OPEN LETTER

The President
The White House
Washington, DC

Dear Mr. President;

Your goal for education, to lead the world again in undergraduate degrees, BS and BA, by the year  2020, is too simplistic to overtake global competition.  Even if it should come to pass, it would not regenerate our flagging middle class or our manufacturing base. There’s a costly disconnect between higher education and the workplace that more traditional degrees won’t fix. We can’t allow higher education itself to think that they will. That’s living in lalaland. The disconnect has always been there, but it glares at us now in the light of nagging unemployment at home and the market economics that are shrinking the world.

You’ve made remarkable strides in turning back the economic doom that the Bush-Cheney neocons left at your door. Who can forget that you got the banks off a cliff, got Wall Street off its knees, and pulled our giant of the 20th century, the automakers, from the grave? The last alone is enough to win my vote.

The weakness that worries me is your counting too heavily on top staff from the Ivy League. As esteemed as these schools are for their academic wealth, they are not the real world. They nibble at it, but only at their own pleasure. They do not have the pulse of greater America. It’s a weakness that works against your agenda for education. The elite quality of an Ivy League education hardly touches the perspective and reality a classroom teacher must have to succeed in the typical elementary or secondary school. The League’s preeminent school of education, Columbia Teachers College, is hardly free of this elitist isolation. It is similarly handicapped by location in inner-city New York, whose schools are a laboratory quite different from school districts elsewhere.

Teachers College prides itself on graduate work for community college administrators. But again its local and state environment are not typical of the larger community college family. As it teams with major foundations to beef up transfer education, it misses reality. Today’s community colleges are not meant primarily to fatten university enrollment; their larger mission is to build still more bridges with the employers in their quest for a globally competitive workforce.

That’s a mission the Ivy League and the university family must take more to heart. In teaching itself, the mission can’t be left to colleges of education alone. Too often they are shortchanged in university budgets that favor the more lucrative professional disciplines. We can’t compete in the 21st century without world-class teachers. We need look no farther than two of our dearest trading partners, debt-free Canada and South Korea, to prove it. Their schools lead the world in student performance in math and science.

The majority of today’s teachers start college in the community colleges. Universities must tackle transfer as the responsibility of the whole institution, especially for the profession of teaching, if our public schools are ever to become world-class again.

Respectfully,  Frank Mensel
— June, 2012