In today’s high-tech global economy, New York students will not just compete for jobs with their neighbors—they will compete with students across the world. America’s outdated schools threaten our economic future. If the next President truly wants to boost New York’s economy, he or she must focus on reforming our schools.
Americans are facing more competition for jobs than ever before.
- Geography matters less. Americans used to have an advantage—skilled jobs had to be done in the United States. However, with the massive investment in fiber-optic telecommunications cables across the globe, work can now easily be digitized (like music) and shipped anywhere in the world.
- “The world is flat.” Now, the best opportunities go to the best educated, no matter where they live. According to the National Center on Education and the Economy, “American workers at every skill level are in direct competition with workers in every corner of the globe.”
- America is losing ground. As recently as 1998, the U.S. ranked first in percentage of 25-34 year olds with at least a bachelor’s degree, but by 2005 it had dropped to 7th. Between 2000 and 2005, out of 23 countries, the U.S. was the only country that showed no increase in its postsecondary graduation rate. And while America once had the best high school graduation rate in the world, it has now slipped to 20th out of 26 countries.
America is not preparing today’s students to be skilled workers for tomorrow’ s economy.
- Our standards are too low. By the end of 8th grade, what passes for the U.S. math curriculum is two years behind the math being studied by 8th graders in other countries.
- Our skills are too low. American 15-year-olds are significantly below average in math and science. Out of 30 countries participating in a 2006 assessment, America’s 15-year-olds ranked 25th in math and 21st in science. Specifically, less than one-third of 8th graders are proficient in math and science in New York.
- New York’s students are not prepared. Two-thirds of new jobs being created in today’s economy require higher education or advanced training, but one-third of New York students who enroll in 4- year colleges after high school do not manage to earn a bachelor’s degree within six years.
Improving our educational performance will pay huge economic dividends to Americans.
If America could increase the cognitive skills of its students to the level of the highest performing nations over the next decade, our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) would grow by an additional 4.5 percent over 25 years—an amount that is equal to what the U.S. currently spends on K-12 public education.
Increasing our economic competitiveness requires strengthening K-12 schools.
- Higher Standards: In a recent report, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) pegged America’s low education standards as one of the biggest threats to the U.S. economy. “A country’s ability to compete in an ever more integrated world economy depends on a highly educated workforce. However, with many countries making more progress in this respect, the United States has lost its leading position.”
- Effective Teachers: The British education expert Michael Barber recently told the New York Times that top-performing education systems around the world “all select their teachers from the top third of their college graduates, whereas the U.S. selects its teachers from the bottom third of graduates. This is one of the big challenges for the U.S. education system: What are you going to do over the next 15 to 20 years to recruit ever better people into teaching?” The likelihood that a highly talented female in the top ten percent of high school graduates will go into teaching declined by nearly half from 1964 to 2000.
- Time and Support for Learning: According to the Center for American Progress, “Many of the countries that outperform the United States on international comparisons of student performance keep their students in school longer […] There is little doubt that the extra time students in other countries devote to education contributes to the differences in academic achievement." On average, students in nations participating in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) spent 193 days annually in school, compared with only 180 in the U.S. Over 12 years, this deficit translates into a gap of nearly one full school year.
Strong American Schools, a project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, is a nonpartisan campaign supported by The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation promoting sound education policies for all Americans. SAS does not support or oppose any candidate for public office and does not take positions on legislation.
Joan Walsh
Kerry Lauerman
Chris Neimeth
James Ruga
TruthinPolitics
Dragonfly
Salon.com
Comments
With other choices and less public reverence for universal public education, it may be harder to accept the hours, emotional challenges and salary. One of the realities of public school jobs is that parents who can't or won't support their kids doing homework, getting to class on time or even just respecting the idea of school are usually going to have more influence on a child failure than any teacher could. People talk about American family values, while one of the older ones the GOP has forsaken is family respect for and support of public schools and teachers. This has been what has kept our national language English in the past, not "English Only" legislation. Free schools make it possible to be a free nation that can thrive and maintain identity with waves of immigration.
Better pay, more respect in society at large and more support from parents would both get and keep more extraordinary teachers.
We need accountability at all levels, not just on the front lines. I think we all know this is a systemic issue.
They all have plans that start with training new teachers. It would take years before they are on line. The biggest pool of potential teachers is teachers who have dropped out for financial and other reasons. What good is served if we lose the bulk of the next generation of teachers similarly?
Add to this pool professionals who actually have had life experience and know why kids need to learn what they are being taught.
Enthusiasm is contagious!
Languages should include extra credit Chinese or Japanese. A certain amount of school has to be set aside for computers, obviously, but also basic business.
All we learned in school in the 70s was advertising and branding. People should not come out of school with the moronic idealism that all business, and profit is evil. Business provides jobs for people who pay taxes, meaning less people who need benefits and tax money, and more people paying taxes.
The government has to work with the private sector, not against it, and teachers have got to learn the symbiotic relationship with business as opposed to promoting an adversarial one.
Which bring us to another point, we are creating too many propaganda programs at the expense of basic education. What is the point of giving students self esteem if they can't read or compete in math and science?
