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No silver bullets. This is the simple premise of Diane Ravitch’s new book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” which is being brought out this week by Basic Books. Written by one of our nation’s most respected scholars, it has been eagerly awaited. But it has also been, at least in some quarters, anticipated with a certain foreboding, because it was likely to debunk much of the conventional — and some not so conventional — wisdom surrounding education reform. Click Image to Enlarge

What of the once-great comprehensive high schools, institutions with history and in some cases a track record of success going back generations? As time moves on, it is fast becoming clear that the new small schools, many with inane themes (how about the School of Peace and Diversity?), can never substitute for a good neighborhood high school, which can become a center of communal life and pride. Ms. Ravitch’s report underscores the fact that the trick is to fix the neighborhood schools beset with problems, not destroy them.

It is not only the foundations that Ms. Ravitch blames for the current crisis: government has also failed in the attempt to reform the schools from above, lacking a clear perspective of how schools work on a day-to-day basis. Thus, the major federal initiative, No Child Left Behind, well intentioned as it may have been, ended up damaging the quality of education, not improving it. While the federal government declares schools as “failing” and prescribes sanctions for schools not meeting its goal of “annual yearly progress,” it is the states that are allowed to write and administer the tests. This has led to a culture of ever easier tests and more test preparation rather than real instruction. More ominously, it led to such scandals as the New York State Education Department lowering the “cut scores” that define the line between passing and failing. Ms. Ravitch suggests that the proper roles of the states and federal government have been reversed under NCLB. Maybe the standards for achievement should be set in Washington, which, after all, administers the National Assessment of Educational Progress , and the solutions found at the local level, using the accurate data provided by Washington. Instead of moving in a different direction from the failed NCLB model of the Bush Administration, the Obama administration has adopted and expanded on them.

1. The private sector will create enough jobs, if the government gets out of the way. Possibly, but when? Right now more than 2.7 percent of our entire population has been unemployed for more than 26 weeks -- an all time-record since the government began compiling that data in 1948. No one is predicting that the private sector is about to go on a hiring spree. In fact, many analysts think it'll take more than a decade for the labor market to fully recover. You can't tell the unemployed to wait ten years. Counting on a private sector market miracle is an exercise in faith-based economics. There simply is no evidence that the private sector can create on its own the colossal number of jobs we need. If we wanted to go down to a real unemployment rate of 5% ("full employment"), we'd have to create about 22.4 million jobs. (See Leo Hindery's excellent accounting.) We'd need over 100,000 new jobs every month just to keep up with population growth. It's not fair to the unemployed to pray for private sector jobs that might never come through. 2. We can't afford it. Funding public sector jobs will explode the deficit and the country will go broke: This argument always makes intuitive sense because most of us think of the federal budget as a giant version of our household budget - we've got to balance the books, right? I'd suggest we leave that analogy behind. Governments just don't work the same way as families do. We have to look at the hard realities of unemployment, taxes and deficits. For instance, every unemployed worker is someone who is not paying taxes. If we're not collecting taxes from the unemployed, then we've got to collect more taxes from everyone who is working. Either that, or we have to cut back on services. If we go with option one and raise taxes on middle and low income earners, they'll have less money to spend on goods and services. When demand goes down, businesses contract--meaning layoffs in the private sector. But if we go with option two and cut government services, we'll have to lay off public sector workers. Now we won't be collecting their taxes, and the downward cycle continues. Plus, we don't get the services. Or, we could spend the money to create the jobs and just let the deficit rise a bit more. The very thought makes politicians and the public weak in the knees. But in fact this would start a virtuous cycle that would eventually reduce the deficit: Our newly reemployed people start paying taxes again. And with their increased income, they start buying more goods and services. This new demand leads to more hiring in the private sector. These freshly hired private sector workers start paying taxes too. The federal budget swells with new revenue, and the deficit drops. But let's say you just can't stomach letting the deficit rise right now. You think the government is really out of money--or maybe you hate deficits in principle. There's an easy solution to your problem. Place a windfall profits tax on Wall Street bonuses. Impose a steep tax on people collecting $3 million or more. (Another way to do it is to tax the financial transactions involved in speculative investments by Wall Street and the super-rich.) After all, those fat bonuses are unearned: The entire financial sector is still being bankrolled by the taxpayers, who just doled out $10 trillion (not billion) in loans and guarantees. Besides, taxing the super-rich doesn't put a dent in demand for goods and services the way taxing other people does. The rich can only buy so much. The rest goes into investment, much of it speculative. So a tax on the super rich reduces demand for the very casino type investments that got us into this mess.

