The Boomer Solution To Our Intractable Reading And Math Proficiency Problems

The strategy is - put people back to work and teach young children to read well. Below are some tactics to get there, at least in part.

Last week NPR reported that the unemployment rate among the 55-and-older set hit 7.2%, the highest since the end of World War II. And while that may be lower than the overall rate, older workers tend to stay unemployed longer, with the average length of the job search more than 35 weeks.

A Pew survey shows that 1 in 3 unemployed older workers hasn't had a paycheck in more than a year. As a result, in 2009, 3 million older workers have simply given up and declared early retirement and have begun drawing Social Security benefits.

Yet this is the best-educated, most highly-skilled cadre in our society as of this moment and it is being pulled from service.

Meanwhile, disadvantaged students in the first grade have a vocabulary that is approximately half that of the average advantaged student (2,900 and 5,800 words respectively). The first grade! For the underprivileged, the race is essentially lost before the starter's pistol has been sounded.

And, if you can't read well, the chances you will do well in math are next to nil.

The marriage of Boomers and needy preschool children is of urgent importance.

Almost anyone with a few years of college and beyond, or even those with a solid high school education, are capable of reading aloud to and giving basic reading, writing and math instruction to a 4, 5 or 6 year-old.

The Boomers who want to retire because of difficulty in finding new employment should be entered into a new program dedicated to transmitting these basic skills to deprived and neglected youngsters.

The Boomers would receive a stipend that would not be taxable and that would not affect their Social Security payment levels. The reading and math sessions could easily be conducted in schools before or after hours, in community centers, in the halls of religious institutions, libraries, even outdoors. The sessions could be for two hours per day, four days per week.

Let's say there were 1,000,000 of these "into-the-breach" senior tutors. And let's say they received $1,000 per month. That would cost $12 billion per year. The extra money added to the average retiree's $1,170 per month in SS money would help immensely, raising their monthly income to $2,170 per month. One can fairly assune that the extra money, like unemployment benefits, would immediately be recirculated into the economy in the form of consumer spending.

By contrast, we are spending over $100 billion per year on the two wars in southwest Asia, plus another 700 billion on defense in general. Corn subsidies cost us about $10 billion per year. Tax and other incentives to the petroleum industry cost us about $105 billion per year.

The benefits to the children who would be affected by such programs are not immeasurable, although the following statistics would serve to astound even the most skeptical among us.
(Stats are from http://www.readfaster.com/education_stats.asp - there are plenty more at their site.)

It is estimated that the cost of illiteracy to business and the taxpayer is $20 billion per year.

It is estimated that more than $2 billion is spent each year on students who repeat a grade because they have reading problems. 

The educational careers of 25 to 40 percent of American children are imperiled because they don't read well enough, quickly enough, or easily enough.

Children who have not developed some basic literacy skills by the time they enter school are 3 - 4 times more likely to drop out in later years.

One-fifth of high school graduates cannot read their own diplomas.

Let's say of the 1,000,000 Boomers employed, they each affect 8 to 12 students per day. That is, obviously, 8 to 12 million students per day.

The children would receive the benefits of all the cumulative applied knowledge of the Boomers. They would stay in the school and learning environment for a longer amount of time each day. They would be sheltered from detrimental home situations, from excessive TV watching and video game playing.

The Boomers - with all their phenomenal skills coming back into play - would find a new sense of purpose plus a reasonable new source of income.

That income would help in a directly stimulative way to reinvigorate our struggling economy.

Volunteerism is all well and good, but the educational crisis is reaching high tide and it needs to be treated with early in a child's life. Volunteers are wonderful, but this is a different kind of predicament.

Maybe this is the new WPA or CCC. Spend money directly on things that are of dire importance to our future. And do something intrinsically good in the bargain.

.

High Speed Trains and One Mule

I am only quasi-pleased that the president is parceling out $8 billion dollars for the development of high speed trains around the country. It is really a paltry amount. It represents .00056 of total U.S. GDP. Let's say you have a two income household that brings in $100,000 per year and you want to replace some important infrastructure element in your house, or improve your transportation choices. Spending a similar percentage would give you a budget of $56.38 out of your hundred grand.

Liberals should be behind an enormous expansion of rail infrastructure - not just passenger, but freight as well, but the latter is another story. According to a number of sources, IF we had a rail system on a par with France's, it would provide 500 million passenger rides per year and require 1,000,000 workers to run, service and maintain the system. Now there's a jobs program for you. By contrast, Amtrak employs about 18,000 people. For a really excellent look at the potential for rail in America, check this out at The Infrastructurist.

Yet the right wing is rabid in its opposition. We can put it down to their usual stale pieties about government spending, waste, jeremiads against "socialism," and their slavish devotion to the oil industry. (As if the Interstate Highway System is not a communal venture!) However, I'd like to go deeper and lay it at the feet of a misguided hyper-individualism that is rooted in the values of the Old South. While the Northeast, Midwest and California were modernizing agriculture in the 1890s, the Old South was still dogging along with small family plots and the remnant of the rotted plantation culture that was dependent on slave labor.

Today's automobile culture is roughly comparable to the one-mule, postage-stamp farm of the post-bellum South. And the people who work on this new automobile version of such a farm, stuck in outrageously uneconomical, environmentally unsound machines, are really simply driving their one mule and hoping it lasts through the spring planting. So, the right wing clings to this outmoded way of thinking. It is deeper than political philosophy. It is a cultural philosophy deeply embedded and fraught with all sorts of common, pre-World War prejudices. Anti-cosmopolitan comes most readily to mind. Fear of the outsider - ewww I might have to sit next to a stranger on a train. Fatalism about the future also pops up when I consider this old, worn out way of thinking.

Listen to Harry Nilsson's "Nobody Cares About The Railroads Anymore"

Broader, almost revolutionary thinking is required if we are to hope that our children and grandchildren have jobs, a clean environment, and quick and easy ways to travel, at least regionally, if not cross continent.

But the future is not looking rosy as we dawdle and dither, held hostage to the old one-mule farm mentality.

The U.S. currently has one high speed corridor, Boston to Washington, of about 500 miles. Even if we were to build ALL the proposed high speed corridors on the national wish list, that would only amount to 4,000 at most. (By the way - in the U.S., "high speed" means an average of 79 mph on a system. In Europe, it's 120 mph.)

China, whose land mass is about the same as the U.S., has embarked on the second largest public works program in all of history, following only the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System in size. China plans to spend more than $1 trillion on expanding its railway network from 48,466 miles today to 68,350 in 2012 and 74,564 in 2020. China’s more pertinent goal is to invest in 8,000 miles of high-speed rail by 2020. They invest $1 trillion, while we argue and backbite over $8 billion.

By the way, the cost of the two wars in south Asia has now reached $955 billion.... hmm... just about what China plans to spend on its rail infrastructure. See this website: The Cost of War. Look for your area.