I agree completely that getting lower-performing students into good jobs is critical --- but the problem is a lot bigger than just education.
Good by whose standard? ...
Much of the low-skilled work cannot be priced too high, or it will disappear, with people mowing their own lawns, cleaning their own houses, and watching their own children.
Everyone has a different idea about a good job. Some people think that earning $100 per hour to write dull technical manuals is a good job. I don't. Some people think being a physicist is a good job. Other people would want nothing to do with that. Some people think that working in construction is a good job. Some don't.
The point is that, in this country,
choices are lacking where they weren't 30+ years ago. We've moved away from the ideas that 1) an adult employee working full-time deserves a living wage and 2) people do not have to go to college to get jobs that pay living wages.
People may argue that "everyone knows fast food, etc jobs don't pay living wages." But this isn't historically true. I worked in fast food as a teenager and there were adults there who earned living wages and got benefits. And they didn't all have college degrees. They earned more than us teenagers because they had been there longer and worked a full week. In other words, back then, the company saw them as being more valuable. Etc. I could give lots more examples, like the factories in a town where I lived.
These days, the cost of fast food isn't much more than it was 25 years ago (e.g. $0.50 for a
burger in 1984 and $0.89 in 2007). But profits are up. Something had to give to make that happen, and it was employee pay. Yet people spin a story that it's the fault of the employees because they didn't go to college or work harder in high school or whatever. So we continue to push low achieving students into college instead of giving them other options.
One result of all this is that everything is cascading downward. We end up with student-loan-debt-yoked young people earning minimum wage and insane competition for "elite" colleges because the state colleges aren't what they used to be for a variety of reasons. Education in the true sense of the word is becoming irrelevant. Certification is what matters. And the solution seems to be to keep pushing more kids to go to college on one side of things and more tiger parenting on another side. The (truly) gifted kids get lost in all this because they simply aren't part of the catastrophe.
