Multiple-Choice Test Questions and the NCLB
W. A. Barrett
Aug. 26, 2007
San Jose State University vs 2
|
|
The following question was printed in the SF Chronicle, August 16, 2007, page A12. It is one of four sample questions on the California Standards Tests, administered to all school children under the No Child Left Behind protocols.
Under the No Child Left Behind act passed under the last Republican congress at the behest of the Bush Administration, a school that cannot achieve a passing score in any of its grades or sections is considered a “failing school”. Those who have been following this issue in the newspaper, or through the excellent three-part television series on the Lehrer News Hour (PBS) will be shocked to discover that many of the best schools in our state of California, for example, Cupertino High and San Mateo High, are now classified as “failing schools”.
Note first that the test is multiple-choice, with exactly four choices to each question. Among other things, this provides a strong incentive for the child to guess, or at least just “try out” each of the answers to see which seems to fit the best.
Multiple-choice tests are given in the NCLB for the simple reason that they can be machine-graded on the cheap with rather dumb optical computer software. Computers are not yet able to unambiguously read numbers, letters or words scrawled in by school children, although character-recognition technology is getting to be very good. A picture, a graph, or space to write out the child’s solution would be a wonderful way to test subtle concepts, but none of these can be machine-graded at present. For more criticism of multiple-choice tests, please refer to Banesh Hoffman’s book The Tyranny of Testing, available through Dover Press, or in most libraries.
Note also that the question carefully spells out that the time is in seconds, the velocity in feet per second, but it fails to explain that s is in feet. That must be inferred from the given balcony height, in feet. A common failing with the M-C test format is some missing detail that can cause a superior student to stumble. (We’ll uncover another missing detail later).
For example, how would you answer this true-false question?
The sky is blue.
O true
O false
Most people would check “true”. But wait a minute -- the question didn’t say whether the color “sampling time” was midday, at twilight, or at night. It also didn’t say whether the sky was overcast (sky is gray then) -- those raised in Ireland or in Seattle will likely consider the sky to be gray most of the time, and only rarely blue. It also doesn’t specify whether this is supposed to always be true, or sometimes true, or true most of the time, etc. It doesn’t spell out the cloud covering condition -- as a Nebraska boy, I never saw a completely blue sky until I spent a summer in New Mexico. One always saw some blue sky in between lots of clouds, every day of the year. Also, “blue” is a subjective color sensation, and light from the sky in fact spans a very wide part of the electromagnetic spectrum -- it just happens that there are usually a higher density of “blue” photons reaching our eye than “red” or “green” -- but the latter are also there.
A superior, thinking, student would therefore have to honestly answer this question false, on the general grounds that a flat-out statement like this can be considered true only if it is true under all circumstances, times and places, and under the most restrictive sense of meaning of these words. Only the sloppy, careless-minded student could answer the question true.
A similarly misleading test question
was recently caught by a science teacher.
Her story was reported on the News Hour in the third episode on a
series regarding the NCLB program (week of August 12, 2007). She had spent the usual amount of time with
her pupils explaining how the sun drives photosynthesis of plants, providing
the basis of life for most of us. But
she also showed them life forms that had evolved around the hot smokers in the
deep sea trenches, where no sunlight ever reaches. They survive on chemicals (mostly raw sulfur) emitted through the
stored heat of the earth -- and the sun had nothing to do with this! Yet a test question on that all-important
NCLB state test asked about what drives all life on earth -- and the only
“reasonable” answer was “the sun”. So,
the superior student would be left wondering what was in the mind of the exam
writer, with none of the choices correct, while the careless student would be
rewarded by checking the “correct” answer.
That teacher asked a particularly relevant question -- do we want our
children to be able to think logically through situations, or just to be able
to check the “right” boxes on a test?
To return to our falling ball question. This would appear to require the solution of a quadratic equation. That’s a reasonable subject for a first-year algebra student -- to learn the quadratic formula, or perhaps even to learn how to solve an equation like this through a simple process called completing the square. Here’s the equation to be solved for t:
16 t2 + 10 t - 84 = 0
The quadratic formula yields two solutions:
The negative solution actually has a meaning. A ball pitched straight up from the ground at time -2.625 seconds will pass the balcony continuing up, then down, again passing the balcony at 10 feet/second at time 0. Negative time has nothing to do with advanced quantum theory -- it just refers to an alternate ball trajectory in which the clock is started 2.625 seconds prior to the time specified in this problem.
