That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back
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Homework x 2 = The American Dream
ORLANDO, Fla., May 31, 2011 /PRNewswire/—Students from Zhejiang University have been crowned World Champions of the 2011 Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest. Sponsored by IBM, the competition, also known as the “Battle of the Brains,” challenged 105 university teams to solve some of the most challenging computer programming problems in just five hours. Mastering both speed and skill, Zhejiang University successfully solved eight problems in five hours. The World Champions will return home with the “world’s smartest” trophy as well as IBM prizes, scholarships and a guaranteed offer of employment or internship with IBM. This year’s top twelve teams that received medals are:
• Zhejiang University (Gold, World Champion, China)
• University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (Gold, 2nd Place, USA)
• Tsinghua University (Gold, 3rd Place, China)
• St. Petersburg State University (Gold, 4th Place, Russia)
• Nizhny Novgorod State University (Silver, 5th Place, Russia)
• Saratov State University (Silver, 6th Place, Russia)
• Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg (Silver, 7th Place, Germany)
• Donetsk National University (Silver, 8th Place, Ukraine)
• Jagiellonian University in Krakow (Bronze, 9th Place, Poland)
• Moscow State University (Bronze, 10th Place, Russia)
• Ural State University (Bronze, 11th Place, Russia)
• University of Waterloo (Bronze, 12th Place, Canada)
Hillary Clinton never asked us for career advice. Had she done so, we would have told her this: When President Barack Obama came to you and offered the job of secretary of state, you should have said, “No, thank you. I prefer to hold the top national security job. Mr. President, it would have been wonderful to have been secretary of state during the Cold War, when that job was crucial. True, some things haven’t changed. Now, as in the past, the secretary of state spends all his or her time talking to and negotiating with other governments. Now, as in the past, success depends far less on his or her eloquence than on how much leverage the secretary brings to the table. Now, as in the past, that depends first and foremost on America’s economic vigor. Today, however, more than ever before, our national security depends on the quality of our educational system. That is why I don’t want to be secretary of state, Mr. President. Instead, I want to be at the heart of national security policy. I want to be secretary of education.”
We are well aware of the limits of the power of even the secretary of education when it comes to raising national educational attainment levels. Indeed, we believe that this responsibility belongs to all of us—the whole society. But symbolically the point is correct. Because of the merger of globalization and the IT revolution, raising math, science, reading, and creativity levels in American schools is the key determinant of economic growth, and economic growth is the key to national power and influence as well as individual well-being. In today’s hyper-connected world, the rewards for countries and individuals that can raise their educational achievement levels will be bigger than ever, while the penalties for countries and individuals that don’t will be harsher than ever. There will be no personal security without it. There will be no national security without it. That is why it is no accident that President Obama has declared that “the country that out-educates us today will outcompete us tomorrow.” That is why it is no accident that the executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles, in partnership with The Economist’s intelligence unit, has created a Global Talent Index, ranking different countries, under the motto “Talent is the new oil and just like oil, demand far outstrips supply.”
As a country we have not yet adapted to this new reality. We don’t think of education as an investment in national growth and national security because throughout our history it has been a localized, decentralized issue, not a national one. Today, however, what matters is not how your local school ranks in its county or state but how America’s schools rank in the world.
Michelle Rhee, the former chancellor of the Washington, D.C., school system, put it this way in an interview in Washingtonian magazine immediately after stepping down from the job (December 2010):
This country is in a significant crisis in education, and we don’t know it. If you look at other countries, like Singapore—Singapore’s knocking it out of the box. Why? Because the number-one strategy in their economic plan is education. We treat education as a social issue. And I’ll tell you what happens with social issues: When the budget crunch comes, they get swept under the rug, they get pushed aside. We have to start treating education as an economic issue.
She is right. Fifty years ago, “education was a choice not a necessity—I can choose to be educated or not, but either way I can get a decent job and live a decent life,” said Andreas Schleicher, the senior education officer at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris. “Today, education is not an option”—it is a necessity for a middle-class standard of living.
Wage statistics make this obvious. The polarization of employment opportunities in the last three decades “has been accompanied by a substantial secular rise in the earnings of those who complete post-secondary education,” noted Lawrence Katz and David Autor. “The hourly wage of the typical college graduate in the U.S. was approximately 1.5 times the hourly wage of the typical high school graduate in 1979. By 2009, this ratio stood at 1.95. This enormous growth in the earnings differential between college- and high school–educated workers reflects the cumulative effect of three decades of more or less continuous increase.” In November 2010, the Brookings Institution released a study entitled Degrees of Separation: Education, Employment, and the Great Recession in Metropolitan America. The study found that “during the Great Recession, employment dropped much less steeply among college-educated workers than other workers. The employment-to-population ratio dropped by more than 2 percentage points from 2007 to 2009 for working-age adults without a bachelor’s degree, but fell by only half a percentage point for college-educated individuals.” All in all, according to Brookings, while there were some regional discrepancies, “education appeared to act as a pretty good insurance policy for workers during the Great Recession.”
