Global Strategies

Robles hits Liu with hand in hurdles final

There is a world track and field championship going on in Korea now. There was an incident in the 110 hurdles involving the Chinese track star Liu Xiang. As reported in the NY Times (here):

….. Dayron Robles of Cuba ran all the way through the finish line in the 110 hurdles and celebrated apparent victory only to find out later that he had been disqualified for obstructing his Chinese rival Liu Xiang as they came over the penultimate hurdle.

The biggest beneficiary turned out to be not the well-established Liu but the much lesser-known American Jason Richardson, a long-haired 25-year-old Texan who has soared to world-class level since moving to Los Angeles to train with the veteran coach John Smith.

Richardson, who finished a distant eighth in the United States national championships last year, ended up with the gold medal in a race that was supposed to be decided among the event’s big three: Robles, Liu and David Oliver, the American star who, like Robles and Liu, has broken the 13-second barrier.

Richardson, whose personal best remains 13.08 seconds, finished in 13.16 seconds. He has yet to join that exclusive club, but he now has a world title. “I’m just comfortable with the color silver, but now I guess I’ve got to get used to gold,” he said.

Liu was second in 13.27 seconds in his first global outdoor championship since he demoralized a nation by withdrawing from the 2008 Olympics in Beijing with an Achilles’ tendon injury……

China Daily has quotes from Liu Xiang about the incident (here):

About the obstruction

"Robles hit me twice. When I approached the ninth hurdle he pulled me, which made me unbalanced and slowed me down, but it wasn't intentional."

"At first, I thought I would be the champion or at least second, but Robles pulled me. If there was no accident, I think I could have won."

"I am OK with everything that happened today and this is a legacy to me. Robles prepared well. I tried my best (and got) no regret."

Regretful to Robles

"I am good friends with Robles. What I like is a happy camp - I don't know what to say."

"The competition is just a game to me. Everybody should enjoy it. The disqualification is very regretful."

OK with the result

"It happens all the time in the competitions. I am OK with everything that happened today and this is a legacy to me. I tried my best (and got) no regret."

"I'm satisfied with the performance and there is only little regret in the race."

Don't care about color

"I have won the gold medals at the World Championships and the Olympic Games, and medals of all colors. My aim this time was to win a medal, and I achieved it."

"I am still not in my best shape. There is still room to improve. I hope I can run within 13.00 next year, and I have full confidence about that.I think I can win a gold medal in London (Olympic Games)."

 

 

For more exports, Chamberlain overlooks educational changes

Tom Chamberlain is president of the Oregon AFL-CIO and has an op-ed in today’s Oregonian titled “Jobs, jobs, jobs: City’s next mayor must zero in on economic revival.” In part, he writes (here):

…..There is a hunger for a candidate who will stand up for working families in Portland. The next mayor needs to understand that while we are a city that prides itself on creating jobs in an emerging green economy, Portland is a major manufacturing city.

Ours is a city (and, really, a region) that makes things: from streetcars to trucks, medical equipment to microchips, solar panels and aviation parts.

The next mayor must understand that our manufactured goods are exported through our port and airport. Those facilities are the conduit that connects products from across the Northwest to markets around the world.

Our mayor must recognize that we are desperately short of the industrial land we need to expand our manufacturing base. Manufacturing jobs are the shortest path to a middle-class lifestyle. Expanding our industrial land supply can and will collide with some of our environmental values…..

Chamberlain seems to want  Portland to export more manufactured goods (made by union workers, of course). So do I. But, while he’s concerned about the physical infrastructure (industrial land and ports) for manufactured exports, he totally overlooks the need to develop our human assets for exports. Who does he think is going to design and develop Portland products for foreign markets? Or sell Portland’s products in China, India, Brazil and other emerging markets? I do not think Chamberlain has spoken or written during the past five years in support of any of the efforts to expand Mandarin and study abroad programs in Oregon’s public schools and universities. His export focus has been too narrow. If he truly care about increasing Oregon exports long-term, we could use his voice and the voice of Oregon AFL-CIO in making some simple educational changes.

Khalil Fong sings "Love" & "Nothing's gonna change my love for you"

From wikipedia (here):

Khalil Fong (Chinese: 方大同) was born on 14 July 1983. He is an American born, Hong Kong-based soul Mandopop singer-songwriter signed to the Warner Music Hong Kong.

Fong was born in Hawaii and his family moved to Shanghai when he was 6. His father, Les Fong (an American-born Chinese from San Francisco, California), wanted Khalil to learn more about Chinese culture. Six years later, they moved to Guangzhou and lived there for about 2 years. Afterwards, they moved to Hong Kong.

