BY ROCHELLE RILEY
DETROIT FREE PRESS COLUMNIST
- FILED UNDER
- Commentary And Criticism
- Rochelle Riley
LANSING — In the next 20 years, America will need employees to fill an estimated 123 million high-paying, highly skilled jobs — but American students will be prepared to fill only 50 million of them, education advocate Michelle Rhee said Wednesday.
“Close to 75 million jobs will have to be outsourced to India and China,” Rhee, the former chancellor of the Washington, D.C. public schools, predicted in an interview before heading to the State Capitol to testify before a joint meeting of the Senate and House education committees and the Senate and House appropriations subcommittee on K-12 and School Aid.
Rhee, who seven weeks ago founded StudentsFirst, an advocacy organization to push for student needs the way that labor organizations push for educators, is on a whirlwind tour of American states to discuss education reforms. One of her big pushes is to change how teachers are evaluated and compensated. She wants effective teachers to be highly paid and bad teachers out of the classroom until they become effective. Rhee has traveled to Florida, Tennessee, Georgia and other states in her effort to recruit 1 million members for her organization and $1 billion on behalf of children.
Here in Michigan, she began her day on WJR 760, had a private meeting with legislators and then spoke at a lunch sponsored by the Michigan Council of Charter School Authorizers. That was followed by an unscheduled and hastily arranged private meeting with Gov. Rick Snyder before Rhee’s 3 p.m. testimony before legislators.
It’s all part of waking up a country that is slowly ruining its future by not ensuring it has an adequate work force.
The sad thing, Rhee said in the interview, is that business leaders nationwide know there is a problem.
“I’m hard core on the business community right now, the chambers of commerce,” she said. “No. 1, they know this stuff. They know you can’t fire people by seniority. You’ve got to do it by value. They know this, and they have refused in many cases — not in D.C. where I had support, but in many cases — to be out in front of these issues because they say, ‘Oh we don’t want the teachers’ unions to boycott our company.’”
Rhee also said that Americans must begin to see education reform in a new light.
“I believe the problems in public education today have largely been framed as problems with poor and minority kids in inner city schools,” she said. “And there’s only so much you’re gong to do to fight for other people’s kids. Where you really get a movement is when they feel their livelihood or their family is being threatened.
"So what we have to do make the connection and let them know that your kids out in the suburbs aren’t doing all that well either," she said. "The top 5% of kids in America are 23rd out of 29 nations. In the long run, your businesses will not be able to thrive without a skilled workforce. So we have to make those connections. As long as they think it’s charity work for someone else, they’re not going to do it.”
Contact ROCHELLE RILEY: rriley99@freepress.com
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