Historically, America has educated its people up to and beyond the technological demands of every era. Lawrence Katz and Claudia Goldin demonstrate in their book The Race Between Education and Technology that as long as our educational system kept up with the rate of technology change, as it did until around 1970, our economic growth was widely shared. And when it stopped keeping up, income inequality began widening as job opportunities for high school dropouts shrunk while employers bid for a too-small pool of highly skilled workers. Today’s hyper-connected world poses yet another new educational challenge: To prosper, America has to educate its young people up to and beyond the new levels of technology.
Not only does everyone today need more education to build the critical thinking and problem-solving skills that are now necessary for any good job; students also need better education. We define “better education” as an education that nurtures young people to be creative creators and creative servers. That is, we need our education system not only to strengthen everyone’s basics—reading, writing, and arithmetic—but to teach and inspire all Americans to start something new, to add something extra, or to adapt something old in whatever job they are doing.
With the world getting more hyper-connected all the time, maintaining the American dream will require learning, working, producing, relearning, and innovating twice as hard, twice as fast, twice as often, and twice as much. Hence the title of this chapter and the new equation for the American middle class: Homework x 2 = the American Dream.
Since this educational challenge is so important, we will divide our discussion of it into two parts. The rest of this chapter will explore what we mean by “more” education. T
he next chapter will explain what is required for “better” education.
We Have a “More” Problem
America needs to close two education gaps at once. We need to close the gap between black, Hispanic, and other minority students and the average for white students on standardized reading, writing, and math tests. But we have an equally dangerous gap between the average American student and the average students in many industrial countries that we consider collaborators and competitors, including Singapore, Korea, Taiwan, Finland, and those in the most developed parts of China.
Some contend that the results of these tests don’t tell the whole story, and that our top students and schools are still as good as any in the world. They are wrong. A study produced for the National Governors Association, entitled “Myths and Realities About International Comparisons,” concluded that the notion that other countries test a more select, elite group of students is wrong. Comparison tests now include a sampling of the whole population in each country. The study, published in The Learning System (Spring 2011), also dispelled the notion that the United States performs poorly in these tests because of poverty and other family factors. In fact, our students are quite similar in socioeconomic conditions to those tested in peer countries. As for the myth that U.S. student attainment cannot be compared to that of other countries because the United States tries to educate many more students, the report noted that the United States does rank above average in access to higher education, but this does not explain the fact that “significantly more U.S. students enter college than the OECD average, but our college ‘survival rate’ is 17 points below the average.” It also doesn’t explain how a country such as Finland, which is not at all diverse, managed to go from the back of the global pack in education to the top. Finland was not diverse when it was mediocre and it was not diverse when it excelled. Diversity was never the issue. Finland vaulted ahead because of specific educational policies. That’s why these tests matter.
And standardized international math and reading tests consistently show that American fourth graders compare well with their peers in countries such as Finland, Korea, and Singapore. But our high school students lag, which means that “the longer American children are in school, the worse they perform compared to their international peers,” the McKinsey & Company consulting firm concluded in an April 2009 report entitled The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools. There are millions of students in modern American suburban schools “who don’t realize how far behind they are,” said Matt Miller, one of the report’s authors. “They are being prepared for $12-an-hour jobs—not $40 to $50 an hour.”
Every three years the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) measures how fifteen-year-old students in several dozen industrial countries are being prepared for the jobs of the future by asking them to use their knowledge of math and science to solve realworld problems and to use their reading skills to “construct, extend and reflect on the meaning of what they have read.”
Here is a sample PISA science question. Test yourself: “Ray’s bus is, like most buses, powered by a petrol engine. These buses contribute to environmental pollution. Some cities have trolley buses: they are powered by an electric engine. The voltage needed for such an electric engine is provided by overhead lines (like electric trains). The electricity is supplied by a power station using fossil fuels. Supporters for the use of trolley buses in a city say that these buses don’t contribute to environmental pollution. Are these supporters right? Explain your answer.”
Here is a sample math question: “A pizzeria serves two round pizzas of the same thickness in different sizes. The smaller one has a diameter of 30 cm and costs 30 zeds. The larger one has a diameter of 40 cm and costs 40 zeds. Which pizza is better value for the money? Show your reasoning.”
Precisely because the PISA test is designed by the OECD to nurture and measure critical thinking and other twenty-first-century workplace skills, the showing of American students in 2009 is troubling. In reading, Shanghai, Korea, Finland, Hong Kong, Singapore, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, and Australia posted the highest scores. American students were in the middle of the pack, tied with those in Iceland and Poland. In math, the American fifteen-year-olds scored below the international average, more or less even with Ireland and Portugal, but lagging far behind Korea, Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Finland, and Switzerland. In science literacy, the U.S. students again were the middle of the pack, and again lagging behind the likes of Shanghai, Singapore, and Finland. It’s notable that Shanghai, the only city tested in China, did better in math, science, and reading than any of the other sixty-five countries.
