conference, transforming American policing is exactly what attendees are trying to do. The conference in the mountains of Asheville, North Carolina, attracts hundreds of activists, lawyers, and, academics from across the country.

In the nine months since the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, police departments nationwide are under intense scrutiny—in particular the departments within cities and communities of color. Thanks to social media and smartphones, we’ve been able to document the unjustified police killings of black people in New York, Baltimore, Ferguson, North Charleston, and more.

At the America Healing event, civil rights and justice take center stage, as exemplified by the Tuesday morning panel titled “Healing Relationships Between Law Enforcement and Communities of Color.

As the president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund Sherrilyn Ifill has worked on improving police practices in Ferguson, Baltimore, and cities throughout the country. When the riots in Baltimore broke out on Monday, April 28, cable news pundits opined about property damage without considering the deeper issues that lay beneath the protests and riots.

“While the CVS burned,” said Ifill, “no one stopped to ask why there was no grocery store in the neighborhood.”

The housing discrimination that marks the city’s history (and which still exists today) “made Baltimore an island reservation where they deposited poor people,” Ifill explained. As a result of discriminatory practices, some Baltimore neighborhoods ended up becoming food deserts with dilapidated schools and inadequate housing. Police killings are just one part of the equation; real change won’t happen, she said, until the problem of concentrated poverty is addressed.

But Ifill put some of the onus on activists, too. “We can’t just march when something terrible happens,” she said. Lawmakers must also be held accountable, she said, for the legislation they draft. When several police accountability bills were presented to the Maryland General Assembly, Ifill noted, activists missed an opportunity to organize around decision-making.

Melanca Clark of the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) division of the Department of Justice spoke of her office’s interim report on President Barack Obama’s task force on 21st century policing. The 109-page report consists recommendations and implementations of what Clark describes as “concrete, actionable solutions.” The task force recommended building trust by making sure police officers acknowledge the role of law enforcement in past injustices and how that affects a community’s ability to trust the police in the present. Other recommendations included new policies for oversight within police departments, using new technology (such as body cameras), and a return to community policing.

Because of newer technologies such as cell-phone cameras, the extent of police violence is being revealed to the nation. As Jeffrey Blackwell, chief of Cincinnati’s police department put it, “many cities in this country are one incident away from Baltimore.”

“We should be in the business of lifting people up, not locking them up,” Blackwell said, drawing applause. Officers in Blackwell’s department are encouraged be involved in the community. Blackwell spoke of how the police officers under his supervision are involved in such efforts as reading to children at elementary schools and feeding the homeless. “Police officers should be guardians of their communities,” he said.

“As law enforcement we have this mentality of big me, little you,” Blackwell said of the way many police officers approach civilians. “If we don’t rethink the way police officers operate in our communities, “we will always think that we have to police our way out of crime.

Police Rethink Long Tradition on Using Force
By MATT APUZZO
The New York Times
MAY 4, 2015

WASHINGTON — During a training course on defending against knife attacks, a young Salt Lake City police officer asked a question: “How close can somebody get to me before I’m justified in using deadly force?”
Dennis Tueller, the instructor in that class more than three decades ago, decided to find out. In the fall of 1982, he performed a rudimentary series of tests and concluded that an armed attacker who bolted toward an officer could clear 21 feet in the time it took most officers to draw, aim and fire their weapon.

The next spring, Mr. Tueller published his findings in SWAT magazine and transformed police training in the United States. The “21-foot rule” became dogma. It has been taught in police academies around the country, accepted by courts and cited by officers to justify countless shootings, including recent episodes involving a homeless woodcarver in Seattle and a schizophrenic woman in San Francisco.

Now, amid the largest national debate over policing since the 1991 beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles, a small but vocal set of law enforcement officials are calling for a rethinking of the 21-foot rule and other axioms that have emphasized how to use force, not how to avoid it. Several big-city police departments are already re-examining when officers should chase people or draw their guns and when they should back away, wait or try to defuse the situation.“In a democratic society, people have a say in how they are policed, and people are saying that they are not satisfied with how things are going,” said Sean Whent, the police chief in Oakland, Calif. The city has a troubled history of police abuse and misconduct, but some policy changes and a new approach to training have led to sharp declines in the use of force, Chief Whent added.