But the “2” is clearly what the question wants, since time is supposed to progress in the positive direction from the moment of pitching the ball downward.
Would any child actually go through all this?
I don’t think so. Most would just try substituting 2 into the equation, then 3, then 6 and 9 to see which yields 84. The “2” works, so that’s the end of it. This shortcuts several questions about the child’s understanding of this subject:
- Why this equation and not some other one?
- Why is the time t squared, and what is the significance of the 16, which seems like a magic number?
- What do you have to do to solve a quadratic equation when you don’t have a solution choice in front of you?
- Does a quadratic equation always have a real-number solution?
Instead of testing the child’s background understanding of the fundamental law of gravity, as first discovered by Galileo and further quantified by Isaac Newton, and also whether the student can actually solve a real-life problem, we have a mere substitution guessing game, about on the level of those puzzles in which you are supposed to find a word in a maze of letters. Never mind what the word means, or why it is spelled out in that odd way in the maze.
But that’s the problem with multiple-choice questions. They invite the child to guess at an answer, rather than require that he/she think it through from basic laws, or through a reasonable understanding of the concepts of algebra.
For those who have forgotten their high school physics and algebra, here’s a discussion of the four questions posed above:
1. Question (1) and (2) deal with the physics of the situation. Gravity on earth causes all free falling objects to be accelerated toward the center of the earth by g, which is approximately 32 feet/second2. Acceleration is the rate of change of the velocity, and it’s not hard to show that the distance fallen must have a gt2/2 component. The initial velocity figures in through the vt component, hence s = vt + gt2/2. A full discussion of this requires some calculus, which incidentally is now taught in most high schools, including the two “failing” high schools in Cupertino and San Mateo, California.
2. The 16 is just g/2. “16” isn’t a magic number, instead it expresses the force of gravity on a mass near the surface of the earth. It is proportional to the mass of the earth and inversely proportional to the square of the earth’s radius.
3. Question (3) and (4) address the algebra side of things. Quadratic equations are most easily solved through the quadratic formula given above, which high school algebra students should know. However, there’s also a process by which a quadratic equation can be solved, called completing the square. I personally prefer to remember a process, since it only depends on noticing a few tricks along the way, rather than trying to memorize a formula, and it uses common algebraic transformation identities. Learning such methods and the identity rules is much better than trying to memorize formulas or answers to particular questions.
Completing the square works like this, using our equation as an example:
Start by dividing by a (16), and placing the constant on the right-hand side of the equation, where its sign changes:
Add a constant to both sides that makes the left side a perfect square. That constant has to be the square of half the x coefficient, or (5/16)2:
Since the left side is the square of x+5/16, we have
Now take the square root of both sides, noting that the right side may be either positive or negative:
or
The right side doesn’t look like “2”, but in fact it has the same two solutions that we found with the quadratic formula.
As to (4), does a quadratic equation always have two solutions? The answer is yes, but they may be in the form of complex numbers, not real numbers. (The two solutions may also coincide). Complex numbers have very useful applications in electronic circuit theory, and understanding them starts with appreciating the solutions of algebraic equations.
Air Resistance
This question posits an equation that determines the penny’s position as a function of time and velocity, so as an abstract algebra exercise, I have no problem with the question.
However, from a physics viewpoint, what about air resistance? It happens that for a penny, baseball, or other fairly dense, compact object, the drag force due to air resistance is fairly small. But a drag force is there, and it’s measurable. (The aerodynamic drag force is in fact what you really pay for in airline fuel costs in long flights). In any event, air resistance will cause the total drop time to exceed that 2 seconds by a small amount. Ergo, the “2” answer is in fact wrong -- it should instead be “approximately 2 seconds”, or “2 seconds within about 0.2 seconds error”. Or -- the question should state: “Neglect air resistance” -- this is a standard clause in elementary physics textbooks when the student is asked to solve a dynamic problem like this.
Air resistance is hard to take into account, since it depends on many factors, the most notable being the shape of the object dropped. If you drop a paper airplane or glider, the thing may sail for hundreds of feet and many seconds before reaching the ground. If you drop a feather or a balloon, it may just sail off in the air currents and not reach the ground for days or weeks. Drop a balloon filled with helium, and it’ll go up instead of down.
For small, dense, heavy objects (like pennys or baseballs), the air resistance force is there, but is typically less than a few percent of the gravity force. But it’s there, and it causes the drop time to be a little larger than estimated by the classical equation.