Of Shanghai’s performance, Chester E. Finn Jr., who served in the Department of Education during the Reagan administration, told The New York Times (December 7, 2010), “Wow, I’m kind of stunned, I’m thinking Sputnik … I’ve seen how relentless the Chinese are at accomplishing goals, and if they can do this in Shanghai in 2009, they can do it in 10 cities in 2019, and in 50 cities by 2029.” That is the Chinese way: experiment, identify what works, and then scale it. Marc Tucker, the president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, has noted that “while many Americans believe that other countries get better results because those countries educate only a few, while the United States educates everyone, that turns out not to be true.” Compared to the United States, most top-performing countries do a better job of educating students from low-income families, he said.
As they say in football, “You are what your record says you are.” Our record says that we are a country whose educational performance is at best undistinguished. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan made no excuses for the results. The day the 2009 PISA results were published (December 7, 2010), he issued a statement, saying, “Being average in reading and science—and below average in math—is not nearly good enough in a knowledge economy where scientific and technological literacy is so central to sustaining innovation and international competitiveness.”
The PISA test results got some fleeting newspaper coverage and then disappeared. No radio or television station interrupted its programming to tell us how poorly we had done; neither party picked up the issue and used it in the 2010 midterms. Partial-birth abortion received more attention. The president did not make a prime-time address. The twenty-first-century equivalent of Sputnik went up—and yet very few Americans seemed to hear the signal it was sending.
Susan Engel, a senior lecturer in psychology and director of the teaching program at Williams College and the author of Red Flags or Red Herrings? Predicting Who Your Child Will Become, frames our challenge this way: “There are two basic problems with education in America. The first glaring problem, the one getting lots of attention, is that too many kids have no choice but to go to schools that are dangerous, badly staffed, educationally indifferent, and underfunded. If you take those kids and put them in a school with reasonable funding, a school board and an administration that are excited about what is happening, and with energetic teachers, it’s a huge improvement over what those kids have had. So, problem one: too many kids in America go to schools that don’t even begin to offer them the hope of getting to average.”
Selected countries’ performance in mathematics, reading, and science, 2009
Mathematics Reading Science
Shanghai-China 600 Shanghai-China 556 Shanghai-China 556
Singapore 562 Korea 539 Finland 539
Hong Kong-China 555 Finland 536 Hong Kong-China 536
Korea 546 Hong Kong-China 533 Singapore 533
Chinese Taipei 543 Singapore 526 Japan 526
Finland 541 Canada 524 Korea 524
Liechtenstein 536 New Zealand 521 New Zealand 521
Switzerland 534 Japan 520 Canada 520
Japan 529 Australia 515 Estonia 515
Canada 527 Netherlands 508 Australia 508
Netherlands 526 Belgium 506 Netherlands 506
Macao-China 525 Norway 503 Chinese Taipei 503
Belgium 515 Switzerland 501 Liechtenstein 501
Australia 514 Poland 500 Switzerland 500
Germany 513 Iceland 500 United Kingdom 500
Estonia 512 United States 500 Slovenia 500
Iceland 507 Liechtenstein 499 Macao-China 499
Denmark 503 Sweden 497 Poland 497
Slovenia 501 Germany 497 Ireland 497
Norway 498 Ireland 496 Belgium 496
France 497 France 496 Hungary 496
Slovak Republic 497 Chinese Taipei 495 United States 495
Austria 496 Denmark 495 Czech Republic 495
Poland 495 United Kingdom 494 Norway 494
Sweden 494 Hungary 494 Denmark 494
Czech Republic 493 Portugal 489 France 489
United Kingdom 492 Macao-China 487 Iceland 487
Hungary 490 Italy 486 Sweden 486
Luxembourg 489 Latvia 484 Austria 484
United States 487 Slovenia 483 Latvia 483
Ireland 487 Greece 483 Portugal 483
Portugal 487 Spain 481 Lithuania 481
Significantly above the OECD average GECD average Significantly below the OECD average
PISA focuses on young people’s ability to use their knowledge and skills to meet real-life challenges. This orientation reflects a change in the goals and objectives of curricula themselves, which are increasingly concerned with what students can do with what they learn at school and not merely with whether they have mastered specific curricular content.
Source: OECD PISA 2009 database
Our second problem, explains Engel, is just as big, if not bigger. It’s that “even the ‘nice’ schools aren’t good enough. These schools have decent facilities, adequate class sizes, a good number of teachers who like their job and/or like kids, and a majority of students who can read, who can pass standardized state tests. These schools are often okay, but not really good. Too many teachers are not that well educated, not that on fire to be teachers, and not that challenged within the system to be terrific. Such schools often lack any coherent or compelling idea about what a good education consists of, what high schools should emphasize, how to be really vibrant learning communities. These ‘okay’ schools may send kids like yours and mine on a good path—good colleges, good job options—but even in these schools, too many kids are not living up to their intellectual or personal potential. They’re not engaged, and not headed to become the inventors, entrepreneurs, and stewards of the Earth that we’re going to need.”