That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [56]
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