3. Private sector jobs are better that public sector jobs. Why is that? There is a widely shared perception that having a public job is like being on the dole, while having a private sector job is righteous. Maybe people sense that in the private sector you are competing to sell your goods and services in the rough and tumble of the marketplace--and so you must be producing items that buyers want and need. Government jobs are shielded from market forces. But think about some of our greatest public employment efforts. Was there anything wrong with the government workers at NASA who landed us on the moon? Or with the public sector workers in the Manhattan project charged with winning World War II? Are teachers at public universities somehow less worthy than those in private universities? Let's be honest: a good job is one that contributes to the well-being of society and that provides a fair wage and benefits. During an employment crisis, those jobs might best come directly from federal employment or indirectly through federal contracts and grants to state governments. This myth also includes the notion that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector. Sometimes it is, but mostly it isn't. Take health care, which accounts for nearly 17 percent of our entire economy. Medicare is a relative model of efficiency, with much lower administrative costs than private health insurers. The average private insurance company worker is far less productive and efficient than an equivalent federal employee working for Medicare. (See study by Himmelstein, Woolhandler and Wolfe) 4. Big government suffocates our freedom. The smaller the central government, the better -- period, the end. This is the hardest argument to refute because it is about ideology not facts. Simply put, many Americans believe that the federal government is bad by definition. Some don't like any government at all. Others think power should reside mostly with state governments. This idea goes all the way back to the anti-federalists led by Thomas Jefferson, who feared that yeomen farmers would be ruled (and feasted upon) by far-away economic elites who controlled the nation's money and wealth. In modern times this has turned into a fear of a totalitarian state with the power to tell us what to do and even deny us our most basic liberties. A government that creates millions of jobs could be seen as a government that's taking over the economy (like taking over GM). It just gets bigger and more intrusive. And more corrupt and pork-ridden. (There's no denying we've got some federal corruption, but again the private sector is hardly immune to the problem. In fact, it lobbies for the pork each and every day.) It's probably impossible to convince anyone who hates big government to change their minds. But we need to consider what state governments can and cannot do to create jobs. Basically, their hands are tied precisely because they are not permitted by our federal constitution to run up debt. So when tax revenues plunge (as they still are doing) states have to cut back services and/or increase taxes. In effect, the states act as anti-stimulus programs. They are laying off workers and will continue to do so until either the private sector or the federal government creates many more jobs. Unlike the feds, states are in no position to regulate Wall Street. They're not big enough, not strong enough and can easily be played off against each other. While many fear big government, I fear high unemployment even more. That's because the Petri dish for real totalitarianism is high unemployment -- not the relatively benign big government we've experienced in America. When people don't have jobs and see no prospect for finding them, they get desperate -- maybe desperate enough to follow leaders who whip up hatred and trample on people's rights in their quest for power. Violent oppression of minority groups often flows from high unemployment. So does war. No thanks. I'll take a government that puts people to work even if it has to hire 10 million more workers itself. We don't have to sacrifice freedom to put people to work. We just have to muster the will to hire them.

So in coming to this meeting of some of the very best in the field -- from Elizabeth Warren to George Soros -- I was keen to hear just what the strategy was to restore us to some sort of financial sanity. How could we avoid it again? Yet through the course of the morning, I was struck by two very different and very depressing points. The first is that things are actually much worse than anyone ever talks about. The pivot points of our financial system -- the infrastructure that lets free markets produce real wealth -- have become profoundly corrupted. Balance sheets are "fictions," as Professor Frank Partnoy put it. Trillions of dollars in liability hide behind these fictions. And as expert after expert demonstrated, practically every one of the design flaws that led to the collapse of the past few years remains essentially unchanged within our financial system still. That bubble burst, but we can already see the soaring profits of the same firms that sucked billions in taxpayer funds. The cycle has started again. But the second point was even worse. Expert after expert spoke as if the problems we faced were simple math errors. As if regulators had just miscalculated, like a pilot who accidentally overshoots the run way, or an engineer who mis-estimates the weight of cargo on a plane. And so, because these were mere errors, people spoke as if these errors could be corrected by a bunch of good ideas. The morning was filled with good ideas. An angry earnestness was the tone of the day.

There were exceptions. The increasingly prominent folk-hero for the middle class, Elizabeth Warren, tied the endless list of problems to the endless power of "the banking lobby." But that framing was rare. Again and again, we were led back to a frame of bad policies that smart souls could correct. At least if "the people" could be educated enough to demand that politicians do something sensible. This is a profound denial. The gambling on Wall Street was not caused by the equivalent of errors in arithmetic. It was caused by a corruption of the system by which we regulate those markets. No true theorist of free markets -- and certainly none of the heroes of even the libertarian right -- believe that infrastructure markets like financial systems can be left free of any regulation, including the regulation of rules against fraud. Yet that ignorant anarchy was the precise rule that governed a large part of our financial system. And not by accident: An enormous amount of political influence was brought to bear on the regulators of these core institutions of a free market to get them to turn a blind eye to Wall Street's "innovations." People who should have known better yielded to this political pressure. Smart people did stupid things because "the politics" of doing right was impossible. Why? Why was their no political return from sensible policy? The answer is so obvious that one feels stupid to even remark it. Politicians are addicts. Their dependency is campaign cash. And in their obsessive search for campaign funds, they let these funders convince them that for the first time in capitalism's history, markets didn't need the basic array of trust-producing regulation. They believed this insanity because it made it easier for them -- in good faith -- to accept the money and steer financial policy over the cliff. Not a single presentation the whole morning focused this part of the problem. There wasn't even speculation about how we could build an alternative to this campaign funding system of pathological dependency, so that policy makers could afford to hear sense rather than obsessively seek campaign dollars. The assembled experts were even willing to brainstorm about how to educate ordinary Americans about the intricacies of financial regulation. But the idea of changing the pathological economy of influence that governs how Washington governs wasn't even a hint. We need to admit our (democracy's) problem. We need to get beyond this stage of denial. We need to recognize that until we release our leaders from a system that forces them to ignore good sense when there is an opportunity for large campaign cash, we won't have policy that makes sense. Wall Street continues unchanged because the Congress that would change it is already shuttling to Wall Street fundraisers. Both parties are already pandering to this power, so they can find the fix to fund the next cycle of campaigns. Throughout the morning, expert after expert celebrated the brilliance in Franklin Roosevelt's response to the Nation's last truly great financial collapse. They yearned for a modern version of his system of regulation. But we won't get to Franklin Roosevelt's brilliance till we accept Teddy Roosevelt's insight -- that privately funded public elections tend inevitably towards this kind of corruption. And until we solve that (eminently solvable) problem, we won't make any progress in making America's finances safe again.

