The 99ers

A while back, I caught an episode of 60 Minutes, and Scott Pelley began the segment with, “The economic jam we’re in has topped even the Great Depression in one respect: Never have we had a recession this deep with a recovery this flat. Unemployment has been at 9.5% or above for fourteen months. Congress did something it has never done before. It extended unemployment benefits to 99 weeks. That cost more than $100 billion. A huge expense for a government in debt.” During the episode they interviewed unemployed individuals from Silicon Valley in California, center of the high-tech universe in the United States. What struck me was that hundreds of highly educated, bright, driven individuals were unemployed for over two years. Financial analysts and fiber optic engineers living in trucks and with friends, unable to find work, were willing to do nearly anything to earn a paycheck. The competition is stiff – over a thousand applicants for four clerk positions in a county office – and people are still finding it tough going after nearly two years of looking for a job. People with doctorates and master degrees feeling desperate wonder what is next. Too young to retire and many have cashed out their 401K’s. Small family businesses were going broke because people don’t have enough money to buy their goods.

At that time the national unemployment rate was over 9%, but that did not take into account the under-employed and part-time workers. In reality it was about 17%. One-third of the unemployed were out of work for over a year, which hadn’t been seen since the great depression. 1.5 million Americans had exhausted their unemployment checks and have been trying to figure out what to do, some taking matters into their own hands, selling their homes, digging through garbage to collect recyclable items, and making other life altering decisions.

So how does this fit into an education blog? The vast majority of the individuals featured in the program were highly educated. In a room full of unemployed individuals, not one had less than a four-year degree, and as mentioned earlier, many with master degrees and a few PhD’s. This recession that still lingers – though some economic indicators do look promising – has spared few. Those out of work have not just been unskilled laborers. What it says to me is that this is the first warning shot across the bow about the changing world economy and America’s role. As individuals like Thomas Friedman and Daniel Pink have warned, our nation must shift our focus and thus our educational system to account for the fact that cheaper labor in other parts of the world coupled with faster communication and tied together with more aggressive countries in the world economy, we will experience more setbacks like this one. Computers can replicate what humans once did. The Chinese can produce goods cheaper than we can. Brazil is now the fourth most powerful economy in the world in an area rich with natural resources. We must understand that just as the 20th century factory system is a things of the past, so must be the educational system that was designed in the same template. We cannot educate our young people the same way we were educated. It is my opinion that the toughest people to convince are the general public. So, here is my request: you must let us change and understand that there will be growing pains. You must trust that we have the best interest of your children at heart. You need to let go of some of the things that really are not that important in the big picture. Help us with these changes and challenge us to do better.