CNN crawler: "Feds: Mississippi runs 'school-to-prison pipeline.'" Is the rest of America doing the same?

At 5:00 p.m. Saturday night, Jim and I were watching CNN News when we saw the crawler, "Feds: Mississippi runs 'school-to-prison pipeline.'"

Are other states in America doing a dressed-up version of the same thing?

As Phil Hemingway once said at an Iowa City Community School District board meeting, "If students don't learn how to make things in high school, at least they'll learn how to make classroom chairs and desks in prison."

When we abandon vocational training in high school and high school drop-out rates are high, we have effectively abandoned the bottom half of our population. For those who can afford it, there are good private schools and good private colleges and universities that are well funded. For everyone else, there are public schools and public universities. 

Is public education keeping up? No.

In his book "Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America," Charles H. Ferguson says that American corporations aren't just sending jobs overseas to save on labor costs. He says that Americans lack the skill set needed to effectively manufacture high-tech products. When Apple turns to robotics, they hire Taiwanese-Chinese manufacturing contractors. Almost none of their highly skilled employees are American.

Ferguson wrote, "The infrastructure and skills to manufacture [Apple's] products no longer exist in the United States. American schools no longer produce enough people with enough skill to enable such manufacturing facilities to be designed, constructed, and operated in the United States." (Pages 310-311)

And that's okay with Apple. Apple's use of Chinese manufacturing is critical to obtaining access to the Chinese market. Apple isn't going to declare war on Wall Street over the future of the American labor force. Neither is Dell, Hewlett-Packard, or Google.

In 19th-century industrialized England, the government placed restrictions on child labor because children working in coal mines didn't live long enough to grow up and become an adult labor force. There is no such incentive for American companies that have gone global. 

In fact, some high-technology companies share the financial sector's interest in gutting regulation and antitrust enforcement. Lower corporate taxes mean more profit for the executives who run the companies. They don't mind that they don't have to pay their fair share in taxes or share their profits with their Chinese labor force.

At the very top of Ferguson's list of what should be done to fix our country is educational reforms:

"Improving educational opportunity and quality is fundamental. The United States cannot compete economically, elect wise leaders, or call itself a fair society if it has a 25 percent high school dropout rate, if only the wealthy can attend good schools, and if only expensive private universities are adequately funded . . . . all children deserve a fair chance. If a child is born in a poor school district, or to drug-addicted parents, it isn't the baby's fault. And yet the ways America handles public school funding, after-school programs, child nutrition, foster care, and child poverty remain shameful . . . [A] well-educated population yields a far happier, more prosperous society. As it stands, America is wasting a startlingly high fraction of its people, in ways that are painful and very expensive."

After that follow essential financial reforms to spare our economy the looting that Wall Street's financial sector engaged in in 2007 and again in 2012.

Finally, we need to "create a truly universally accessible, high speed infrastructure, both wireline and wireless . . . The United States should view broadband deployment in much the same terms that the Eisenhower administration . . . deployed the nation's highway system in the 1950s."