More discussion of air resistance can be found in this article: http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/329/lectures/node42.html, by prof. Richard Fitzpatrick of the University of Texas, as part of his course on numerical methods.
You will find that the air resistance for most “heavy” bodies varies with the square of the velocity, is always in the negative direction of the velocity, is proportional to the air density (about 0.075 lb/ft2), and proportional to the cross-sectional area of the object. A dimensionless factor CD is also involved, which in general depends on the velocity in a nonlinear way, but is about equal to 0.63 for smooth objects until the velocity reaches 220 feet/sec, after which it goes down. Fitzpatrick’s article discusses baseballs at some length, and points out that CD also depends on whether the baseball is smooth, rough or somewhere in between.
The complete drag force formula is
You can use units of pounds/cubic foot for the density of air r, square feet for A, feet/second for v. The dimensionless parameter CD does depend on v in general, but is fairly constant at velocities below 100 to 200 feet/second.
I offer this link to an Excel spreadsheet, which performs a numerical integration of both the “simple” equation (no air resistance) and one in which the air resistance is taken into account. It uses Newton’s F = ma equation directly, where F is mg - D. But note that the air resistance force is always opposite to the velocity direction, and that changes the sign on D when the object is moving up vs. moving down. The acceleration a for a very short time interval determines the velocity in the next time interval, and that velocity in turn determines the position in the next time interval. You don’t have to know how to solve a differential equation in order to do this, only use the simple ideas of kinematics and dynamics of physics. Given an hour of class time, I could explain all this to a high school science class, and show them how to do their own computer “experiments” with falling bodies.
Obviously, a student taking this test has no access to Excel or the web. But he/she should be aware that a falling object in our atmosphere is subject to more than one simple, constant force, and that will affect the answer.
This is yet another fallacy in assuming that a MC test can reveal whether the student understands the ideas behind algebra and physics. Nowadays most high school students are using laptops on a daily basis. How many know how to use a spreadsheet to solve numerical problems of this sort? I suspect many more than their parents or teachers are aware. And what MC test can possibly reveal their skills in this area? And are they not being “left behind” through these dumb tests that can in no way reveal their learning?
Another Algebra Question
Here’s an algebra question on the California High School Exit Exam:
y = 3x - 5
y = 2x
177. What is the solution of the system of
equations shown above?
A. (1, -2)
B. (1, 2)
C. (5, 10)
D. (-5, -10)
The correct answer is C.
The same objection I raised above applies to this question as well. This should be a test of whether a student can solve the pair of equations for x and y. Instead, it is really just a test of whether the student can try the four numbers into these equations, looking for the one that fits.
I doubt that any simple M-C test can in fact test a student’s ability to solve a pair of simultaneous equations. In a classroom test, one should ask for the answer, and not just provide a few choices.
In its defense, it does provide a minimal test of the use of negative numbers in arithmetic, but not much, since the correct answer C does not involve the more interesting cases of a negative times a negative, or the “sum” of two negatives.
Conclusions
Multiple-choice test questions invite guessing by the student, and rarely are able to plumb any of the deeper concepts that a student should know. In most cases, even a rather dumb student could figure out the wanted answer here, whether he/she knew anything much at all about algebra or physics, only some basic formula substitution.
· In the first question, it would be much better to ask for the number of seconds without providing choices, which would require the student to solve the quadratic rather than guess at the answer, then write out the answer.
· It would be still better to just frame the question without the formula, and point out that the acceleration of gravity g is 32 ft/sec2, then ask for the number of seconds, again writing out the answer.
· It would be much better to ask the student to show their work in arriving at their answer.
The best teachers routinely grade test papers of the third kind. They in fact consider it an insult to assign more significance to a state board-designed MC test than to their own more carefully crafted essay-type tests.
It would take dozens of multiple-choice questions to even come close to assessing a student’s comprehension of the algebra or physics issues implied in this question. But that would require paying some expert to grade the tests. But the NCLB program clearly neither respects teachers as professionals, nor does it trust them to objectively grade such tests, nor has it funded the testing program sufficiently to provide quality testing. It would also greatly extend the length of the MC test -- instead of a few carefully crafted questions, one must in all honesty require dozens of “little” questions to be answered.
Is this how we expect to fill the ranks of our engineers to design bridges, high-rise office buildings, computer gear, automobiles, etc., with students who’ve learned only how to guess at multiple-choice tests?
Would you drive a car designed by someone who could only guess that “2” was the right answer to a M-C question like this?
