Plastics!

{I'm headed for a remote beach in Western Ghana with no internet, so I need to post this a couple days early.}

If you go up to anyone at a cocktail party (not that I've ever been to an actual cocktail party) and ask anyone the right questions, you will find, I think, that everyone has an overarching theory of their world--which they would love to share with you.
     Truck drivers, underwear salesmen, cosmetologists: they all have a story about why their world (the world of underwear or trucking or nail parlors) is constructed the way that it is. Mostly you don't want to ask about such things because these theories generally make for very dull party monologues.
     Remember "The Graduate"?
 "Plastics."
 That was his overarching theory. The world was being remade by plastics, and any sensible young person would hop on that particular bandwagon if he knew what was good for him.
 Since this is summer and school is out, I decided that I would bore you with my overarching theory of American education.
 My story begins in 1945, which happens to be the year I was born, but that's not part of my story.
 The entire world was prostrate from the ravages of World War II; the whole world except the US of A. The US economy was not just dominant in those post war days, it was the only game in town.
 Automobiles, steel, razor blades, chocolate bars: we had it, we made it, the world bought it. That was the world that we Baby Boomers grew up in.
 It made for a world where Americans had the expectation of wealth. We drove gargantuan automobiles that burned gas costing twenty-nine cents a gallon. We moved to brand new homes in the suburbs with air conditioning and ice boxes that no longer required an ice man.
 Gradually the world recovered. The Japanese made cars better than Detroit. The Europeans made whatever they made. Even the Chinese eventually woke up from their Marxist daydream and started making things.
     The American lifestyle didn't collapse; it just stopped being an assumption that we would be the world's factory.
In 1957 the Soviets scared us with Sputnik. The counselor said I should take calculus so that we could beat the Russkies to the moon.
     By the 1970's people in this country began looking around for an explanation of why we couldn't buy chic dresses in Paris for ten bucks anymore, and why the steel mills in Pittsburgh were closing.
 One logical cause was education. A bunch of smart people examined our primary and secondary school systems and penned a long description of what they found. They called it "A Nation At Risk"(1983).
 It said that American schools weren't very good and that if we didn't do something about it right away we were going to heck in a hand basket.
     This report produced a brief kerfuffle in education circles, but there was no noticeable improvement in America's economic standing in the world.
More factories closed.
 By the 1990's there was a national consensus that American kids were being shortchanged and that children in Finland and China and other places were preparing to take jobs away from their relatively dunderhead US counterparts.
 The federal government responded to this outcry by trying to use markets and competition to shake the cobwebs out of American schools.
      They needed a way to score this education product, so they naturally turned to test scores. Schools, students, and teachers would be prodded to success via numerical measures.
 Vouchers and charter schools were used to produce innovation. If parents voted with their feet the thinking was, if parents had choices they would vote with their feet and all schools would improve.
 Major cities like New York and Chicago handed over control of the entire education bureaucracy to their mayors. School boards were reduced to spectators.
 In desperate times people are willing to give up their democratic prerogatives for the sake of action.
 It all makes sense if you believe that US schools are worse than they used to be and that bad schools are sinking the American economy.
 You see, this is why you should never talk to me at cocktail parties.