Education and Business
What Thomas Friedman Doesn't Say, Conclusion
Published April 25, 2009 @ 08:04AM PT
[Part One here. Two here. Three here.]
Friedman still hasn't said exactly what "we should have done," though, to prevent our hypothetical "education recession." He delivers that in his conclusion:
It is not that we are failing across the board. There are huge numbers of exciting education innovations in America today — from new modes of teacher compensation to charter schools to school districts scattered around the country that are showing real improvements based on better methods, better principals and higher standards.
In other words, pretty much the Duncan-Klein-Rhee agenda. I mis-spoke in an earlier post when I said Friedman parrots the McKinsey report's conclusions. They only touch on teacher compensation, better standards, applying best practices from better-performing districts to worse-performing ones. Still, Friedman's only re-hashing the bromides echoing from Arne Duncan and, sadly, President Obama across all the mainstream media, most of which are far more problematic than the media suggests.
But it's Friedman's conclusion that really saddens me:
With Wall Street’s decline, though, many more educated and idealistic youth want to try teaching. Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America, called the other day with these statistics about college graduates signing up to join her organization to teach in some of our neediest schools next year: “Our total applications are up 40 percent. Eleven percent of all Ivy League seniors applied, 16 percent of Yale’s senior class, 15 percent of Princeton’s, 25 percent of Spellman’s and 35 percent of the African-American seniors at Harvard. In 130 colleges, between 5 and 15 percent of the senior class applied.”
Part of it, said Kopp, is a lack of jobs elsewhere. But part of it is “students responding to the call that this is a problem our generation can solve.” May it be so, because today, educationally, we are not a nation at risk. We are a nation in decline, and our nakedness is really showing. (emphasis added)
Let's parse this: "Wall Street's decline" is causing more elite school grads to apply for teaching jobs. And we're supposed to believe this is due to a sudden "idealism" instead of a sudden evaporation of the usual options for Ivy grads. (And let's note that Friedman here reports an opinion straight from Kopp's chummy and conflict-of-interest-laden phone chat with him - another instance of parroting instead of questioning.) As the Daily Beast puts it,
For other students, the sinking economy is increasing interest in jobs whose low-pay, high-karma profile used to make them less sexy than higher-paying jobs in fields like investment banking. Apparently it’s easy to be altruistic when no one else is offering you a job, and nonprofits are reporting large increases in applications.
Is this a new wave of Obama-inspired community service, or just would-be investment bankers looking to take a few years to build their resumes, earn a small but steady paycheck and continue with their more lucrative plans once the Dow is back over 10000? Probably a combination of both.
Even assuming idealism is at the core of this, there are almost four million teachers in America. Elite schools don't graduate a sliver of that number. It's not a scalable solution, even if the "idealistic" (and option-less) young stayed on the job. And they typically don't.
Dan Brown, also responding to Friedman's piece, expands on these obvious facts, showing the lead beneath Friedman's silver-plated bullet:
I'm concerned that [Teach for America is] being propped up by many as a cure-all for America's education woes, when it is nothing of the kind. Teach For America currently contains 6,200 corps members, which constitutes about 0.16 percent of the 3.9 million K-12 teachers in America. And for many within that fraction of a percent, it's a two-year jump in the pool, not a long term endeavor.
. . . . Sure, many Ivy Leaguers are interested to work in underserved schools. TFA may represent an "island of excellence," as Friedman puts it, but it's not a replicable model, since the premise of its success is predicated on exclusivity. Its model of skimming the cream of America's top colleges to serve in 29 regions around the country (the Pacific Northwest is ostensibly on its own) is unequipped to strike at the heart of our costly teacher turnover crisis and its searing impact on our achievement gap.
Brown proceeds to offer another scenario of different economic costs related not to the sensationalistic (and hypothetical) "long-term recession" purportedly caused by the achievement gap, but to the failure to retain more career teachers over the long term:
In 2007, the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (NCTAF) conducted an extensive and illuminating study on teacher turnover, which calculated an annual nationwide cost of over $7 billion for the replacement of people leaving the profession.
That's staggering, and doesn't take into account the invaluable institutional knowledge or student-teacher relationships lost when experienced teachers depart the job early and overwhelmed rookies run for the exit. The study's findings on the importance of recruiting and retaining quality teachers speak directly to the long term health of our education system-- and our economy.