Other NCLB Fallacies
As I understand the NCLB program, (and I don’t fully understand it) there are several fallacies at its heart that should raise great concern among us all, not just our professional teachers:
· The achievement tests are crafted by each state, which also decides on the score that must be achieved by a school overall. There is no uniform national test, something that could in fact be implemented rather easily, given the resources available to the federal Department of Education. An SAT test would at least provide some uniformity between the states, but that was rejected in the law. I cannot fathom why this is the case, other than this solution arose through various political maneuvers during the legislative process, perhaps out of a misguided zeal to protect “state’s rights”. So we have wildly varying state standards, but a uniform standard of punishment for “underachieving” or “failed” schools.
· Teachers, university professors of education and other professors of higher education were left out of the deliberative process for the NCLB law. My guess is that the GOP-led house was deeply suspicious of all educational professionals, most of whom support their labor union and the Democratic party, and are in any case, “liberal intellectuals” and therefore not to be trusted. One hears statements from Ms. secretary Spelling about her problems with “teacher’s unions”, and her deep-seated suspicion that teachers and their unions are only interested in job security, higher pay and less work.
· NCLB places much too much reliance on machine-graded tests as an indication of student performance. As I’ve tried to point out in this essay, MC tests are about the worst form of testing that one can imagine, and it is almost impossible to design them in a way to improve their quality.
· Few if any states made any effort to calibrate their tests. This is in fact, a difficult, if not impossible, undertaking. Against what standard should one calibrate an MC test? They are typically written by groups of “experts”. These folks are at best reasonably aware of the pitfalls of MC questions, and they try to elicit something measurable from their questions. But what topics should be tested? “Reading, writing and arithmetic” is a good political slogan, but it means nothing when it comes down to deciding whether test questions about the civil war should ask about Sherman’s march through Georgia, or the difficulty Lincoln had in selecting a general “who would fight”, etc. Even algebra has many, many issues that ought properly to appear on a test, yet the resulting test is usually a pitiful few questions that barely address a few borderline issues.
· Every test can at best be only a sampling of the material actually taught. A test is a useful tool when designed by, administered by, and graded by the teacher in the subject. It is hardly meaningful when designed with no consideration of the subjects taught, how they are taught, what the superior students are likely to have learned on their own, etc. When I was in junior high, I was reading books on technical drafting, analytic geometry, calculus, advanced astronomy, and biological evolution -- I had no classes in any of these, but I found them interesting and had a Carnegie library in my hometown with good books on these subjects. What state MC test could possibly elicit anything about that kind of achievement?
· The scores of the student tests in a school are used to judge the quality of the teaching in that school. That’s a fallacy. A child’s achievement on a test score is not just a simple function of what he/she was taught in that school in that year. It also depends very much on whether the child has supportive parents; whether English is the first language; whether the prior schooling was good or bad; and a whole complex of psychological and developmental issues unique to the child. At best, the test result of one child indicates only where that child happens to be along the path of his/her personal educational development. It says little or nothing about the quality of teaching he/she has received at school. The “averaged” results from a class of students, or the whole school, say even less about the quality of instruction in that school. At best, there can only be a very weak correlation between the two.
· Nothing is ever said about the variances of test scores. For one thing, getting a good estimate of variance that means anything is very difficult. Mostly, “variance” is evidently not understood by the public and our current department of education. (It’s a measure of the spread of test scores within an ensemble). For another thing, I suspect that the variance of almost any of the given tests is very large, so large that any comparison of the average from one semester to the next is meaningless, as would be any comparison of one school to another.
· There appears to be an assumption that if the average test scores go up from one year to the next, then this is due to improved teaching performance. But it could also be due to random variation; or to the teachers discovering what’s on the test, then teaching only those topics; or to changes in the complexion of the incoming students. If you rate (say) a particular third grade in a particular school each year, you are really rating a completely different class each year, and each class brings with it its own set of peculiar differences. The assumption that each entering class is identical in preparation, background, etc. is one that has no material evidence in its favor.
· Our mobile population, coupled with high levels of temporary immigrant workers, means that a particular class of students will be comprised of students largely drawn from elsewhere in the world. Only some may have been enrolled in that school since kindergarten. So one cannot really assume that the child’s background profiles will be the same from year to year.
· Children are required to take the test in English, even though they may only have immigrated to the US within the previous year or two. They will obviously fail such a test, even though they may have a good grade-level comprehension of the subject in their native language. This aspect of NCLB has clearly come from the right-wing “English-only” fanatics, plus those who want to punish all forms of immigration, legal or otherwise.
