Charlie Rose

esantoro  12/17/2008 06:50 PM Report

Porter talks about the need not to spout the same old cant, yet he spouts the same old cant about education and _A Nation at Risk_. What he doesn't talk about is the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965 that opened the doors of immigration that had been closed since the 1920's. The U.S. did this out of the same need it had during the second half of the nineteenth century: cheap labor for a burgeoning service economy.

The twenty years between 1965 and 1985 saw an increase of students from lower socio-economic groups and students whose native language was not English. The U.S. did little to invest in education for this changing demographics. What little it did was siphoned off to corporations with little going to mainstream education. Search the archives of The American Prospect for relevant research.

Talk about education reform is a scapegoat to preclude discussion of the U.S.'s unwillingness to bolster the middle class, which holds requisite opportunities for upward mobility for all. When the U.S. looks at its ethnic makeup of the last thirty years, it shudders in disgust and does all it can to pretend that America is something other than it is. It's our national class version of white flight.

Like others who regurgitate cant, Porter is a tool.