Overall, the most saddening thing about both Friedman's piece and the McKinsey study itself is that they do not say anything to address the poverty at the root of the achievement gap. No talk of the absence of parental support - or even presence - for poor children due to the absence of a living wage law; no talk of all the other roots of poverty that the United States chooses not to address when it views schools through on Overton Window opening out to a thoroughly rightward view. That rightward view got its biggest push with the release of "A Nation at Risk" back in 1983, which the McKinsey Report echoes resoundingly - this time with an appeal to all our pocket-books. (It's worth noting that the economic model created for the McKinsey report, and upon which the whole "recession" scenario is founded, is based on the theories of Eric Hanushek, a free-market fundamentalist and long-time advocate of vouchers whose research has been criticised for cooking data to support his ideology.* Thomas Friedman doesn't say that, but it's true.)
If America's most educated elite in Washington and on Wall Street - whose elite college children are now signing up in droves to save us all, we're to believe, through Teach for America - hadn't given 1.3 trillion in tax cuts to the very wealthiest during the Bush administration, spent another trillion on the Iraq invasion, and cost the rest of us trillions more in bailing out Wall Street after de-regulating it (out of trust for its Ivy-educated leaders), we'd be in a completely different America today - and one that could withstand these hypothetical costs.
Friedman writes in this piece that, to deal with this "decline," we need a "sense of urgency and follow-through that the economic and moral stakes demand." A truly moral stance would be to look away from the McKinsey report's manufactured crisis, and address instead the real one: the economic decline, for all but the very wealthiest, that has overtaken America in the past three decades.
And when Friedman, quoting the far-from-average Warren Buffett, says that the economic meltdown shows that schools are "swimming without a swimsuit," I can't help but wonder if Friedman is not revealing his own nakedness. We all have opinions, and Friedman's piece is just an opinion column, after all. And I'm sure Friedman is a decent man in many ways. But the opinions in "Swimming Without a Swimsuit" seem to come from one who has for far too long been swimming with . . . the Suits.
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(More to come on the McKinsey Report itself.)
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*Here's a snippet from Hanushek that should give us more pause now than it did before the deregulatory crows came home to roost last year:
The United States has led the world in fostering the elements of a strongly functioning and growing economy. These include a mature system of property rights, the maintenance of generally open and competitive labor and product markets, minimal intrusion of government through regulations and taxation, and, of course, a broad system of education and human-capital development. (Source: Hanushek, “Education and the Economy: Our School Performance Matters,” Education Week 24(21), February 2, 2005. Pdf here.)
Image by keso
What Thomas Friedman Doesn't Say, Part Three
Published April 23, 2009 @ 07:03PM PT
Recap: In Part One, we saw how Thomas Friedman's op-ed divorces the McKinsey Group report's comparison of education's purported "good years" during the '50s and '60s from the wider context of those decades' fairer tax burden and narrower wealth gap: he fixates on comparing test scores between now and then, and fails to compare the corresponding division of wealth. We then noted Friedman's failure to go beyond parroting McKinsey's interpretation of the international rankings from PISA test scores, and let education scholar Gerald Bracey complicate those interpretations.
In Part Two, we discovered that the McKinsey Group, far from being "neutral," was instrumental in creating the blueprint for the magnificently corrupt Enron group, but somehow managed to survive the fallout from that scandal with enough credibility to be championed by Mr. Friedman and the New York Times. I'd already noted in Part One that the McKinsey report claimed to be neutral, but had on its steering committee the anything-but-neutral wing of the anti-union privatization reformers associated with NYC schools chancellor Joel Klein and his Education Equality Project.
New York education professor and Change.org contributor Jessica Shiller added in comments that Klein has the McKinsey Group on the NYC schools payroll for consultancy services which, if true, further undercuts their neutrality claim.
Friedman doesn't say any of this in his column. He just uses his position at the most influential newspaper in America to draw conclusions from McKinsey's report of "how far we have fallen behind in K-12 education and how much it is now costing us." As we'll see, Friedman doesn't draw conclusions about that cost at all; instead, he merely rubber-stamps the McKinsey report's conclusions in an exercise that's less analysis than PR summary.