Yes, it is a global economy. In which American students are completely ignorant of the rest of the world. That makes a lot of sense. More computers, more business, less self esteem nonsense and politically correct propaganda, which is useless in the marketplace.
http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/oct2007/sb20071025_827398.htm
http://davidsirota.com/index.php/flattening-the-great-education-myth/
Why is our education failing? Who knows, but I don't think it's possible to blame it on any one thing. Teachers do not teach in a vacuum. As a country, we need to start looking at other countries who children continue to succeed and ask ourselves what we are doing wrong. If we are preparing our young people to work in a global economy, then it seems logical that education becomes global as well.
And Josh Draper, I think you are correct about creativity and the seminar format. I had that as an under-grad in college, and I think I could have used it a whole lot earlier.
That is that K-12 school districts want graduates from academically prestigous colleges and universities. K-12 adminstration is comprised of graduates of SUNY "teacher colleges" with modest academic admission and curriculum requirements. Better students from better universities tend to be more independent thinkers - this is very threatening to the staus quo administration. More often than not they will hire the applicant with the same background as themselves. Even if they are well intentioned, they have no idea what excellence is, having spent their entire career bathed in mediocrity. The unaccountable public education system allows this model to perpetuate - mediocre teachers and administrators , underperforming, perpetuating mediocre standards.
Higher pay is not the issue - teacher/administrator pay in New York is on par with most other "professions". There is systemic problem that will not be fixed from within.
First the good news: no other country educates all of its handicapped children as well as we do. Go back a generation and you will find the handicapped adult living in the attic - hidden from the world by his family and never having a chance at any kind of education.
I also work in a school with a lot of very intelligent, professional, hard working teachers and administrators. And I know I am very lucky to work there. There are many many thousands of schools like mine across the country.
The problems though are legion. Number one is the way the NCLB has been implemented. The idea is a good one if it could be implemented in ways that do not encourage bureaucracy, waste and fraud. Just two examples: first is all those handicapped children we educate plus the many non English speaking children we see coming in to our classrooms. They are all welcome, but to hold them to the rigid testing standards of the mainstream population in unreasonable ways is very destructive. It is one of the main reasons that thousands of Florida schools are now labeled "failing schools".
Second are some of the fraudulent ways that NCLB claims to "fix" these so called failing schools. One example is the private tutoring companies making the private sector richer at the expense of shrinking public school budgets. Where do they get their tutors to correct the instruction given at our failing school? Why they hire our "failing"teachers of course and after paying them and in one recent case giving each child who comes to 10 sessions a free lap top they still make a profit and have none of the accountability the public sector is held to. I too would love to have several thousand dollars for every 10 classes our students attend. Those extra millions would go a long way to help provide the resources that are never quite all there for our school. I might even get my planning time back and not have to work straight through the day with a 25 minute lunch and 6 classes of middle school kids. That planning time was taken away to save money. In Japan, one of the countries our math and science scores are constantly compared to, the teachers have many hours of planning time. The same is true around the world in many other high scoring school systems. Of course no one in a pubishing company or tutoring company can make a buck on giving teachers planning time so I don't expect to see it any time soon.
Another huge issue in public schools is the political aspect of our failure to educate. It is always the schools that are failing. This lets the politicians of the hook on things like kids who come to school sick day after day. They still need to pass the tests without health care, without a parent home to help them with homework because the parent(s) are working long hours at minimum wage jobs. We have had years of welfare (big tax breaks) for the rich and shrinking resources for the poor and now many of our children from working class homes are suffering. When they fail at school its my fault. The politicians have found a great scape goat in the public schools so they don't have to take responsibility. But as has been said here many times it takes all of society to educate our children. They need to step up and do their part to stop preaching about family values and start implementing policies that actually support American families.
Last but not least are the parents. I myself am a single parent with a child who just graduated from film school. I know what hard work it is to raise a child and how little help there is from our culture to support raising happy healthy children. I see many families of my students working hard to do their best in a society that does not offer much help and often gets in the way. We as families have been told to support our country by shopping. We need a culture that advocates less shopping and more time spent at home with our children making sure they are doing their homework and talking to them about things that matter in their lives. Children cannot be raised by schools and the TV and parents need time with their children. School has to be a priority for our families. They need to realize that just because we are the most powerful nation now does not mean that hard work and sacrifice are not necessary for our children to continue to be successful. The children who are failing in our schools are often unmotivated, without goals, and sometimes emotionally traumatized by the lives they lead. Schools are overwhelmed by the role demanded of them by society. We need to work together with everyone taking responsibility for our children's future and for our futures as well.
They also focus too much on sport. If you're not into sports and are into getting a decent education, you do not fit in at all. Don't get me wrong, I think sports are a good social activity, but how many kids get to become professional athletes vs. having to get a normal job? What about those kids that just want to go to school to learn and not be involved with contact sports?
And just like many companies, they focus too much on teaching things one way. Everyone learns things in a different way, some by doing, some by reading, some by watching others complete it first and then it clicks for them. You can’t teach everyone the same and expect them all to be on the same page.
I remember when my son was in 4th grade, we had spend the day with your child at school. His History teacher made it a point to let it be known, that they were told by the government to change their curriculum to teach the provided information on airplanes and air travel, because it was Nov and right before the holidays and they wanted the kids to go home all excited and try to convince their parents to fly again to travel during the holidays. The government is to involved in the wrong parts of education.
Also, most teachers are way under paid which makes it a less appealing job. I live in NC and the teachers here are paid once a month, don’t make that much and aren’t paid for their summer breaks. I think that’s awful and it doesn’t give one much incentive to become a teacher.
Just my 2 cents