Posted on 06/13/2006 5:41:42 AM PDT by ProCivitas
In his recent bestseller, "The World Is Flat," Thomas Friedman warned Americans about the challenges of an era of increased globalization and international competition. In an ever "flattening" world, many jobs can easily be outsourced to skilled, lower-cost workers in other countries. Today, American workers have to compete against workers from around the world.
Friedman explained what this should mean to American students by recounting a warning he offered his daughters: "Girls, when I was growing up, my parents used to say to me, 'Tom, finish your dinner. People in China and India are starving.' My advice to you is: Girls, finish your homework. People in China and India are starving for your jobs."
Too few American students are heeding this advice. The Department of Education released a report last week on American students' and adults' performance on international tests. The findings of this report, "The Condition of American Education 2006," are not inspiring: American students rank in the middle or low end of the pack.
For example, American students scored below average on math and science tests administered to students in OECD countries. In math, U.S. 15-year-olds ranked 21st out of students from 28 countries. In science, U.S. students ranked 16th.
American students fared somewhat better on reading exams; U.S. 15-year-olds scored at the average of OECD countries. That's still too low.
Thomas Friedman isn't alone in recognizing the challenge facing Americans in the increasingly competitive global economy. President Bush focused on this looming problem in his State of the Union address when he unveiled his American Competitiveness Initiative. "We must continue to lead the world in human talent and creativity," the President said. "Our greatest advantage in the world has always been our educated, hardworking, ambitious people -- and we're going to keep that edge."
Everyone can agree with that goal. But what can policymakers do to help Americans keep their edge? President Bush proposed a series of new federal programs to improve American students’ performance in math and science, including plans to train 70,000 high school teachers for math and science advanced-placement courses and to encourage 30,000 math and science professionals to become classroom teachers.
This Band-Aid approach is unlikely to deliver results. Already, more than a hundred math and science programs are scattered across more than a dozen agencies in the federal government. If teacher training programs were the solution, we'd have already solved the problem. Before financing another program, taxpayers deserve to know why the existing programs aren’t making a difference.
More broadly, taxpayers should question why the $66 billion the federal government currently spends on K-12 education has failed to deliver meaningful results. Long-term assessments of National Assessment of Educational Progress test scores show that student achievement has remained flat since the early 1970s. Over this period, federal education spending has increased dramatically.
The real challenge in American education is getting more out of our already considerable investment. According to the OECD, the U.S. spends much more per student than most other developed countries. For example, the U.S. spends more per pupil for primary education than the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and 22 other OECD countries. Only Luxembourg spends more than the U.S.
In all, Americans spend more than $500 billion annually on K-12 education-nearly 5 percent of the entire U.S. economy. A student enrolled in public school from kindergarten through 12th grade can expect local, state, and federal taxpayers to invest more than $100,000 on his or her education. Students in emerging economies like India and China-our competitors in Thomas Friedman's flat world-certainly don't have this advantage.
So how can we get more out of our investment in education and make American students more competitive? One answer is to introduce competition into American education. We should allow families to control that $100,000 by choosing their child's school.
For too long, politicians and bureaucrats have controlled America's schools, and the result has been a lack of innovation and steadily rising costs. But student-centered educational reform is beginning to change this.
Just in the past fifteen years, American families now have unprecedented flexibility and choice about how to educate their children, thanks to the spread of charter schools and scholarship programs. The result has been innovation as schools compete to attract students with promising new learning models. Unfortunately, we've only seen a glimpse of what could be possible if families had full control over the $100,000 invested in their child's education.
Thomas Friedman argues that a key to succeeding in the new "flat" world economy is making oneself irreplaceable. "You have to constantly upgrade your skills," he writes. "There will be plenty of good jobs out there in the flat world for people with the knowledge and ideas to seize them."
Families deserve the opportunity to help their children acquire the knowledge and skills to compete in the world economy. School choice policies can give them this freedom. The byproduct will be widespread innovation in our schools-an important key to increasing American competitiveness.
Mr. Lips is education analyst at The Heritage Foundation.
Not a subscriber to HUMAN EVENTS? Sign up now!
(You will receive the latest conservative news and offers by email. Unsubscribe any time. Read our Privacy Policy.)
In all, Americans spend more than $500 billion annually on K-12 education-nearly 5 percent of the entire U.S. economy. A student enrolled in public school from kindergarten through 12th grade can expect local, state, and federal taxpayers to invest more than $100,000 on his or her education."
Every school board in America should become predominantly Republican/Conservative because we have a huge curriculum standards/accountability problem in this country.
The schools in this country are terrible and parents keep right on sending their kids to them. Get your kids out of public schools or change the schools drastically.
bump
When she was a 10th grade exchange student, she was shocked that the math taught in 10th grade was 5th grade material back home. She essentially lost a year in math by being here. But the real reason was to become proficient in English and she accomplished that goal.