· A child can be excused from the NCLB test through a written note from the child’s parent. But, instead of using the remaining test scores as indicative of the school’s performance, NCLB insists that the missing test scores be marked 0, pulling down the average as a whole. It’s very possible (and now known for certain) that a superior school could be rated “failing” from this factor alone. The school also cannot, under the law, influence such parents in any way, for example, by having the teacher explain to the parents some of the implications of their decision.
· Where are the comparable tests for the private schools? NCLB is specifically directed at the public schools, since only they are qualified to receive that all-important federal aid. (It is the federal aid that is conditioned upon a school meeting its achievement goal.) My suspicion is that NCLB is really a plot to destroy the public school system. NCLB has gone a long way toward that goal, with a huge number of public schools now on the “failing” list, which also requires the state to “take over” the school. Some states are now overwhelmed with “failing” schools and lack the resources to “turn them around”. I contend that since public schools are mostly financed by local property taxes, controlled by locally elected school boards, and of substantial interest only to the local community, that the state (and federal government) should play a supportive role, but otherwise not interfere with the school system.
· Finally, where is it written that a school, public or private, is to be the only source of growth and education for a child, and that the school has full responsibility for this vital mission? Where is the responsibility of the child’s parents to read to them when young, to provide books and opportunities at home to learn, to make sure the child keeps up the homework and projects, and to ensure that the child has adequate nourishment? What is one to make of parents who not only shirk these responsibilities, but may actually abuse or ridicule a child who wants to grow and learn? Where is the community’s responsibility in seeing to it that the child’s neighborhood is safe, has adequate parks and recreational facilities, summer programs, and the like? Where is the community’s responsibility in providing sufficient tax revenues for clean, well-lighted school buildings, a well-paid professional teaching staff, and sufficient teaching resources? My philosophy was shaped by my childhood experience -- school was an opportunity to learn, one that we were advised to take advantage of. No one blamed the school system if Johnny came out of it unable to read. We typically knew that Johnny was retarded, or a rotten kid, or was unfortunate enough to have parents who discouraged learning.
· Finally, the child itself bears the primary responsibility to make the best use of the resources provided it. Most healthy children are eager to learn, and will find ways to do it whether or not their teachers and schools are the best in the world. Conservatives and liberals alike agree that we need to find ways to provide our children with what they need to grow. That includes skilled, dedicated teachers. But the teachers are only a part of the growth process, and must not be saddled with the entire responsibility for the outcome of our children.
I say choose the best and most dedicated teachers, give them a good competitive salary, good working conditions, reasonable class sizes, enough educational resources, then let them do their job. Families that care about their children’s education will choose schools with a good reputation, then work with their children and their teachers in a way that maximizes their child’s potential.
Some children won’t make it for a variety of reasons, but that’s life.
What About Those ‘Left Behind’?
NCLB can be understood largely as a praise-worthy piece of legislation whose intention was to help every child to find a useful place in our society, whether as a truck driver, factory worker, engineer, lawyer, or corporation executive. As a society, we have in recent decades failed to provide good jobs for those who drop out of school.
It was not always that way. My father ended his schooling at the ninth grade. Yet he carved out a good and interesting career for himself, largely through a determination to continue educating himself in various skills. He was also fortunate to be in a society that had some jobs for the unskilled, paying enough to afford a small home, a wife and two children.
That employment system has all but collapsed. Those who drop out of high school today have very bleak employment prospects. If hired at all, their job entails long hours and low pay, often no medical benefits, and no day-care support for small children. The unemployed end up on the street, or turn to drugs and crime. Desperation for the next meal or fix will drive anyone to crime. Our schools of higher education charge increasingly high tuition rates, posing yet another barrier to break out of poverty. Even returning to high school to complete a degree after marriage and children is a formidable obstacle for someone forced to work two or even three jobs to make ends meet.
Instead of recognizing that the real problem lies with providing work for anyone regardless of their schooling, and providing free or subsidized education for all those capable of making good use of it, we seem to be trying to force our public schools to “fix the problem”. Just saying that everyone should get a good education makes a great political slogan, but actually achieving that within our current job/tuition/child care system is next to impossible.
Providing more vocational training, free, to those who can’t make it in the regular classroom, is a step in the right direction. But this has its limits. Voc Ed tends to be much more expensive than ordinary classroom training, in the specialized equipment and teachers required. It can also quickly become irrelevant -- training a large class in, say, programming machine-tool controllers will be a lost cause if the local manufacturing plant hiring such people has been moved to China.