Khalil was self-taught on guitar and piano at the age of 15 and 18 respectively. In the meantime, he started writing songs and sent demos to music producers. When he was 16, he sent demos, which he had written, to music producers. Four years later, Warner Music Hong Kong finally recruited him as their producer. Khalil is a Bahá'í

“The Fraying of Oregon’s Middle Class”

The Oregon Center for Public Policy, along with Demos, has issued a report “The Fraying of Oregon’s Middle Class.” It is a good summary of our current dilemma, with lots of useful charts, and  begins (here):

The American Dream used to mean that if you put in a hard day’s work, you could expect good wages, benefits, and a better life for your kids. Today, the kinds of jobs that can provide a solid middle-class life in return for hard work are in short supply – unemployment is high, earnings are flat, and hard-won benefits are being lost. The future of Oregon’s middle class, the backbone of the state’s economy for more than half a century, is at risk.

Oregon’s strong and vibrant middle class didn’t just happen. It was built brick by brick in the decades after World War II by hard work and workers’ strength in numbers that came from the unions that represented them. Unions made sure that the state’s prosperity was widely shared. As Oregon’s wealth and productivity grew, so too did the income and benefits of the people who worked hard to create that wealth – wages increased and more employers provided their workers with health insurance, pensions, and paid time off. The middle class was also built by policies that invested in public infrastructure (from schools and public universities to highways), supported homeownership and made a college education accessible to a new generation. Parents without higher education themselves were able to send their kids to college with the help of affordable tuition at state universities and financial aid.

But Oregon’s middle class is now threatened. Median income for Oregon workers is the same as it was a decade ago and only workers with a post-secondary degree earn more than their counterparts a generation ago. There’s also been a dramatic shift in costs for health coverage from employers to employees as well as a rapid decline in the number of employers who even offer health insurance. Rising out-of-pocket costs mean that a family illness can lead to substantial expenses and medical debt. And as employers replace traditional pensions with 401(k)-type plans – again shifting costs and risks to employees – middle-class workers can no longer count on a secure retirement. 

The report does not make even general recommendations about what to do. It states at the end:

Workers are going to have to fight to get their fair share. Just as the post-war middle class was built, it is possible to rebuild it and strengthen it for the next generation. That will require the strength of workers coming together to reclaim the American Dream and demanding that our elected officials work for workers.

Now I share a concern for all the statistics shown on the declining status of the middle class. It’s bad. But, unlike the report, I do not think nostalgia for the past, plus a feisty attitude by “workers”, is a good substitute for clear thinking about our economic problems and how to get out of them. The past, especially the old economy, is not coming back. Technologies have changed. The economy has become much more international. Changes are required.

“U.S. Official Warns About China’s Military Buildup”

(Photo from report below)

China’s military is growing and modernizing. Each year the U.S Department of Defense issues a report like its latest on “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2011” (here). Elisabeth Bumiller covers its release in her NY Times article “U.S. Official Warns About China’s Military Buildup” (here)

…..Over all, the report described what is generally known:

China’s People’s Liberation Army — with some 1.25 million ground troops, the largest in the world — is on track to achieve its goal of building a modern, regionally focused force by 2020. The Chinese military remains focused on Taiwan, which it claims as part of its sovereign territory, and it has deployed as many as 1,200 short-range missiles aimed in its direction. Moreover, it is developing antiship ballistic missiles, potentially capable of attacking American aircraft carriers.

It is also developing its own aircraft carriers, and is already in sea trials with a refitted Soviet-era carrier from Ukraine — a development the report anticipated, but which occurred after it was printed. Finally, China is developing a new-generation stealth jet fighter, the J-20, which it boldly tested in Beijing in January during a visit by Robert M. Gates, then the defense secretary.

Mr. Schiffer said that no single development led him to describe China’s arms buildup as “potentially destabilizing,” although Pentagon officials had increasingly said they were concerned about China’s military intentions in the Pacific. Instead, he said, he used the phrase because of China’s lack of transparency and its trends in military prowess.

“It’s a combination of the lack of understanding that’s been created by the opacity of their system, but it is also because there are very real questions given the overall trends and trajectory in the scope and the scale of China’s military modernization efforts,” Mr. Schiffer said. “I wouldn’t put it on any one particular platform or any one particular system. There’s nothing particularly magical about any one particular item.” …..