Like the 21-foot rule, many current police practices were adopted when officers faced violent street gangs. Crime rates soared, as did the number of officers killed. Today, crime is at historic lows and most cities are safer than they have been in generations, for residents and officers alike. This should be a moment of high confidence in the police, said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a law enforcement policy group. Instead, he said, policing is in crisis.

“People aren’t buying our brand. If it was a product, we’d take it out of the marketplace and re-engineer it,” Mr. Wexler said. “We’ve lost the confidence of the American people.”

Mr. Wexler’s group will meet with hundreds of police leaders in Washington this week to call for a new era of training, one that replaces truisms such as the 21-foot rule with lessons on defusing tense situations and avoiding violent confrontations. While the Justice Department and chiefs of some major police departments are supportive, the effort has not been widely embraced, at least so far. Some police unions and others have expressed skepticism, saying officers are being unfairly criticized.

“All this chatter just increases the idea that these encounters are avoidable and law enforcement is at fault,” said Jeff Roorda of the St. Louis Police Officers’ Association, who said officers already thought about ways to avoid confrontations.

The typical police cadet receives about 58 hours of training on how to use a gun and 49 hours on defensive tactics, according to a recent survey by Mr. Wexler’s group. By comparison, cadets spend just eight hours learning to calm situations before force is needed, a technique called de-escalation.
“Everything now is: You get there, you see a guy with a knife, you resolve it,” said Mr. Wexler, a former senior Boston police official. In many situations, he said, officers who find themselves 21 feet from a suspect can simply take a step backward to buy themselves time and safety.

Mr. Tueller’s article never proposed a bright line between a shooting that was justified and one that was not. In a telephone interview, Mr. Tueller, 63, said he had simply wanted to warn officers that they might be in danger far sooner than they realized. Twenty-one feet as a justification for shooting, he said, just became a “sticky idea” in policing.

The Dallas police chief, David O. Brown, said at a policing conference in February: “Sometimes it seems like our young officers want to get into an athletic event with people they want to arrest. They have a ‘don’t retreat’ mentality. They feel like they’re warriors and they can’t back down when someone is running from them, no matter how minor the underlying crime is.”

Those remarks came just weeks before a police officer in North Charleston, S.C., was charged with murder for shooting an unarmed man in the back. The officer had stopped the man, Walter L. Scott, because of a broken brake light. When Mr. Scott ran, the officer gave chase, even though he had Mr. Scott’s driver’s license.

A recent survey of 281 police agencies found that young officers spent far more time training on firearms and tactics than on responding to a crisis or defusing tense situations.

“In most cases, time is on our side,” Chief Whent, of Oakland, said in an interview. “We’re chasing someone whose name we know, and we know where they live.”
The Oakland department, which is still working to repair its troubled history, now prohibits officers from chasing suspects alone into yards or alleys if they might be armed. All officers receive training that emphasizes smart decision-making. After averaging about eight police shootings annually for many years, the city had none last year and cut in half the number of times officers drew their guns, Chief Whent said.

Whether a shooting is justified often hinges on the fraction of a second before the officer fires. In Cleveland in November, officers thought that 12-year-old Tamir Rice was wielding a pistol, not realizing he was playing with a replica. In Ferguson, Mo., an officer said he killed Michael Brown, 18, last summer because Mr. Brown had lunged at him after a scuffle through the window of his cruiser. In Seattle, the officer who shot the woodcarver said that the man had refused to drop his knife and that he had struck a “very confrontational posture.”

But earlier decisions can also be critical. In Cleveland, officers pulled their cars extremely close to Tamir, immediately increasing the possibility of a confrontation. In Ferguson, the officer, Darren Wilson, got out of his car after the tussle and pursued Mr. Brown alone. In Seattle, internal investigators chastised the officer, Ian Birk, for approaching the armed man and then using the 21-foot rule to justify shooting him.

Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story “Officer Birk created the situation which he claims he had to use deadly force to get out of,” a police review board concluded. The officer resigned.

Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York announced a new training program for the Police Department in December as the city faced waves of protests over the death of Eric Garner, an unarmed black man who died after a police chokehold. Seattle, which is under federal supervision after a Justice Department civil rights investigation, recently announced that its officers would also receive new training.

Mr. Tueller, the retired Salt Lake City instructor, said that he supported improving police training, but that officers were being unfairly blamed for the recent spate of fatal shootings. Most, if not all, would have been avoided if the suspects had obeyed orders, he said.

“We can’t get in people’s heads, and we can’t change behavior in many situations,” he said. “If they don’t comply, the officer has to have options. De-escalation is fine, to a point.”

Teaching officers to hesitate, Mr. Tueller said, could put them in danger.

That focus on officer safety has underpinned many police policies, but Mr. Wexler argues that it is a false choice. Officers in Britain, most of whom do not carry guns and typically face fewer suspects with firearms than some American police officers do, regularly confront suspects carrying knives, as do their counterparts here. British officers follow what is known as the National Decision Model, which emphasizes talking, remaining patient and using no more force than necessary.

No police officer in England has died from a weapon attack during the past two years, according to the most recent published data, and none have been involved in fatal shootings during that period. (Officers with guns back up those who do not carry them.)

But Mr. Wexler acknowledged that changes in policing would be slow. “Not everybody’s going to accept it,” he said. “We’re asking them to rethink in a major way things they have done for 20 years.”

If I Had a Hammer and You a Diploma

We are sure that the hallowed halls of ivory are the solution to reducing income inequity. If you saddle someone up with enough debt that eventually they will have to take a job doing something that will pay for it.

We have every year or so another declaration of which will be the hot field to enter when you get your degree. This you are to determine at age 17, pick the appropriate major, complete the requirements in the needed time frame and then walk in ready to hit it to win it in 4 to 6 years (the added two is for the advanced degrees required now in pretty much every profession) and immediately earn enough to pay off the loans and live an up and coming middle class lifestyle.

Lord I can see why we are moving towards legalizing marijuana as you really need to put that American myth in your pipe and smoke it.

That was ideally the case but today the economic realities are not quite as clear cut or simplistic as that implies.

Paul Krugman has a great column today discussing this supposed skills gap and Builder has another great article about this issue when it comes to construction and labor shortages of 2015.They found this:

It’s interesting in terms of disciplines we’ve been having trouble with,” comments Morrison on the analysis’ early findings. “Most people would think it’s those that would require a multi-year apprenticeship, but what we’re hearing is that it’s framers, finish carpenters, plumbers, electricians, so it’s really the guts of the house.”

Noteworthy among the pain-point areas, Morrison says, “every single respondent who builds more than 250 homes said that they are having labor problems.” More big builders work to counter the exodus of trade contractors from their jobs with “builder-of-choice” programs that, as Morrison points out, offer “better pay, better, benefits, they’re offering more training, they’re trying to get involved with vocational and tech schools to offer alternatives to career paths that don’t necessarily involve a college degree.”

As we re-examine the needs of work with who is working the changing demands and fields that often were designed by gender still remain as such but the actual critical needs skills, the flexibility and in turn the willingness to do work outside the expected also plays into this. We have few women actually entering the supposed nirvana of fields, STEM and in turn entering the health care marketplace, an always open door when it came to women past and it appears present.

Women still dominate the education field and if you note the amazing speech by Patricia Arquetteat last nights Oscars, it also may be why they are the least paid when it comes to income parity. Why wield a book or a needle when a hammer can pay more. And the fact is that many of the jobs available are physically demanding and you see few women on those sites but you do see – immigrants who do so as day labor without the skill set either but they are cheaper, uncomplaining and undemanding. Back to that whole how dare these workers want compensation, protection, longevity, training. And you say there is a skill set lacking. For what – arrogance? We gots plenty of that!