About those costs:
Friedman writes (emphasis added),
Using an economic model created for this study, McKinsey showed how much those gaps are costing us. Suppose, it noted, “that in the 15 years after the 1983 report ‘A Nation at Risk’ sounded the alarm about the ‘rising tide of mediocrity’ in American education,” the U.S. had lifted lagging student achievement to higher benchmarks of performance? What would have happened?
Let's stop here for a second. If Friedman had given a full disclosure about the history of the McKinsey group - its results with Enron, its conflicts of interest with Joel Klein and the EEP - we might be less ready to follow Friedman's argument that it's "model" "shows" anything. Even without such disclosure, we still have cause to ask about Friedman's easy readiness to accept that a think tank's "economic model created for this study" is a valid one. Friedman lays no claim to expertise in evaluating such models, and shows no evidence that he approached this one with any skepticism.
On the contrary, with the same lack of complexity he showed in his infamous "Iraq: Suck. On. This" support for the Bush administration's "model" for invading Iraq, Friedman barges straight past all such complexity to tell us that the hypothetical model is the reality; it shows us the "costs." Never mind that his text itself tells us this is an exercise in "supposing." Never mind, too, that the costs of the Iraq war - which Friedman supported as our opportunity to tell the Islamic world that some of its behavior, per Friedman, "is not okay" - will amount to around $3 trillion (and that's a low estimate from the Washington Post).
Friedman shows a similar lack of investigative skepticism when he barges past the McKinsey report's citation of the 1983 report, "A Nation at Risk," as the marker for when "reform" should have begun. Anybody familiar with the report knows "A Nation at Risk" was an extremely ideological piece, bordering on propaganda for business interests wanting to feed at the trough of public education funds - while simultaneously undermining the entire public school system. (Gerald Bracey offers a solid refutation of its claims here.) Here's Alex Molnar of Arizona State University, Tempe, discussing A Nation at Risk at the 2003 conference of the decidedly mainstream Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD):
At the same time . . . the corporations were supporting the ideology behind "A Nation at Risk" and demanding that schools improve, they were also demanding a whole host of economic development strategies which had the effect of knocking the pins out from public funding for public schools. Economic development strategies, like tax incremental financing, industrial revenue bonding, equipment and inventory tax exemptions, and so on, all had the effect of transferring the tax liability, to a very large extent, from corporations to individual homeowners. And with the predictable consequence that, by the mid- and late-eighties and early-nineties, there were tax limitations measures on the ballot in many States, as homeowners found that they were literally sometimes, particularly fixed-income senior citizens and blue-collar workers, who saw their income declining throughout the eighties and into the nineties, that they literally had a choice to pay their ever-escalating public school tax bills or cap the amount of money. The only way they could give themselves a raise was to lower their taxes.
So, on the one hand, you have the explosion of school-business partnerships; on the other hand, you have the embrace of economic development strategies, which have the effect of constricting the resources available for public education.
Friedman doesn't say anything about "A Nation at Risk." Continuing to avoid any mention of the effect of tax policy on education, he just repeats McKinsey's propagandistic meme of that report's "alarm" about the "rising tide of mediocrity," and in effect implies that all would be well, and we wouldn't have suffered the McKinsey report's hypothetical "costs," if we'd just given public schools, as well as tax breaks, to the business sector during the Reagan administration.
And what are those costs, according to Friedman? They're whatever the McKinsey Group says they are:
The answer, says McKinsey: If America had closed the international achievement gap between 1983 and 1998 and had raised its performance to the level of such nations as Finland and South Korea, United States G.D.P. in 2008 would have been between $1.3 trillion and $2.3 trillion higher. If we had closed the racial achievement gap and black and Latino student performance had caught up with that of white students by 1998, G.D.P. in 2008 would have been between $310 billion and $525 billion higher. If the gap between low-income students and the rest had been narrowed, G.D.P. in 2008 would have been $400 billion to $670 billion higher.
So there's "the answer," in black and white (never mind its hypothetical foundations). If only we we'd done whatever it was we should have done to make the immensely more populated, more multi-cultural, more multi-linguistic, and much-more-mired-in-poverty America more like Finland and Korea, 2008 would have almost paid for the Iraq war.
Friedman still hasn't told us McKinsey's "answers" about exactly what it is that we should have done. More on that in Part Four.