For most of the last 1,500 years, the river supported a sustainable salmon economy. Salmon were at the heart of all the Klamath’s tribal cultures, and Indians were careful not to over-harvest them. Each summer, the lower Klamath’s Yurok and Hoopa tribes blocked the upstream paths of spawning salmon with barriers; then, after ten days of fishing, they removed the barriers, allowing upstream tribes to take their share. As the salmon completed their lifecycle, dying in the waters where they’d been spawned, they enriched the watershed with nutrients ingested during years in the ocean. Among the beneficiaries were at least 22 species of mammals and birds that eat salmon. Even the salmon carcasses that bears left behind on the riverbanks fertilized trees that provided shade along the river’s banks, cooling its waters so that the next generation of vulnerable juvenile salmon could survive. “We tried to go to court, to go through the political process, but it didn’t work. …The big issues were still out there, and we still had to resolve them.” Salmon’s biological family may have started in the age of dinosaurs a hundred million years ago. They’ve survived through heat waves and droughts, in rivers of varying flow, temperature, and nutrient load – but they were as ill-prepared for Europeans’ arrival as the Indians themselves. Gold miners who showed up in the mid-nineteenth century washed entire hillsides into the river with high-pressure hoses and scoured the river’s bed with dredges. Loggers dragged trees down streambeds, causing massive erosion, and dumped sawdust into the river, smothering incubating salmon eggs. Cattle grazed at the river’s edge, causing soil erosion and destroying shade-giving vegetation. Farmers diverted water to feed their crops. The dams were the crowning blows. Between 1908 and 1962, six dams were built on the Klamath. The tallest, the 173-foot-high Iron Gate, is the farthest downstream, and definitively blocked salmon from the river’s upper quarter – after it was built, the river’s salmon population plummeted. In addition, the dams devastated water quality by promoting thick growths of toxic algae in the reservoirs. For Klamath basin farmers, however, the dams were deemed indispensable, as they generated hydropower that made pumping of their irrigation water possible.To the farmers, the potential loss of the dams’ hydropower was considered no less crippling than an end to Klamath-supplied irrigation.

For most of the last century, the farmers were oblivious to the damage that dams and water diversions caused downstream, while the tribes and commercial fishermen quietly seethed. The annual salmon run, once so abundant that people caught fish with their hands, was roughly pegged at more than a million fish at its peak; in recent years it has dropped to perhaps 200,000 in good years, and as low as 12,000 – below the minimum believed necessary to sustain the runs – in bad years. Spring Chinook, which once comprised the river’s dominant salmon run, entirely disappeared. Two fish species – the Lost River sucker and the shortnose sucker – that once supported a commercial fishery, were listed as endangered in 1988. Coho salmon were listed as threatened nine years later. All this has had a devastating impact on the tribes. Traditionally able to sustain themselves throughout the year on seasonal migrations of the river’s salmon, trout, and candlefish, tribal members suffered greatly as the runs declined or went extinct. For four decades beginning in 1933, the tribes were barred from fishing the river even as commercial fishermen went unrestricted. Members of the Karuk tribe once consumed an estimated average of 450 pounds of salmon a year; a 2004 survey found that the average had dropped to five pounds a year. The survey linked salmon’s absence to epidemics of diabetes and heart disease that now plague the Karuk. The 2001 cutoff left farmers without irrigated water for the first time in the Klamath Project’s history. Over the next four months, many farmers performed repeated acts of civil disobedience, most notably when a bucket brigade passed pails of banned water from its lake storage to an irrigation canal while thousands of onlookers cheered. The protests attracted Christian-fundamentalist, anti-government, and property rights advocates from throughout the West; former Idaho Congresswoman Helen Chenoweth-Hage likened the farmers’ struggle to the American Revolution.