Only? When one in eight of the population can’t make effective use of the written word I don’t think that only is a suitable qualifier.
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If I was a parent and I noticed my kid couldn’t read, I would be like “Oh right that’s because she’s only two years old and I haven’t taught her to read yet.”
But obviously that’s only an option for literate parents, which is the real cost to this level of failure in the school system. Illiterate and innumerate high school graduates can’t teach their own kids literacy and numeracy, and can’t read to their own children, giving the next generation a head start toward illiteracy as well.
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Yo gumshoe. Read the history on the LINCS website. They clearly just re-named the institute, and not all links everywhere were updated.
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Blue collar is not necessarily the same thing as working class. We don’t call slinging hamburgers or providing home health care as “blue collar,” even though aspects of their employment relations are similar.
Further, blue collar doesn’t imply necessarily which social class you belong to at large, and not all working class members are low(er) wage workers. Some, like high-rise steel workers, make as much hourly as doctors and lawyers.
I actually hesitated on whether or not to include working class service jobs, but decided against because it muddies the point about the power blue collar labor possesses in shaping relationships between capitalists and workers of all stripes. (By power I mean the presence of, not the actualization) The source of that power stems from the fact that the majority of capital is created through the production process, and at the root of that process is the labor necessary to manifest that production. Simply put, things don’t get made (or machines don’t get operated) without blue collar labor. If they walk off the job, capitalists have to replace that labor, and if the labor pool they draw from is unified, they have no choice but to accede to worker’s demands for payment.
I suppose that superficially, the working class service sector resembles that of the white collar ‘service’ sector, but the relationships between either and the capitalist class are fundamentally different.
What I mean by white collar jobs being in service to capital is things like corporate lawyering, middle management. The nature of this work is to maximize profit from capital creation, as opposed to the direct creation of capital itself. They provide that service to the capital class, whereas the services provided by the working class are far more varied and generally revolve around front-end labor that anyone theoretically might need or want. They do not take part, generally speaking, in the profit maximization process, and as such do not have the direct link to the capital class possessed by their white collar service peers. Further, I think it’s worth mentioning that the working class service sector is more unionized today than it’s ever been- SEIU has been the fastest growing union in this country for a long time, at least a decade or more.
Expounding further, the size of a sector in regards to the overall size of a given labor pool is not the only defining factor in it’s ability to negotiate for better compensation. More important than size is where that labor stands in regards to the flow of goods and services. As an example, transportation/warehousing accounted for less than 2% of the overall labor market as of 2014, and of that sector, longshoreman (who are in a service position, not a production position) make up a small fraction. However, due to their position on the supply chain, a paltry few workers (relative) can affect economic decision-making up and down the chain. When longshoremen strike, the entire economy in the area of the strike is affected (i.e. the PNW during the strike two years ago in Seattle and Portland.) Because of that power to effect economies as a whole, the fixed position of that labor (you can’t just up and move a port!) and the highly skilled nature of the work itself, longshoremen have benefits that most other workers in the transportation sector couldn’t dream about.
Inarguably true, but
I can’t agree with this. Capitalists will always pay the minimum possible wage. Productivity may alter that, or it may not, but wages based off things like productivity stem from the demands of labor, not the concessions of owners (who can, and will pay workers nothing at all if they can get away it, like unpaid “internships”- certainly not tied to productivity since they don’t have a wage to begin with.) Far more crucial to the stagnation of wages is the decline of unionization in the private sector; in 1972 33%, now below 7%. That is the result of relentless efforts by capitalists to reduce unions via law, finance, and propaganda, not simply because production jobs have diminished as a percent of overall employment. Until full automation is profitably realized, blue collar labor stands at the crux of capital creation, and as such still has significant bargaining power when unified. “Fear of the Reds” was an undoubtedly effective method for capitalists to reduce labor’s seat at the table, however I’d argue this strain of propaganda is losing it’s effectiveness now that there is no longer a “Red” menace to the West.