But let’s look at the labor side of the coin.
The American laborer could meet the Chinese standard -- but that would require:
· A more benevolent federal structure that provides minimal medical care and child care.
· Willingness to give up a single-family home, and a car, in favor of a factory dorm, bicycle and public transportation. Certainly no more RVs, motor boats, second home in the woods, or a suburban home a long way from the job.
· Willingness to submit one’s wife and children to these conditions. How many of our wives are ready to give up all their appliances in favor of a 19th-century cooking and cleaning environment? We smile when we see Indian women washing their clothes on rocks on the shores of the Ganges river, but that’s a very cheap way to do it compared to buying a washer/dryer, paying for the electricity (or even having electric power), the fresh running water, soap powders, etc.
· Willingness to work much longer hours under more tedious and less safe conditions. Think “sweatshop” here, even for professionals, vs. our standard of air-conditioned cubicles and private offices.
· Much closer connection to a large farm population, through lightly regulated farmer’s markets. Our supermarket economy is wonderful as a way of providing high quality, healthful produce and meats, but it comes at a high cost in middlemen, packaging, marketing, etc. How many American wives could buy a whole freshly killed chicken, and get a chicken dinner going for the family in a few hours, using a wood stove? My mother could do that, but her children would never think of it.
· Much greater difficulty in amassing enough savings to pay for a higher education for oneself or one’s children. The wealth now goes to the corporate CEOs and the stock-owning families, with little to the middle class and none to the lower classes. Under our current lassez-faire policies, the U.S. will slide even farther down the road toward a two-tier society of very rich and very poor, with little or no middle class.
We in fact are submitting to these lower living conditions, but we are being forced into it through what I consider to be a misguided policy of rewarding multi-national corporations and their executives, rather than American labor.
My personal view is that as a nation, we need to reconsider the damage caused by “globalization” and “outsourcing”. As an economic theory, free trade is a wonderful thing -- for those who have something to trade, and are able to make a living at it.
Unfortunately, “free trade” also means that goods will be manufactured and sold only in those countries where there is no bottom line to wages, no consideration given to the cost of environmental protection, and no consideration given to the rights and living conditions of labor. Most of the goods on our shelves are now made in China, and they sell cheaply here. So those who have a job in the US can enjoy the low prices. Those without a job, or with a low-end job, can hardly share that sort of benefit, and, in a real sense, have suffered because of free trade.
Yet we continue to consume at a high level, despite the obvious fact that hardly anything is actually made in the US anymore, and that we are rapidly losing our technical leadership. This has been possible by speculating on real estate -- driving home prices ever higher, and borrowing against that unearned equity. Our economy is being propped up by trading with trade and money, along the lines of Enron before its collapse. We can’t continue to do that forever, any more than a Ponzi scheme will continue forever. A collapse may occur -- perhaps the current stock market crisis centered on problems in the home mortgage market will bring about such a collapse.
We must find a way to restore manufacturing to its formerly high place in our society. That would not only stabilize our economic position relative to the world market, but also provide good jobs for all those less-skilled people that will inevitably fall out of the school system. That will require some form of trade protections, and a trade policy that considers not just prices of goods, but the varying labor standards of the producing nations.
We also need to give serious attention to providing some form of salaried work to anyone willing and able to accept it. During the years of the Soviet Union, everyone had some kind of job to perform, even if it was as mundane as sweeping a street once a day, or stationed on a floor in a hotel. Is something like this really incompatible with our capitalistic system? I don’t think so.
What’s needed are enough incentives, in the form of subsidies or tax credits, or what not, for every company registered in the US to provide a certain quota of jobs, with a living wage, whether or not that job contributes profit to the bottom line.
Correcting the damage also requires defining a reasonable standard labor situation -- what maximum hours need to be worked under what working conditions, and what are the living standards that stem from that pay check? We have in the past enjoyed a very high living standard in the US -- much higher than in China, India, Korea, and other third-world countries. We expect the same in the future. As a result, our laborers expect much higher wages than overseas. But an abstract “free trade” agreement makes no distinctions of this sort, and is based solely on what a Chinese laborer is willing to do at what price compared to an American laborer.
Given such a standard, we should then, as a nation, be prepared to set up tariffs and other trade restrictions against those countries that fail to meet our standard.
This is an easy thing for an academic to propose, but I also am under no illusion that we have the political will and the wisdom to carry it off.