Here is an example of extreme cognitive dissonance. Teachers are striking across the United States. Thousands of educators have been walking off the job in protest at radical public budget cuts over the past several years. These cuts have left them under-paid, overworked, and using their own money to supplement[31](1.extravagant 2. minuscule 3. balanced) budgets that result in books held together with duct tape and rain pouring into classrooms through ceiling holes.
At the same time, business leaders, who have spent the past year successfully lobbying for tax “reform,” are complaining that politicians have to do something about the [32](1. bitter taste 2. happy medium 3. sad state) of American schools. They complain that the failing American education system has made it impossible to find the workers needed to maintain their competitiveness on the international stage.
They are right about that. While the US will probably have created about 15 million new jobs in the decade leading up to 2020, 65% will require post-secondary education and training beyond high school.Meanwhile, only 54% of Americans who enter tertiary education receive a degree within six years, a rate that reflects both cost inflation and the lack of preparedness with which many of them enter degree programs.
Yet there is a huge irony here: Businesses want both tax cuts and educational reform . But they refuse to acknowledge the [33)(1.elephant in the room 2. snake in the grass 3. wolf in sheep’s clothing): the incompatibility between those two things. Recent tax cuts did not cause the state teacher strikes. Education is mainly funded by state and local governments. However, they are part of a decades-long pattern of cuts in the public sector, made mainly at the [34)(1.upheaval 2. behest 3. perusal)of business lobbyists, that has battered public education, which is and always has been the great equalizer in
American society.
State funding for education hit a peak in the 1980s and has been falling ever since, a decline that has [35](1.nevertheless 2. ofcourse 3.inexplicably)created a huge class and skills gap.While the cost of a degree has risen for everyone, it has hit families in the lowest quartile of the socio-economic [36](1.spectrum 2. prism 3. continuity)the hardest.They paid 44.6% of their income for a degree in 1990, compared with 84% today.No wonder so many drop out with no diploma but huge amounts of debt—a situation that has become a “headwind” to economic growth, according to the US Federal Reserve.
This, combined with the fact that US education has not been retooled in decades and does not churn out graduates equipped to compete in the digital economy, means that there is a large class of under-employed and under-skilled American workers. According to many chief executives, economists and civil society leaders, this has become the most pressing single problem for business.
“There are a lot of individual efforts on the part of business to address the skills gap,” says Darren Walker, the president of Ford Foundation. “And yet we must acknowledge that,when we prioritize tax cuts above all other policy, we risk [37](I. spiking 2. starving 3. stimulating) the public sector, and that ultimately leads to lower educational outcomes, higher inequality, and more polarized politics.”
Changing this is (38](1.something other than 2. anything other than 3. nothing short of)a national security issue. Economic research shows that only when education stays ahead of technology can countries prosper. Yet in the US, the system is so broken that the quest for education is itself leading to rising inequality and a $1.3 trillion student debt pile. This is terrible for business in a number of
ways-from the fact that unskilled , low-paid workers cannot(39](1.drive 2. lift 3. stretch) growth in an economy dominated by consumer spending, to the reality that less educated people vote for populist politicians.
Business must acknowledge this cognitive dissonance. America’s major corporate lobbying groups should take on educational reform as a national competitiveness issue , just as they did tax reform. Members should create a task force to [40](1.lay low 2. roll out 3. draw in) their own best practices at a national level and declare that they will not support tax cuts that strip education of funding.It would be good for business—and society.
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