Tuesday, June 21, 2011

School choice one of the answers in preparing youngsters for good jobs

Siemens, the German engineering group, is having difficulty filling job openings in the U.S.
With an unemployment rate of 9.1 percent, how is that possible?
Eric Spiegel, chief executive in the U.S. for Siemens, said in an interview with Financial Times that, “There’s a mismatch between the jobs that are available, at least in our portfolio, and the people that we see out there.  There is a shortage (of workers with the right skills.)”
For contrast, the article goes on to say that a Volkswagen plant had 85,000 applicants for 2,000 jobs at its new plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
America spends far more on education than most other nations, so why is its workforce lagging behind? There are jobs to be had, but the industries hiring say the knowledge, education and performance levels needed for these jobs aren’t being found in the U.S.
While the Obama Administration and Department of Labor tout that more job training and government intervention would solve this problem, why not fix the problem at its roots—America’s current education system.
One simple and cost effective way to do so is to allow students and parents to choose what school they attend and what kind of education they want to receive.  And that is exactly what many states are doing during this time of budget cuts and fiscal restraint.  In fact, over the past five years, the number of states that have enacted school choice programs has doubled.
 
Red states will embrace these sort of programs while blue states will fight them tooth and nail, such as what we see  in NY and California. Most of the reasons behind such recalcitrance is of course the teachers unions that see cushy jobs disappearing right and perhaps even left.

And Obama's ideas are simply stupid.

Providing additional training to youngsters who cannot read, write, or speak even colloquial English because they've been promoted to fulfill quota systems, will NEVER benefit from any genuine training program. Just ask anyone in Human Resources how difficult it is to find young, and even middle-aged workers in some areas, who can spell much of anything other their name.

The REAL training programs begin with Kindergarten.

Liberals have kept certain ethnic groups barefoot and pregnant and now they've assured that they must rely upon government giveaways because there isn't a decent paying private company that will hire them.

2 comments:

David said...

School choice is a Good Thing.

Razing the "feddle gummint" Department of Education to the ground, sowing it with salt (and the blood of "feddle gummint" bureaucraps) and then proceeding to do the same thing to "schools of education" in colleges and universities would have an even more positive effect.

Oh, and surviving remote educrats and professors of (mis)"education"? Chain gangs making little rocks out of big ones, pour encourager les autres--particularly the stupidest class in public edcucation: pubschool administrators.

I'd also prescribe regular beatings with cluebats for stupid, lazy parents and stupid, lazy "educators" (I'd reward actual teachers, in part for actually teaching and in part for not needing the ego-boosting extra syllables to refer to themselves).

But since we don't live in a rational world, I'm not expecting these miraculous events to come to pass...

Fits said...

Back when I started school..we're talking 1956...the threat was always "WE'LL SEND YOU TO PUBLIC SCHOOL" if you didn't do this or that.

Everyone knew that the public education system in NYC was horrific, and if anything its gotten worse.