Image by Charles Haynes
What Thomas Friedman Doesn't Say, Part Two
Published April 22, 2009 @ 08:07PM PT
[Part One here.]
After posting Part One, I learned more from Fred Klonsky about the McKinsey group behind the report Friedman touts:
McKinsey has its own problematic track record. . . . McKinsey [coached] Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling at Enron. They created the blueprint for Enron. Remember Enron?
In an article in the New Yorker a few years ago, writer Macolm Gladwell wrote:
The reputations of Jeffrey Skilling and Kenneth Lay, the company’s two top executives, have been destroyed. Arthur Andersen, Enron’s auditor, has been driven out of business, and now investigators have turned their attention to Enron’s investment bankers. The one Enron partner that has escaped largely unscathed is McKinsey, which is odd, given that it essentially created the blueprint for the Enron culture.
So McKinsey was a player when Enron's world went flat. Friedman leaves this background out too. No need to look back while moving forward, as the new mantra goes. We should presumably trust that McKinsey's new blueprint for education will do students, teachers, and parents better than Enron did its employees and shareholders. If the liberal New York Times says it's so, it must be okay.
Back to the op-ed. Freidman continues quoting McKinsey:
There are millions of kids who are in modern suburban schools “who don’t realize how far behind they are,” said Matt Miller, one of the authors. “They are being prepared for $12-an-hour jobs — not $40 to $50 an hour.”
What Miller, through Friedman, doesn't say is that there aren't enough $40 to $50 an hour jobs for our top students now. They've been outsourced, pay-reduced, or otherwise Enron-ed from the landscape of American labor. Again, Gerald Bracey:
[E]ven if comparisons of average test scores were a meaningful exercise, it only looks at one dimension--the supply side. Predictably, the [PISA test] results gave rise to calls for more spending on science instruction. This ignores the fact that we have more scientists and engineers than we can absorb. In one study, Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown University and Harold Salzman of the Urban Institute found that we mint three new engineers for every new job (this is from permanent residents and citizens, not foreigners). More disturbing was the attrition rate. While educators fret over losing 50% of teachers in 5 years (and well they should), Lowell and Salzman found that engineering loses 65% in two years. Why? Low pay, lousy working conditions, little chance for advancement. American schools of engineering are dominated by foreigners because only people from third world nations can view our jobs as attractive.
Schools are doing a great job on the supply side*. Business and industry are doing a lousy job on the demand side. The oil industry, responding to increased demand for oil exploration raised the entry-level salaries for petroleum engineers by 30-60%. The number of students lining up to be petroleum engineers has doubled and enrollment at Texas Tech has increased sixfold.
There's a concept: to improve the economy and incentivize student performance, don't outsource $40 to $50 an hour jobs; instead, produce more of them in America. (Which corporation recently offered its employees to keep their jobs - but only if they moved to India, and accepted an Indian middle class salary?)
This is a detour, I know. More in Part 3.
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*I take Bracey to mean "the supply side" as demand is now. In other words, they're producing more qualified and skilled (largely white, largely affluent) students than the job market can - or is willing to - absorb.
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What Thomas Friedman Doesn't Say
Published April 22, 2009 @ 04:15PM PT
In this week's NYTimes op-ed, "Swimming Without a Suit," Thomas Friedman pulls an interesting move by connecting the Wall Street meltdown to - what else - America's "decline in education." When Friedman says "that's the conclusion [he] drew from a new study by the consulting firm McKinsey, entitled 'The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools'," he overstates the case. He's not drawing conclusions: he's summarizing those of the report. And he does so without the least sign of skepticism or analysis. Far more interesting than anything in Friedman's piece is what's not in it.
It's a prime example of what David Sirota noted about Friedman back in 2006:
Tom Friedman parrots the propaganda of Big Money, using his column to legitimize some of the worst, most working-class-persecuting policies this country has seen in the last century - all while bragging on television that he doesn't even bother read the details of the policies he advocates for.
Is the McKinsey report "propaganda of big money"? Judge for yourself. It claims to be neutral, but its steering committee consists of (billionaires Eli Broad and Mayor Bloomberg protege) Joel Klein, Klein's factually-challenged Education Equality Project (along with it's $.5 million mouthpiece Al Sharpton), and the anti-teacher-union Bill Gates, among others.