 

Photos: SE Sunday Parkways

Today I took my "Make a Year of Study Abroad an Option for High School" placards to Edwards Elementary School in SE Portland for several hours of the SE Sunday Parkways. Next to me, on the corner, were two young men selling homemade sushi. Back behind me, in the entrance of the school, the Portland Recorder Orchestra set up and played in the early afternoon. And across from me, the CRAG Law Center (here) set up an informational table. Lots of folks floated by on bikes, including Charlie Hales, candidate for mayor, who was interested in my ideas.

"Bad Education" - financial dilemas of higher education

The literary magazine “n + 1” published an essay on the probable bubble in higher education titled “Bad Education” by Malcolm Harris. It begins (here):

The Project On Student Debt estimates that the average college senior in 2009 graduated with $24,000 in outstanding loans. Last August, student loans surpassed credit cards as the nation’s single largest source of debt, edging ever closer to $1 trillion. Yet for all the moralizing about American consumer debt by both parties, no one dares call higher education a bad investment. The nearly axiomatic good of a university degree in American society has allowed a higher education bubble to expand to the point of bursting.

Since 1978, the price of tuition at US colleges has increased over 900 percent, 650 points above inflation. To put that number in perspective,  housing prices, the bubble that nearly burst the US economy,  then the global one, increased only fifty points above the Consumer Price Index during those years. But while college applicants’ faith in the value of higher education has only increased, employers’ has declined. According to Richard Rothstein at The Economic Policy Institute, wages for college-educated workers outside of the inflated finance industry have stagnated or diminished. Unemployment has hit recent graduates especially hard, nearly doubling in the post-2007 recession. The result is that the most indebted generation in history is without the dependable jobs it needs to escape debt.

What kind of incentives motivate lenders to continue awarding six-figure sums to teenagers facing both the worst youth unemployment rate in decades and an increasingly competitive global workforce?

And:

Higher education seems an unlikely site for this kind of speculative bubble. While housing prices are based on what competing buyers are willing to pay, postsecondary education’s price is supposedly linked to its costs (with the exception of the for-profits). But the rapid growth in tuition is mystifying in value terms; no one could argue convincingly the quality of instruction or the market value of a degree has increased ten-fold in the past four decades (though this hasn’t stopped some from trying). So why would universities raise tuition so high so quickly? “Because they can” answers this question for home-sellers out to get the biggest return on their investments, or for-profits out to grab as much Pell Grant money as possible, but it seems an awfully cynical answer when it comes to nonprofit education. 

The benefits of increasing costs has not gone primarily to teachers but to administrators:

If overfed teachers aren’t the causes or beneficiaries of increased tuition (as they’ve been depicted of late), then perhaps it’s worth looking up the food chain. As faculty jobs have become increasingly contingent and precarious, administration has become anything but. Formerly, administrators were more or less teachers with added responsibilities; nowadays, they function more like standard corporate managers—and they’re paid like them too. Once a few entrepreneurial schools made this switch, market pressures compelled the rest to follow the high-revenue model, which leads directly to high salaries for in-demand administrators. Even at nonprofit schools, top-level administrators and financial managers pull down six- and seven-figure salaries, more on par with their industry counterparts than with their fellow faculty members. And while the proportion of tenure-track teaching faculty has dwindled, the number of managers has skyrocketed in both relative and absolute terms. If current trends continue, the Department of Education estimates that by 2014 there will be more administrators than instructors at American four-year nonprofit colleges. A bigger administration also consumes a larger portion of available funds, so it’s unsurprising that budget shares for instruction and student services have dipped over the past fifteen years.

 And, the article ends on the financial plight of students:

Today, student debt is an exceptionally punishing kind to have. Not only is it inescapable through bankruptcy, but student loans have no expiration date and collectors can garnish wages, social security payments, and even unemployment benefits. When a borrower defaults and the guaranty agency collects from the federal government, the agency gets a cut of whatever it’s able to recover from then on (even though they have already been compensated for the losses), giving agencies a financial incentive to dog former students to the grave.

When the housing bubble collapsed, the results (relatively good for most investors, bad for the government, worse for homeowners) were predictable but not foreordained. With the student-loan bubble, the resolution is much the same, and it’s decided in advance.