THe second thing was her shock that people would celebrate high school graduatation. She was wondering why people celebrating high school graduation were not embarrassed. According to her, graduating high school is an expectation and you are looked down upon by society if you can't do that. Graduating from college there is considered a major accomplishment and that's where the celebration should be. By celebrating a mere high school graduation, it belittles college graduation. I guess it has something to do with the heirarchial structure of Japanese society.
""According to the OECD, the U.S. spends much more per student than most other developed countries."
Comparing oranges and apples.
U.S. figures include huge amounts spent on athletics, which is the most important school activity K through college.
Most other countries have club sports not included in the education budget.
A total breakdown but Education demands more and more money. It should be obvious to everybody by now that money is not the needed fix.
I think there is something to that, but that's not to overstate it. I have attended some of the finest schools, and I think the best approach is to treat school as something you have to do (like pay taxes, or go to the dentist) and that there is a value attached to doing well, but there is no legitimate reason to 'apply oneself as much as possible' as you put it.
I never consistently (or even regularly) applied myself 'as much as possible,' and I didn't know many people who did. I think that's kind of a crazy standard anyway, and I don't use that figure of speech ever because it's not that meaningful.
There are more important things than getting all As in school, that's just the truth. Medium and long-term success in life doesn't have much to do with a very demanding academic backstory. I went to one of the best private high schools in the USA, filled with nauseating Type A personalities, and even they didn't 'do everything possible' to excel.
It's 20 years later and most of them played by the rules, worked hard, married young, and are now miserable, working in small offices and cubicles, tired of their wives & their lives. They can't leave it all because their status quo is invested in their career choice.
School is something you have to do to a certain point, nothing more. Most education is self education, anyway. That's pretty much how the law is taught, and I think that's the best approach.
Indeed, it has become a brave new world. This is a bad idea. Doing well in school has only very little to do with success in life.
[In different countries] I have seen it from both sides: a rather strictly meritocratic streaming system and a PC egalitarian one. From my experience, meritocratic streaming is an extremely good and necessary idea.
Depends on the kind of job at hand. In one school for the gifted I personally observed 6th or 7th grade kids doing [in their heads, no less] multidimensional geometry exercises, like figuring out the intersection between 5-dimensional hypercube with something else equally complicated [forgot which one it was - it was ages ago]. I would submit that there are jobs [not many, granted] for which such kids [or rather, what would be grown out of them] cannot be replaced by any number of people with better "personal style, maturity, etc...", even if you tried to replace them at 50 to 1 ratio. And to slow down such kids by placing them in the same class with retardees is simply criminal.
The choice is between comparable (though nonidentical) skillsets. Complex mathematical computations done in the mind are important in some fields, but not terribly important in other fields. The skillset should match the job at hand.
I know one very gifted young man who is very intelligent, but can't hold down a job simply because he can't cope well with day-to-day dynamics that a lot of us wade through with ease (in my case, I tend to just ignore them, but to each their own). That guy was utterly replaceable at every job he ever had: while finding someone with his exact same skillset isn't easy, that's not the mandate. The mandate is to find someone with comparable skillset.
They don't have to be the best, they just have to be good enough. And I'll take a mature person that's 'good enough' with some imagination over a
My point is that performing excellently in school is just one example of intelligence, but certainly not the only one. It;s also probably not the most important one.
The smartest people tend to not do the best in life. We see that time and time again. There is no direct correlation between success and intelligence, though intelligence is a strong factor.
I tend to see this as a good thing. Doing the best in school, in most cases, isn't the most probative quality. There is a remarkable reluctance, i find, to admit what everyone who has been paying attention knows: being very intelligent doesn't have much to do with being successful, and certainly not being happy.
Back to strict meritocracy, if you can include a variety of other factors besides intelligence in evaluating merit, I'd be more on board. I've probably successfully hired 1000 people for all sorts of jobs in my life, and I never considered schooling, grades, or intelligence to be the most important factor in my decision. Sometimes, people with superior credentials are legitimately rejected, though I admit a lot of folks find that hard to swallow.
What I was about is called "creativity". Not all highly intelligent people are creative, but almost all creative people are highly intelligent - it must be a subset. Most jobs have a very high "routine quotient", and for these you are right - good enough is good enough. The expression about trained monkey pertains there. The fun starts when one is dealing with non-routine situations.
Yep, that's certainly true. I just have never found school performance and pedigree to be reliable indicators of intelligence. That's why I would never overstate their significance.
It's called Emotional Intelligence. It's like IQ, but ranks how someone relates to others on a personal level. It's been found that people with a high EQ tend to be very successful in life. Coupled with a high IQ and they are even farther ahead. Humans are social creatures and those without that kind of interpersonal empathy just don't build relationships that help lead to success.
Well, look at Michelangelo. By all accounts, he had a terrible character and was next to impossible to deal with, but he has been an exemplar of professional career success ever since. It must apply only to the lesser mortals.
But Michelangelo understood the politics of the time. That is another big advantage - being aware of one's political circumstances.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.