I find it hard to believe any such committee will steer any study into "neutral" ground - and McKinsey is a business consultancy firm, anyway. Friedman doesn't bother to share any of this info about the report's origins. He just passes it to Times readers an unchewed, undigested whole.
Friedman starts off with "a quick review":
In the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. dominated the world in K-12 education. We also dominated economically.
Friedman doesn't steer us into other comparisons of 1950s and '60s America with today's, so let's add this data from Robert Borosage to the mix:
The Institute for Policy Studies details the staggering contrast to the Eisenhower years. In 1955, the top 400 taxpayers averaged about $12.3 million in income (2006 dollars) and paid, after exploiting every loophole imaginable, 51.2% of that in federal income tax. A half century later, the richest 400 average a breath-taking $263.3 million in income each, and pay a mere 17.2% of that in federal income taxes. (A lower tax rate than paid by most of their secretaries).
If those 400 taxpayers had paid at the same rate in 2006 as a half century earlier, the federal treasury would have collected $35.9 billion more in revenue, or enough to double the energy and transportation budget combined. No wonder Ike, clearly a stealth "socialist", could afford to build the interstate transport system.
Call me crazy, but I suspect we could make a connection between the wealth gap and the achievement gap in those halcyon days to the "decline of education" Friedman is wringing his hands about here. (But Friedman is married to a member of a family worth over $2.5 billion dollars - pre-Wall Street decline, anyway - so that wouldn't be in his interest. This is not to attack his wealth, mind you. It's just to identify his position in America's class structure, and his relevant blind spots.)
Friedman then trots out the McKinsey report's standard fare about America's ranking on international test scores:
For instance, in the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment that measured the applied learning and problem-solving skills of 15-year-olds in 30 industrialized countries, the U.S. ranked 25th out of the 30 in math and 24th in science. That put our average youth on par with those from Portugal and the Slovak Republic, “rather than with students in countries that are more relevant competitors for service-sector and high-value jobs, like Canada, the Netherlands, Korea, and Australia,” McKinsey noted.
Education scholar Gerald Bracey's critiques of such studies are as available to Friedman as they are to me, so it's anybody's question why he parrots McKinsey instead of complicating it. Here's Bracey (emphasis added):
As usual in these comparisons, Americans in low-poverty schools look very good, even in mathematics. They would be ranked third in the 4th grade (among 36 nations), 6th in the 8th grade (among 47 nations). This is important because while other developed nations have poor children, the U.S. has a much higher proportion and a much weaker safety net. When UNICEF studied poverty in 22 wealthy nations, the U. S. ranked 21st.
Friedman's fixation on test score rankings divorced from poverty rankings needs fixing. But it's standard in education punditry today. We ignore poverty, and instead only focus on schools and teachers. Friedman follows that script with his next paragraph, in which he summarizes the McKinsey report on American high schools:
Actually, our fourth-graders compare well on such global tests with, say, Singapore. But our high school kids really lag, which means that “the longer American children are in school, the worse they perform compared to their international peers,” said McKinsey.
Again, Gerald Bracey complicates the Singapore meme:
Who cares if Singapore, with about the same population as the Washington Metro Area, and Hong Kong, with about twice that number, score high? There aren't many people there. (And, as journalist Fareed Zakariya found out, the Singapore kids fade as they become adults.)....
When Zakariya asked the Singapore Minister of Education why his high-flying students faded in after-school years, the Minister cited creativity, ambition, and a willingness to challenge existing knowledge, all of which he thought American excelled in. But, as Bob Sternberg of Tufts University has pointed out, our obsession with standardized testing has produced one of the best instruments in the nation's history for stifling creativity."
Still, there is a problem with education for many of the nation's least privileged children. So how do Friedman's solutions look? More on that in Part Two.