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If this is important, and not just trying to score points, then it is essential to get your facts correct. This article does not do that.
The main point is, of course, that the headline on this article has no apparent empirical backing – instead, the only actual statistics, from the NCES, contradict it.
Nor do either LINCS or NIFL produce these statistics or have they produced a report on these statistics.
Furthermore, to your last point, LINCS was (by your own link, read the second paragraph) spun out of NIFL before the supposed report was made.
Sorry, despite your shrill denials, this is still Fake News.
These statistics are clearly incorrect. All of the reports on this statistic goes back to one source, which is not the original source and does not cite where the numbers came from clearly. In fact, the numbers are easily debunked using the most reputable organization, the NCES, which actually does original research.
Yet, at least four people here have tried to defend these bogus statistics. Fake News dies hard.
I think you’ve got this backwards, fear of the Reds was what empowered the unions rise to begin with, as it as it was a way to placate labor and keep them out of radical politics. The decline of unions & stagnation of Labor wages times very well with the decline of the cold war.
Your attachment to production labor as the source of all wealth begs the question of what happens when the labor involved nears zero. It’s clear that Piketty is correct that capital is the source of all capital.
Some of us are just better at reading the news than you. The report it is citing is the single comprehensive nation-wide estimate of adult literacy that was done in 1998. The screen clip is the definition of functionally illiterate they use, representing a meaningful difference between not being able to read and not being able to read well enough to do anything.
The data you cite is from a later report talking about an even worse standard of literacy.
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Government destroys everything it touches.
Case in point, government schools.
Quick, de-fund public education even more! That’ll fix it!
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No, actually the problem started with privatized school through for profit charter programs, with money being taken out of public school systems - also the wave of white flight after integration and runaway factory phenomenon did undermine the public tax base in detroit.
it doesn’t help that people who think “government” is the problem are often running for office so they can prove it by wrecking programs that actually worked for quite a while before they showed up with their copies of Atlas Shrugged.
[ETA]
https://news.vice.com/story/school-choice-detroit-betsy-devos
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Good, you found where they got the numbers from. But that is not the original source. The original source is the 1992 (not 1998) NALS study conducted by the NCES , which also produced a more recent study in 2003 (see my link above). So not only is this paper over two decades out of date, it has been superseded by a more recent (2003), more comprehensive (at 36,000 respondents it is over 50% larger), and more professionally done study (https://nces.ed.gov/naal/pdf/2007464.pdf).
(The actual results for the 1992 study are also there and they show a illiteracy rate at the time of 21%, not 47% as claimed in the article.)
Voice to text?
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That would make a lot of sense.
On a related note, I think that Trump is frequently in danger of failing the Turing Test.
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AI artificial idiot.
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In 1992 the data was collected from interviewing the people directly, while in 2003 the data was collected from a mail-in questionnaire.
From 1988-1993 they collected 26,000 (a larger sample size relative to the population than in 2003) respondents, and this is their findings:
Complicating things, the 2003 survey does not use the full data set for some reason that I can’t find:
In 1998, the data reported in 1993 was combined with the 1990 census data to generate the 1998 report I posted. That report takes the data used for the national report and applies it to each county. What is unclear is the model they used to generate their city data, which is why the report specifically says the data for Detroit shows irregularities.
What is most accurate to say is that the 47% figure is an outlier of a statistical model, and is likely inaccurate. The Wayne county number shows a level 1 (below basic) literacy rate of 18% total.
But to answer your points directly, the 2003 survey is less professional and less comprehensive (relies on self reporting and sample size is smaller compared to the total body) but both are extremely professional and comprehensive. The 1992 remains as the single most comprehensive study ever done on adult literacy, so the results are still referenced even when they are out of date. What is actually needed is someone doing work just like the 1998 study that uses data across multiple sources with more recent census data to attempt to generate a similarly geographic analysis - but it would require studies still using a similar scale for Prose, Document, Quantitative, and Healthcare literacy.