That has to be what Mike Rowe, the true speaker of the house for the trades, calls profoundly disconnected. It is that all right.

I am watching first hand the hysteria of many returning to college to get numerous degrees and certificates only to find doors firmly shut in their face. The MOOC’s or online education programs that were touted to ensure access and affordability are not exactly throwing down the pigskin or well any skin in the game. The Public schools are bursting at the seams and there are many many qualified and willing educators currently substitituing while districts claim a substitute shortage and in turn cutting the education budgets to the edge while still touting sports at all the levels of education, especially the higher ones. We are seeing repeatedly across the country education budgets slashed as touted to save the bottom line yet while the same time touting the education is the key to prosperity.

Perhaps we could all be as lucky as Scott Walker to be elected Governor without completing an education. I look forward to seeing across America community college grads with associate degrees running the country in the next few years, they’ll be free right? They couldn’t be worse than the kids I see now in high schools who are total assholes and think they can do so right now. Well they are public school students and we know the rich want that style of education changed as well. What is good for their gander is not what they want the geese to have or do. Plessy v. Ferguson the 21st century.

Knowledge Isn’t Power
Paul Krugman
The New York Times
FEB. 23, 2015

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, Bowles-Simpsonism — 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.

Do Good

On the note of the last entry the economic writer for the New York Times, Eduardo Porter, had a great column about what it means to be a business and one that is responsible to the workforce in which are largely the reason they exist. The customer is only one aspect of this equation and without those producing or serving those same customers there is no business. And the workers themselves are a businesses best customers.

We have the notion that corporations are people well no they are not or they would have some type of emotion and in turn human dignity. Business is just business and while they have an immense sense of personhood with regards to the public they are a business with goals that have little to do with people. Money is not a person.

But there are corporations who have historically made the human connection to ensure the success and longevity of the business. It is not charity nor generosity it is just something called “good business.”

We don’t treat each other very well but as Corporations are people maybe they need to set the example but that would require a serious examination of the compensation scale of the executives, the board of directors, the concept of outsourcing, tax avoidance and other games that corporations are doing in which to avoid responsibility to the larger community. We have major problems. Be Good or Be rich is the real debate today.

Motivating Corporations to Do Good

JULY 15, 2014
Eduardo Porter

Is it naïve to expect corporations to assist in addressing the social, economic and environmental challenges of the day?

In 1929, several years before Social Security and the National Labor Relations Act cemented pensions and labor rights in law, workers at the Eastman Kodak Company already enjoyed profit-sharing, retirement bonuses and a pension plan. They had sickness benefits and accident insurance.

In 1914, Henry Ford decided to raise wages to $5 a day, doubling, in one stroke, most of his workers’ pay. “We were building for the future,” he later explained. “A low-wage business is always insecure.”

Almost half a century later, Coca-Cola’s chairman, William E. Robinson, argued that a corporate executive served not just stockholders, but also workers, customers and the community. “The neglect of the customers and his labor relations will seal his doom far faster than an avaricious quick-dollar stockholder or director,” he said.

Today, we live in a different world. Energy companies both recognize that climate change is a problem and actively lobby against efforts to combat it. The nation’s half a million fast-food cooks earn, on average, $9.07 an hour, which even on a full-time basis is not enough to keep a family of four out of poverty. Yet fast-food behemoths like McDonald’s and Wendy’s fight tooth and nail against efforts to raise wages.
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Milton Friedman in 1964. He said businesses’ responsibility was to increase profits. Credit Ernie Sisto/The New York Times

Coming out of World War II, corporate America enthusiastically draped itself in the American flag. As General Motors’ Charles E. Wilson famously told a Senate committee in 1953, “for years I thought that what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa.”

G.M.’s star-spangled jingoism sits in awkward contrast to Pfizer’s recent efforts — along with those of other companies — to rid itself of its status as an American corporation to avoid taxes.

“Over all, there is no question that the ethos of corporate America has changed dramatically over the past 40 years,” said Rick Wartzman, executive director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University, who is writing a book about how the social contract between workers and employers has changed since World War II. The belief that business must serve multiple constituents, he argued, has given way to an imperative “to make the shareholder king.”

