That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [57]
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. The 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