However, to call this fake news is also inaccurate since the post doesn’t lie about the available data for literacy in Detroit.
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See the little state of Delaware there in your map? I can answer your question in that region only.
First of all, notice that the state property taxes go up and up as you move north from the two large agricultural counties and up into the industrialized upper county. People are poorer and yet have larger properties in the south; it’s a consequence of being a farmer, one of the people who feeds the nation.
Second, notice that although the quality of Delaware schools has decreased for nearly my entire life (we are quite a bit worse off now than we were in 1961) we are actually pretty good by national standards - and the states with better schools are all bluer than us, while the ones with worse schools have more agriculture than us.
Finally, note that Delaware is jam packed with millionaires and megacorporations that donate directly into the school systems voluntarily. A tradition that I believe started with the duPont family more than a hundred years ago, but I could be wrong on that.
Property tax is a stupid and counterproductive way to fund schools. I am generally against income taxes - they reward the idle rich at the expense of the working poor - but this is one place where they could make better sense than asset taxes. So naturally education is the one thing we don’t fund that way 
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I’ve seen similar students, but I don’t see it as a problem of the student’s making. It is still a systemic problem, whether it’s a family, societal, or peer problem. Somewhere, the message of status over learning got in, any correction also has to address the system.
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Aye aye aye…
Honestly, the notion of the Red Scare empowering the rise of unions is pretty insulting, and grossly ignorant of the history of the labor movement in this country. The unions didn’t fight in a metaphysical sense for the workplace protections and norms we nominally enjoy today- workers literally fought in the streets and died for them. This entire statement has no basis in fact, and makes about the same sense as saying the Indian Removal Act empowered Native Americans to settle down and join polite, western society.
When I comment in communities like this, I try to avoid making statements of my opinion as matter-of-fact. This is one subject, however, where I have a crystal clear understanding of history.
The decline of the unions began in the mid-50’s, long before any apparent decline in the Soviet Union, and before many socialist uprisings through out the global South, the Middle East, and east Asia. There can be no doubt that capitalists immediately sought to fight back against the New Deal, and were quite successful in scuttling large portions of it through the courts before they could be implemented.
Wage stagnation, however, came along with the oil shocks and the general stagnation of the US economy as a whole in the early 70’s. Nixon marked the beginning of the Republican, “We’re all Keynesians now” supply-side approach to economic policy that would lead into the dawn of the neo-liberal era under Reagan. These developments played a crucial role in the retraction of union membership and influence, punctuated by Reagan’s stand against the air traffic controllers.
I never said that production is the source of all wealth, that’s a foolish statement. I said the majority of capital is generated through production. That is simply how the facts stand today. I highly doubt that will remain the case by mid-century, as capital’s incessant demand for growth far outstrips humanity’s need for production. We already produce far more than is needed to sustain our population. In the US alone we throw out enough food to ensure no one here goes hungry, yet some level of food insecurity is experienced by nearly 45 million, over 20% of the population. We have enough vacant housing stock to put a roof over every homeless individual’s head. These are not conditions that can be reasonably expected to continue without major disruption to society as a whole, at which point all bets on the future are off.
I’ve only read a handful of Piketty’s work, so I’m not sure what context you’re paraphrasing from, however I know that he shares the same POV as stated in the paragraph above. Without context it doesn’t really say anything at all, however. The sources of capital are varied, ranging from brutal slavery to Quantitative Easing, but ultimately capital itself is simply a store of value. It can be manifested in anything, a machine, a Monet, a human body- and therefore to me is nothing at all but a function of relationship between objects. What will happen as capital growth drifts off towards the infinite limit, while resources steadily divide towards the zero limit? Will this function governing our relationships, not only to ourselves but everything on this planet, be capable of sustaining society as we know it? I do not believe so.
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