Milton Friedman, the economic thinker from the University of Chicago, argued that this was exactly as it should be. The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits, he stated in an essay published in The New York Times 44 years ago. For executives to devote resources to anything else would amount to doing charity with other people’s money.

Friedman’s maxim arrived just in time for the era of the hostile takeover and the leveraged buyout, when corporate raiders sold themselves as saviors liberating shareholders from misguided managers who paid too little attention to the stock price.

Though legally dubious, the argument that it is an executive’s fiduciary duty to maximize the company’s share price became a mantra from the business school to the boardroom. And it was nailed down with money.

In 1993, some 20 percent of executive compensation was based on stock, according to Lynn Stout of Cornell Law School. Today, equity accounts for about 60 percent of the remuneration of executives at companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. With so much money tied up in stock options and the like, it is not surprising that executives will do almost anything to give their share price a boost regardless of what costs this might incur after their options have vested.

These changes responded to economic forces. The 1970s and 1980s were an era of high inflation, high interest rates and low returns on investment. Globalization was exposing American companies to much greater competition from abroad, putting pressure on margins and redoubling executives’ attention on cost cutting and short-term profitability.

George Eastman had a vested interest in maintaining a trained and motivated work force in Rochester. Steve Jobs did not have much of a factory work force to think of. Another company halfway around the world made most of Apple’s devices.

Is there any hope that corporate ethics might swing back to something resembling the earlier era?

Corporate executives jumping on the “corporate social responsibility” bandwagon certainly want you to think so. In 2000, 44 businesses signed up to the United Nations’ global standards on human rights, workers’ rights, environmental stewardship and anti-corruption policies. By last year, 7,717 had signed.

Companies, of course, are not charities. Their main responsibility is to remain profitable.

Still, there is a case to be made that attending to workers’ rights or environmental degradation might help the business in the long term. The housing bubble and subsequent financial crisis served as a stark reminder of the consequences of compensating bankers based on short-term returns regardless of whether their business would blow up a couple of years down the road.

More broadly, company executives are under a new form of pressure. George Serafeim of Harvard Business School points out that the information age has brought greater transparency to corporate operations. Customers, investors and employees know more about what businesses do around the world and can exert influence to change their behavior.

Some prominent businesses, like the American retailer Costco, the Danish pharmaceutical multinational Novo Nordisk or the Anglo-Dutch food conglomerate Unilever appear to take a serious stand on broader social and environmental issues.

Nonetheless, it would be wise to temper expectations that corporate ethics are about to turn the corner.

After all, the motivations go only so far: Notably, pressure to “do good” from investors, customers and employees is not likely to encourage much good-doing in domains that investors, customers and employees cannot readily see.

Remember Enron? A report by Jean Tirole of the Toulouse School of Economics and Roland Bénabou of Princeton University notes that even as the company was quietly cooking the books, it was visibly giving money to all sorts of philanthropies. “Companies may behave better where it is most visible and not where it is less visible,” Professor Bénabou told me.

Corporations of an earlier era were just as motivated by self-interest. Eastman Kodak’s mini-welfare state came about in part to keep unions at bay. Henry Ford wanted to encourage his workers to be more productive and hoped that many would ultimately be able to afford Model T’s for themselves. But he also wanted to limit the dividend he would have to pay to the Dodge brothers, Ford shareholders who needed the money to set up a rival carmaker.

Wilson’s patriotic take on G.M.’s interests occurred at a confirmation hearing in which he was trying to convince senators that he could be a fine defense secretary and still keep his G.M. stock.

Indeed, there is a corollary to Milton Friedman’s proposition: You can trust a business that merely wants to turn a profit in a way that you cannot quite trust one that wants to change the world, too.

“I don’t think we would get very far in addressing large social concerns if we left them to corporations,” said Margaret Blair of Vanderbilt Law School. “The ethic of shareholder values is just too strong, and our social problems are just too big.”

Elected governments are certainly imperfect. But to address our most intractable ills, they are the better tool.