Image by Charles Haynes
Another (Dismally, Comically, Painfully) Bad Week for Joel Klein
Published April 17, 2009 @ 01:13PM PT
You've got to wonder if Joel Klein, Mayor Bloomberg, Eli Broad, and the whole billionaire gang are cooking up ways, now that they've largely neutralized NYC parents, to neutralize the interwebs next. The cheeky thing just won't know its place and let Klein have the last (or only) word. It must annoy him, but it may tickle you a good bit. So enjoy
Eine "Kleine" Friday Night Schadenfreude
Read:
1. Diane Ravitch's NYTimes op-ed, "Mayor Bloomberg's Crib Sheet," correcting our affably misinformed (or dammit, is it disinforming?) "Arnie" Duncan's whoppers about Bloomberg/Klein's "NYC miracle" first; then
2. Klein's NYTimes response to Ravitch, "The Chancellor's Report Card"; then
3. Aaron "skoolboy" Pallas at Gotham Schools' cool but deadly analysis of Klein's response to Ravitch, "Why NAEP Matters"; then
4. Ravitch's own delicious and, yes, devastating response to Klein's response on the NYC Public School Parents blog. A teaser:
And then there is the strange idea that NYC kids do well on state tests because they study for them, but do poorly on national tests because they don't. Of what value is it to learn to read if one can read only for state tests? Does that mean that students can't read college textbooks or work manuals because they are prepared only to take state tests?
I read a claim recently, maybe in EdWeek, that everybody with a stake in education funding is afraid to openly criticize Duncan because he holds the purse-strings to the $5 billion in "race to the top" [sic?] funds. I just hope he can read and think about what Ravitch is trying to tell him.
I know this sounds straight from a Liz Smith article, but who says this stuff can't get juicy? Bravo to Ms. Ravitch for the work.
Klein photo by azipaybarah
A Tea-bagging Resource for Current Events: Executive Pay Database
Published April 16, 2009 @ 03:04AM PT
Leave it up to Fox News to call the silly Tea Party movement a "grass-roots" affair, when it's backed by, um, Fox News, the Coors family, and other deep-pocketed conservative groups.
Here's a useful resource to pull back the curtain and reveal the wizard for the media manipulator he truly is: the 2009 Executive Paywatch Database on the AFL-CIO's website.
I searched it for Wal-Mart, and learned this: CEO H. Lee Scott's total package amounted to $29,682,064, which is equal to:
17 Nobel prize winners
74 average university presidents
74 U.S. presidents
109 AFL-CIO presidents
158 Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
729 average workers
2,178 minimum-wage earners
Assuming a (generous) 50 weeks at 8 hours a day, Scott averages roughly $15,000 per hour, or $250 per minute.
Wal-Mart is an extreme case, according to the database. Microsoft's CEO made less than $1.5 million, and Steve Jobs at Apple made less than $1.25 million. This makes the Walton pay scheme all the more interesting, since the Walton family is a major force in the education "reform" movement, and the biggest funder of non-union charter schools. Imagine being a teacher at a Wal-Mart school.
The American case is an excessive exception in international capitalism:
Different calculations of executive pay by different researchers yield different results. As Larry Bumgardner of Pepperdine University's business and management school points out, a Business Roundtable study in 2006 puts the Average Worker:CEO pay ratio at 179 to 1, while 2005 studies by "the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy, determined the ratio to be 411 to 1." (According to Bumgardner, the Economist reports "the ratio of average CEO compensation at large U.S. companies to the average production worker's pay was about 40 to 1 in 1980, [and] the ratio had risen to 85 to 1 by 1990, and then soared to about 400 to 1 by 2003.")
But the paydirt comes when Bumgardner compares American practices to those of other nations:
[E]ven if the average CEO is paid only about 200 times as much as the average employee, rather than roughly 400 times, there is little doubt that the ratio in the United States remains far higher than in other industrialized nations. According to The Wall Street Journal, in 2006, the CEO to average worker pay ratio was 11 to 1 in Japan, 15 to 1 in France, 20 to 1 in Canada, 21 to 1 in South Africa, and 22 to 1 in Britain.
What this has to do with education:
To state the obvious, the database gives real data to counter the media blitz of the "Save the Rich" cabal (and check out that link, please, for doing an Orwell on the Orwellian doublespeak of the Tea-Baggers). Without it, students are likely not to learn from Fox that Obama's tax scheme restores upper income taxes to those of the Clinton administration - hardly a socialist move:
It’s well known that tax rates on top incomes used to be far higher than they are today. The top marginal rate hovered around 90 percent in the 1940s, ’50s and early ’60s. Reagan ultimately reduced it to 28 percent, and it is now 35 percent. Obama would raise it to 39.6 percent, where it was under Bill Clinton. (source)
Here's a closing video on the value of taxes - it almost made me faint by painting teachers, for once, in a good light:
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