S.T.E.M. Poverty, Not Education: Teachers and the World Economy

           If knowledge is power, then the education system should the most important institution in our modern world. Indeed, education is often cited as the explanation and the cure of wide disparities in wealth at the local, national and global scale. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, maintained that “Education is the key to understanding broad inequality trends” (Qtd. Winner-take-all Politics, p. 34). Yet, our political leaders have been underfunding our educational systems at the same time that they impose increasingly byzantine assessments and standards. Our society entrusts its children to public school teachers while it pays those same professionals less than the people who collect our garbage (although this, too, is an important task). Teachers with at least a bachelor’s degree earn $33,169 a year, while city refuse collectors with no training or experience are paid $39,204 (“Teachers’ Salary Schedule,” Hawaii Department of Education. “Class Specifications,” City and County of Honolulu Department of Human Resources).

            Our country’s educational policies at state and federal levels have focused on science, technology, engineering and math (S.T.E.M.), to the detriment of the humanities like history, art and music. The burden to get students interested in S.T.E.M. careers has fallen to teachers, who are often poorly trained and in poorly-equipped classrooms. People like Makiw, Bush and now President Barack Obama have continually pushed the idea that skill-biased technological change is the cause of America’s economic woes and wealth disparity. SBTC is an economics term used to justify increased focus on S.T.E.M. subjects because it describes a global economic shift to rely on science and technologies that need highly skilled laborers.

This focus has manifested in programs like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top that peg federal financial assistance to a state’s overall performance on standardized assessments. Teachers—not underfunded, mismanaged school districts or students distracted by their own personal poverty—are blamed for the education system’s failure to meet America’s need for skilled workers. SBTC is a global trend, not a national one, that is influenced by corporate offshoring practices and international economic policy, not by chemistry teachers in Waianae.

             Unlike the disingenuous “War on Drugs” and the “War on Terror,” which are not actually about waging war on drugs or terror (but rather, on drug-users and religious extremists, respectively, with massive amounts of collateral damage in both cases), the “War on Teachers” is real and harmful to America’s present and future generations. This protester, Geneva, represents the average modern American teacher: young, underpaid, female, undervalued and often ignored. Like many of her peers, Geneva took on student loans to finance her education. Now that she has entered the work force and started her career as a teacher, she has had enough—it is time to stop the “War on Teachers.”

Works Cited

Department of Human Resources. "Refuse Collector." Class Specifications. City and County of Honolulu, n.d. Web. 14 Oct. 2013. <http://www4.honolulu.gov/hrjobclass/index3.htm>.

Hacker, Jacob S., and Paul Pierson. Winner-take-all Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer-and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010. Print.

“Teachers’ Salary Schedule” Hawaii Department of Education, n.d. Web. 14 Oct. 2013. <http://www.hawaiipublicschools.org/ConnectWithUs/Employment/WorkingInHawaii/Pages/home.aspx>.