In addition to the billions colleges have spent on advertising, sports programs, campus aesthetics, and marketable luxuries, they’ve benefited from a public discourse that depicts higher education as an unmitigated social good. Since the Baby Boomers gave birth, the college degree has seemed a panacea for social ills, a metaphor for a special kind of deserved success. We still tell fairy tales about escapes from the ghetto to the classroom or the short path from graduation to lifelong satisfaction, not to mention America’s collective college success story: The G.I. Bill. But these narratives are not inspiring true-life models, they’re advertising copy, and they come complete with loan

"A host of new online enterprises are making earning a college degree cheaper, faster and flexible enough to take work experience into account"

More on the growth of online higher education from the NY Times article “Online Enterprises Gain Foothold as Path to a College Degree” (here):

Harvard and Ohio State are not going to disappear any time soon. But a host of new online enterprises are making earning a college degree cheaper, faster and flexible enough to take work experience into account. As Wikipedia upended the encyclopedia industry and iTunes changed the music business, these businesses have the potential to change higher education……

And:

….. The emerging menu of new offerings is startlingly varied, as are the institutions. One unaccredited nonprofit startup, University of the People, gives English-speaking high school graduates a chance to study business or computers free, with volunteer teachers. There are also budding joint ventures between brick-and-mortar campuses and online entities, like Ivy Bridge College — a collaboration between Tiffin University, a nonprofit school in Ohio, and Altius Education, a commercial business, offering two-year online degrees transferrable to dozens of partner four-year colleges. And there are grass-roots nonprofits like Peer 2 Peer University, where people start study groups on topics as diverse as JavaScript and Baroque art.

Nationwide, almost three quarters of college students attend public institutions, and commercial career colleges like the University of Phoenix and Kaplan now make up almost as much of the remaining quarter as traditional nonprofit private universities like Stanford or Duke. Many of the emerging models are far cheaper than the publicly traded career colleges, some of which have come under scrutiny over the last year for leaving students with mountains of debt and credentials of little value.

Most are still new and very small, making it hard to locate students who have used them, other than those referred by the businesses themselves.

And it is too soon to know which will take off, or what might come along to overtake them.

“I’m just waiting for a Wikipedia University, with high-quality, online, open-source courses provided by a variety of different people,” said Richard Vedder, an Ohio University economics professor who directs the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. “Or the moment when someone like Bill Gates creates Superstar University, finding the best professors for the 200 courses that a good liberal arts college offers, and paying them $25,000 each to put their classes online.”

Oregon's governor, legislature, and its new Oregon Education Investment Board will increasingly find it difficult to allocate more funding to the existing public residential model of higher ed when online learning provides cheaper and more accessible alternatives.

17 Oregon legislators on trade mission to China

Oregon is sending a legislative trade delegation to China September 4 to 19^.  From the Oregonian article “Oregon lawmakers, spouses, family members head to China for trade mission” by Harry Esteve (here):

. …. Watch out China -- here comes Oregon. A total of 17 state legislators, along with their spouses or other family members and a handful of business leaders, are headed to the Fujian province for a two-week trade and goodwill mission.

Leading the trip will be House Co-speakers Arnie Roblan and Bruce Hanna, who are also bringing their wives. In all, the delegation totals slightly more than three dozen.

"It's the largest one that we've ever had, actually," said Rep. Dennis Richardson, R-Central Point, who has organized lawmakers on China expeditions for the past nine years.

The legislative group is scheduled to link up in Beijing with a separate Oregon trade delegation being led by Gov. John Kitzhaber, Richardson said. Combined the groups should make an impact on the Chinese authorities, he said.

"You have the co-speakers and the legislative delegation meeting with the same people as the governor at key points," Richardson said. "It shows strength that you would have this many people." ….

These periodic legislative delegation visits to China are very important.

“Low enrollment prompts Lake Oswego School District to cancel kindergarten-level Mandarin immersion class”

Sad news! Just a days after celebrating the new Mandarin immersion charter school in the Beaverton school district (here), news arrives that not enough students signed up for the Lake Oswego Mandarin immersion kindergarten. From the Oregonian article “Low enrollment prompts Lake Oswego School District to cancel kindergarten-level Mandarin immersion class” by Nicole Dungca (here):

The Lake Oswego School District will not offer a Mandarin language immersion class for kindergarten students this fall, largely because too few students enrolled in the program.
 
The board earlier this year declined to expand its language immersion programs past the kindergarten level because of concerns including attrition and equity, despite pleas from a small, but vocal contingent of community members. But the board also gave the go-ahead to add a kindergarten class for Mandarin immersion, contingent on high interest and finding a suitable teacher.

Sixteen students registered for the kindergarten-level Mandarin class, which Jonnie Shobaki, the district's director of elementary education, characterized as "not enough." By comparison, the Spanish immersion kindergarten class at Lake Grove Elementary School has 25 students enrolled with a wait list for the fall…..

Discussions do continue in Lake Oswego, but his is a step backwards in the strategic effort to expand Mandarin education in Oregon.