Last summer I attended a talk by Michelle Rhee, the dynamic chancellor of public schools in Washington. Just before the session began, a man came up, introduced himself as Todd Martin and whispered to me that what Rhee was about to speak about our struggling public schools was actually a critical, but unspoken, reason for the Great Recession.

There's something to that. While the subprime mortgage mess involved a huge ethical breakdown on Wall Street, it coincided with an education breakdown on Main Street precisely when technology and open borders were enabling so many more people to compete with Americans for middle-class jobs.
In our subprime era, we thought we could have the American dream a house and yard with nothing down. This version of the American dream was delivered not by improving education, productivity and savings, but by Wall Street alchemy and borrowed money from Asia.

A year ago, it all exploded. Now that we are picking up the pieces, we need to understand that it is not only our financial system that needs a reboot and an upgrade, but also our public school system. Otherwise, the jobless recovery won't be just a passing phase, but our future.

"Our education failure is the largest contributing factor to the decline of the American worker's global competitiveness, particularly at the middle and bottom ranges," argued Martin, a former global executive with PepsiCo and Kraft Europe and now an international investor. "This loss of competitiveness has weakened the American worker's production of wealth, precisely when technology brought global competition much closer to home. So over a decade, American workers have maintained their standard of living by borrowing and overconsuming vis-à-vis their real income. When the Great Recession wiped out all the credit and asset bubbles that made that overconsumption possible, it left too many American workers not only deeper in debt than ever, but out of a job and lacking the skills to compete globally."

This problem will be reversed only when the decline in worker competitiveness reverses when we create enough new jobs and educated workers that are worth, say, $40-an-hour compared with the global alternatives. If we don't, there's no telling how "jobless" this recovery will be.

A Washington lawyer friend recently told me about layoffs at his firm. I asked him who was getting axed. He said it was interesting: lawyers who were used to just showing up and having work handed to them were the first to go because with the bursting of the credit bubble, that flow of work just isn't there. But those who have the ability to imagine new services, new opportunities and new ways to recruit work were being retained. They are the new untouchables.

That is the key to understanding our full education challenge today. Those who are waiting for this recession to end so someone can again hand them work could have a long wait. Those with the imagination to make themselves untouchables to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies will thrive. Therefore, we not only need a higher percentage of our kids graduating from high school and college more education but we need more of them with the right education.

As the Harvard University labor expert Lawrence Katz explains it: "If you think about the labor market today, the top half of the college market, those with the high-end analytical and problem-solving skills who can compete on the world market or game the financial system or deal with new government regulations, have done great. But the bottom half of the top, those engineers and programmers working on more routine tasks and not actively engaged in developing new ideas or recombining existing technologies or thinking about what new customers want, have done poorly. They've been much more exposed to global competitors that make them easily substitutable."

Those at the high end of the bottom half high school grads in construction or manufacturing have been clobbered by global competition and immigration, added Katz. "But those who have some interpersonal skills the salesperson who can deal with customers face to face or the home contractor who can help you redesign your kitchen without going to an architect have done well."

Just being an average accountant, lawyer, contractor or assembly-line worker is not the ticket it used to be. As Daniel Pink, the author of "A Whole New Mind," puts it: In a world in which more and more average work can be done by a computer, robot or talented foreigner faster, cheaper "and just as well," vanilla doesn't cut it anymore. It's all about what chocolate sauce, whipped cream and cherry you can put on top. So our schools have a doubly hard task now not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.

Bottom line: We're not going back to the good old days without fixing our schools as well as our banks.

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Please Sir; Can I Have My Blood Back?
by Greg Larson

(2009, University of Illinois)

Nine years ago the Yanomami Indian tribes of Brazil and Venezuela asked for their blood samples to be returned after they learned that the researchers did not use all of the blood that was forcefully collected over forty years ago - nine years later the blood samples sit, unused, in freezers around the United States. The organizations holding these samples – mainly Pennsylvania State University and the National Cancer Institute – have used delay tactics to hold the blood and forced the Brazilian Government to intervene. These organizations still won’t respond to the Yanomami tribes’ request.

Visiting anthropologists to the Yanomami introduced numerous diseases to the tribes and caused massive epidemics to ensue. The Yanomami were led to believe that their blood would lead to the cure of these diseases. Researchers effectively spread fear and disease through the tribes. One Yanomami, Davi Kopenawa, says in Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy and What We Can Learn From It “when he [the Yanomami] didn't give up his blood, the guy was going to get sick, right? If he didn't give blood the guy was going to get sick, he was going to die. Those who were donating blood would live.”
Furthermore, although some medicine was delivered to the tribes, the Yanomami were not shown the test results of the blood – which they required when they gave their blood – and they were not cured of any diseases that infected them. No help was even sent to the tribes when a measles epidemic occurred in 1969.

Also, some Yanomami would receive trade goods – machetes, fishing poles and hooks, etc. – in exchange for their blood. This is an unfair exchange because once one tribe gives in to the researchers’ demands and accepts the trade goods, all other tribes, in turn, need to acquire those goods in order to not fall behind the other tribes’ advancements in economics and military.
Unfair methods of collection coupled with the Yanomami tribes’ agreement that the blood samples would be quickly analyzed and destroyed, not held for decades indefinitely, accounts for why the blood should be returned. The Yanomami deserve to defend their right to a decent procedure of informed consent.

The Yanomami need the blood samples returned to fulfill the funeral rights of their ancestors who gave blood. They believe that every part of a deceased person’s body needs to be destroyed for a person’s soul to be fully released from earth and enter the spiritual world. With the blood still remaining, the Yanomami believe that the spirit of the person will haunt their tribe and cause disease and war.
This belief will delay any advancements made by the Yanomami; for they will think their problems are caused by their ancestors angry spirits and will not make much progress towards understanding and analyzing a problem to further improve their civilization. They may become dependent on outsiders for their advancement and medicine as a result of this belief. We are effectively delaying an entire civilization’s progress and enhancement by illegally holding their blood. I thought America is heavily invested in the advancement of poorer civilizations.

Of course, some people believe that the human right to informed consent can be disregarded for the purpose of biomedical investigation. They believe that the blood samples’ involvement in the Human Genome Project, the study of human migration patterns, and the study of different mutations within different populations of humans, goes above everything else. Others still believe that the trade goods given to the tribes are acceptable payments and that this was an agreed upon deal from which the Yanomami are now dishonoring.

Although these are adequate reasons to maintain storage of the blood, the view that informed consent can be excused reduces this study with the Indians to that of animal experimentation. None of the agreed upon terms were met for the Yanomami; their desires should be honored and the blood returned so that they can dispose of it properly and release this heavy burden put upon them.