Wb News

This is a breaking story about which I'll have more to say in a column next week, but today the National Governors' Association announced that 46 states and the District of Columbia have joined a coalition in favor of common academic standards. Only South Carolina, Alaska, Missouri, and Texas have held back. From the NGA press release:

By signing on to the common core state standards initiative, governors and state commissioners of education across the country are committing to joining a state-led process to develop a common core of state standards in English language arts and mathematics for grades K-12. These standards will be research and evidence-based, internationally benchmarked, aligned with college and work expectations and include rigorous content and skills.

The caveat here is that once the coalition develops the standards, each state will be able to choose whether or not it will actually adhere to them. Unless the federal government provides some sticks and carrots, there will be little incentive for politicians from low-performing states, like Mississippi, to enact the standards. After all, doing so would reveal just how little those states' school children are actually learning, and to what a pitifully low standard they've been held.

But this is still big news. It wasn't that long ago that proponents of common standards believed the best they could hope for were regional standards. In other words, instead of our current system of 50 different state curricula, groups of states would band together and agree to share one system. But in recent months, the political calculus has shifted considerably, with national standards emerging as education reform common ground between teachers' unions and some of their opponents within the Democratic coalition -- those who broadly support teacher merit pay, an expansion of charter schools and vouchers, and alternative-certification programs for teachers. All of these folks can agree, seemingly, that the system would benefit from some regularization.

Of course, anti-testing advocates are likely to be quite skeptical of this move, which has the potential to lead to national assessments. At this early stage, though, it is totally unclear whether common assessments would even be an outgrowth of common standards.

--Dana Goldstein

For general discussion and debate. Possible talking point: Bob Woodward's writing a book about Obama.

Since the inauguration, the Washington Post legend has been quietly reporting a new book on the Obama White House. "I'm in the preliminary stages of working on it," Woodward confirmed to me by phone recently. "I'm working on it and making progress."...Woodward has some extra motivation to fill his next book with big scoops. His fourth and final Bush book, The War Within, sold just 159,000 copies, according to Nielsen BookScan, far below his third Bush installment, State of Denial, which sold more than half a million. "The last time I talked to him about books, earlier this year, he had been lamenting the fact his last Bush book didn't sell as well," one of Woodward's friends told me.

What should we expect from this?

What's the administration's specific aim in bailing out GM? I'll give you my theory later.

For now, though, some background. First and most broadly, it doesn't make sense for America to try to maintain or enlarge manufacturing as a portion of the economy. Even if the U.S. were to seal its borders and bar any manufactured goods from coming in from abroad -- something I don't recommend -- we'd still be losing manufacturing jobs. That's mainly because of technology.

When we think of manufacturing jobs, we tend to imagine old-time assembly lines populated by millions of blue-collar workers who had well-paying jobs with good benefits. But that picture no longer describes most manufacturing. I recently toured a U.S. factory containing two employees and 400 computerized robots. The two live people sat in front of computer screens and instructed the robots. In a few years this factory won't have a single employee on site, except for an occasional visiting technician who repairs and upgrades the robots.

Factory jobs are vanishing all over the world. Even China is losing them. The Chinese are doing more manufacturing than ever, but they're also becoming far more efficient at it. They've shuttered most of the old state-run factories. Their new factories are chock full of automated and computerized machines. As a result, they don't need as many manufacturing workers as before.

Economists at Alliance Capital Management took a look at employment trends in 20 large economies and found that between 1995 and 2002 -- before the asset bubble and subsequent bust -- 22 million manufacturing jobs disappeared. The U.S. wasn't even the biggest loser. We lost about 11 percent of our manufacturing jobs in that period, but the Japanese lost 16 percent of theirs. Even developing nations lost factory jobs: Brazil suffered a 20 percent decline, and China had a 15 percent drop.

What happened to manufacturing? In two words, higher productivity. As productivity rises, employment falls because fewer people are needed. In this, manufacturing is following the same trend as agriculture. A century ago, almost 30 percent of adult Americans worked on a farm. Nowadays, fewer than 5 percent do. That doesn't mean the U.S. failed at agriculture. Quite the opposite. American agriculture is a huge success story. America can generate far larger crops than a century ago with far fewer people. New technologies, more efficient machines, new methods of fertilizing, better systems of crop rotation, and efficiencies of large scale have all made farming much more productive.

Manufacturing is analogous. In America and elsewhere around the world, it's a success. Since 1995, even as manufacturing employment has dropped around the world, global industrial output has risen more than 30 percent.

More after the jump.

--Robert Reich

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