Equality, Opportunity, Equity

In his January 23rd column in the New York Times entitled “Free Market Socialism”, David Brooks writes:

"Democrats, meanwhile, have shifted their emphasis from lifting up the poor to pounding down the rich. Democratic candidates no longer emphasize early childhood education and community-building. Instead they embrace the pseudo-populist Occupy Wall Street hokum — the opiate of the educated classes.

This materialistic ethos emphasizes reducing inequality instead of expanding opportunity. Its policy prescriptions begin (and sometimes end) with raising taxes on the rich. This makes you feel better if you detest all the greed-heads who went into finance. It does nothing to address those social factors, like family breakdown, that help explain why American skills have not kept up with technological change."

I must say that I admire and respect Mr. Brooks immensely, but as far as his belief that there exists a chasm between expanding opportunity and reducing inequality, he misses the point more than slightly. In fact, he is wrong.

In a January 4, 2012 article in The Atlantic entitled "What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success", Anu Partanen lucidly points out that perhaps the best public school system on the planet exists in Finland.

Partanen often quotes Pasi Sahlberg, director of the Finnish Ministry of Education's Center for International Mobility and author of the new book Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland?

Now to the point--to hit the mark squarely with no deviance--I return to Sahlberg: " It is possible to create equality. And perhaps even more important -- as a challenge to the American way of thinking about education reform -- Finland's experience shows that it is possible to achieve excellence by focusing not on competition, but on cooperation, and not on choice, but on equity."

The problem facing America is the economic inequality of society, and this is precisely the problem that Finnish education reform addresses.

I believe that the Occupy Movement, if it is stressing anything, is stressing equity; both in the financial sphere and our society as a whole. By striving toward equality we cannot help but provide opportunity--for all. To rewrite Mr. Brooks: To ensure there’s skilled labor for US businesses we must champion different policies: successful training programs, better coordination between colleges and employers, better treatment for superstarteachers, more child care options and better early childhood education. 

How? By focusing more on equality and equity both in education and our society at large and less on competition. That's how.