A Simple Proposal to Decrease Income Inequality

The Center on Education and the Workforce recently issued a report on the future of jobs available in the American economy based on education. The report notes that in 1970, 74% of middle class jobs were held by workers with a high school diploma or less. At the current time that figure hovers around 40% and the report predicts that by 2018 the number will fall to 37%. The reasons for this are fairly well understood. The restructuring of the American economy away from manufacturing and toward a technology and service economy are often cited as major contributors. This process, begun in the 1970's, has resulted in a huge increase in income inequality that currently ranks the U.S. near the bottom of the Gini scale as explained in this Atlantic Monthly analysis. Income inequality matters. The Gini scale has been in use for a century and has proven to be one of the best predictors of social instability and economic performance. Nations with high inequality perform much more poorly in terms of economic growth, are more prone to political unrest, and exhibit a general decay in social cohesion. The recent rise of the Tea Party and Occupy Protests should provide ample evidence to everyone that this is not a problem of one particular political party or class in our society. This is everyone's problem. The solution, oddly enough, is neither new nor mysterious. Upward economic mobility is the traditional answer and in fact, created the stable, prosperous society we once enjoyed between the second world war and the 1970's. This stability grew directly out of the New Deal's contract with America and it's focus on education. The basic contract was the promise that everyone should be given access to a public education that prepared all for a well paying job. For many decades our society delivered on this promise. Our education system became the envy of the world and a high school diploma provided the gateway to the middle class. That contract is now utterly broken. The current gateway to prosperity is a college education and it is not free. Political remedies to maintain upward mobility in the last 30 years have come in the form of  patchwork policies, mostly in the form of grants and loans, to increase college enrollment. The assumption has been that by ensuring more people received a secondary education, they would be prepared to participate in the changing economy. Our current economic crisis has laid bare the failure of these policies. Our primary education system has devolved into a system to prepare students for college and is no longer tasked with providing a complete, much less useful, education. Colleges and universities have been tasked with a job they were never designed for, to provide the minimum primary skills to enter the U.S. economy. The result of this has been a declining public education system that has lost it's focus and an increasingly inefficient secondary system with rising tuition, increasing student debt, and declining graduation rates for the poor. It would be naive to think that the remedies for this state of affairs will be anything but complex and politically difficult but we have to start somewhere. Therefore I make this simple proposal. We restore the promise of a primary public education. We must promise that anyone who graduates from our public schools should qualify for 70% of the well paying jobs in our economy. We must re-establish the old Jeffersonian ideal of a public education. Every person should be equipped, at the public expense, with the minimum education required to participate in our democracy as a good citizen. Good citizenship includes participation in the economic life of our nation as well as the political. This is the basic doctrine of fairness. The only barrier to achieving a middle class life in our country should be the willingness of our citizens to participate in the economy to the best of their natural ability. The goal of public education should be to foster this doctrine. Secondary education should be just that, additional training for the specialists in our society, which by definition means the few and not the many. The average person should not be required to go into debt just to make a decent living. Perhaps we should expand the time in public systems by two years. We could make a year of preschool at the front end a standard part of the curriculum. An additional year could be added to high school and graduation delayed. Students could be given the option of pursuing career specific training in the final two years of public school. Schools could base the curriculum on existing skills and aptitudes, similar to the technical programs of the past, instead of trying to "catch them up" for a college education they can't afford and some have little hope of completing. Private technical schools and community colleges might partner in these programs. Maybe there needs to be increased focus on creating good jobs in the economy that require more moderate skill sets. These are just ideas and better ones will come from those with more expertise than I. The real point is that we need to restore the promise that public schools will provide the primary education in our country. Not the education most will happen to receive based on vague political policies, but the truly primary education most will need to participate fully in the American enterprise of democracy.