Education Reform - what is the writing on the wall?

This entry eventually gets to teachers' unions via Steel, Gambling, and GM.

Today's news: General Motors files for Chapter 11 protection.

Last week's news: In a bid to boost its sagging profits, Las Vegas-based casino giant Sands Corp opened a new casino in Bethlehem, PA.

Sands spent 3/4 of a Billion dollars to redevelop part of the old Bethlehem Steel mill site for the new casino. That is a lot of money, considering GM's debt after the restructuring is going to be of the order of $60B.

It seems sort of symbolic that the new casino is on the very site that for 140 years had been an integral part of the modern industrial age. Bethlehem Steel, one of the icons of the United States' industrial manufacturing prowess, finally went bankrupt 8 years ago, and its remaining assets are now in the hands of Mittal Steel.

As one prospective gambler at the new casino told a CNBC reporter - "Life goes on. We got to make the best of what we have"


Back to today's news: So today GM takes another step down a road that Bethlehem Steel has been down. Who knows whether it will find a different exit, and how far it will have to go before doing so.


Looking back at the road travelled so far, all the pundits - with the clarity of hindsight - have plenty of explanations of the writing on the wall that GM should have seen, and responded to.

Whatever your political ideology, it is clear that GM's responsiveness was hampered by its relationship with its Unions, and that they (the Unions) had a role to play in how we got here.


Education Reform: Every time I read an analysis of the woes of the United States' education system, and suggestions for improving it, I invariably run into someone suggesting that the stands taken by individual Teachers' Unions are impeding necessary reforms. Of course, there are many valid sides to this story, just as there were in the case of GM.

But the fact that such a criticism exists means that there is some writing going up on the wall this very minute.

Will we have to wait another decade or two to look back and discern what it was?