That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [69]
How does he sell this reform to skeptical Delaware residents? He does it by connecting education with jobs. “I went to Taiwan a month ago,” Markell told us in January 2010. “We have two Taiwanese companies in Delaware with 250 employees between them. One of the companies makes solar panels. At the same time that they started in Delaware, they started a factory in China. There is only one thing I am asking myself: ‘Where are they going to invest their next dollars?’ And you have to put yourself in their shoes. It is going to go where it will have the best return.” And part of that, added Markell, will depend on where they find the most productive workers. This is not just about cheap labor. It is about skilled labor.
Neighbors: The role of neighbors today is to appreciate the importance of the public school down the street, even if their own children have long graduated or they have no children at all. Good schools are the foundation of good neighborhoods and communities. Money may be saved in the short term by voting down tax increases to fund schools. But if that results in higher dropout rates and higher unemployment, the overall cost to the community will certainly be higher. When the performance of local schools drops, it usually is not long before the value of nearby houses drops as well. In March 2010, Tom attended the Intel Science Talent Search, a national contest for high school students designed to identify and support the nation’s next generation of scientists. “My favorite chat was with Amanda Alonzo, a thirty-year-old biology teacher at Lynbrook High School in San Jose, California,” he wrote at the time. “She had taught two of the [Intel] finalists. When I asked her the secret, she said it was the resources provided by her school, extremely ‘supportive parents,’ and a grant from Intel that let her spend part of each day inspiring and preparing students to enter this contest. Then she told me this: Local San Jose Realtors are running ads in newspapers in China and India telling potential immigrants to ‘buy a home’ in her Lynbrook school district because it produced ‘two Intel science winners.’” While every child’s educational experience should matter to everyone as a matter of principle, good education is also good economics—for everybody.
McKinsey & Company made that very point in its report entitled The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools (April 2009). The report asked what would have happened if in the fifteen years after the 1983 report A Nation at Risk sounded the alarm about the “rising tide of mediocrity” in American education, the United States had lifted lagging student achievement. The answer: If black and Latino student performance had caught up with that of white students by 1998, GDP in 2008 would have been between $310 billion and $525 billion higher. If the gap between low-income students and the rest had been narrowed, GDP in 2008 would have been $400 billion to $670 billion higher.
“We simply don’t have the capacity to carry large pockets of our population, whom we know are unskilled and have a life that has a ceiling on it, and think that the United States can still soar and be unique and be the number-one source of good in the world,” Kasim Reed, the mayor of Atlanta, told us.
Parents: In January 2011, Yale University law professor Amy Chua set off a firestorm of debate across America when The Wall Street Journal published