http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/08/opinion/sunday/friedman-cant-we-do-better.html
Can't We Do Better?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: December 7, 2013 4 Comments
THE latest results in the Program for International Student Assessment,
or PISA, which compare how well 15-year-olds in 65 cities and countries
can apply math, science and reading skills to solve real-world problems
were released last week, and it wasn't pretty for the home team. Andreas
Schleicher, who manages PISA, told the Department of Education: "Three
years ago, I came here with a special report benchmarking the U.S.
against some of the best performing and rapidly improving education
systems. Most of them have pulled further ahead, whether it is Brazil
that advanced from the bottom, Germany and Poland that moved from
adequate to good, or Shanghai and Singapore that moved from good to
great. The math results of top-performer Shanghai are now two-and-a-half
school years ahead even of those in Massachusetts — itself a leader
within the U.S."
Not good. We're now in an era in which globalization and the information
technology revolution have merged to drastically shrink what was the
basis of our middle class for so many years: the "high-wage,
middle-skilled" job. In a less integrated and less automated world of
walls, where unions held more sway, many Americans could live an average
middle-class lifestyle with average skills. In today's hyperconnected
world without walls — when more Indians, Chinese, computers, robots and
software can perform more average blue-collar and white-collar jobs —
the only high-wage jobs are increasingly high-skill jobs. "Over the last
decade, job growth in the industrialized world has almost exclusively
been at the top end of the PISA skill distribution," explained
Schleicher, "while routine cognitive skills, the kinds of things that
are easy to teach but also easy to digitize and outsource, have seen the
steepest decline in demand."
President Obama noted last week that this is one reason that the top 10
percent in America now takes home half of our national income, up from a
third in 1979. One response is to raise the minimum wage and provide
national health care. I hope both work, but neither will solve the
problem. "Since the link between skills, jobs and growth is becoming
ever tighter, it will be harder and harder for governments to address
inequalities through redistribution," argues Schleicher.
To his credit, Obama has also been calling for more investment in
preschool, tech-ed and affordable colleges, but Republicans will only
talk about tax cuts. Tax cuts alone won't cut it either. Our kids face
three big adjustments. First, to be in the middle class, they will need
to be constantly improving their skills over their lifetime. Second, to
do that, they will need a lot more self-motivation. The "digital divide"
will soon disappear. Fairly soon, virtually everyone will have a screen
and an Internet connection. In that world, argues futurist Marina
Gorbis, the big divide will be "the motivational divide" — who has the
self-motivation, grit and persistence to take advantage of all the free
or cheap online tools to create, collaborate and learn. And third,
countries that thrive the most will be the H.I.E.'s — the high
imagination-enabling countries — that attract and enable talent to be
constantly spinning off new ideas and start-ups, the source of most new
good jobs.
So now let's look at the latest PISA. It found that the most successful
students are those who feel real "ownership" of their education. In all
the best performing school systems, said Schleicher, "students feel they
personally can make a difference in their own outcomes and that
education will make a difference for their future." The PISA research,
said Schleicher, also shows that "students whose parents have high
expectations for them tend to have more perseverance, greater intrinsic
motivation to learn." The highest performing PISA schools, he added, all
have "ownership" cultures — a high degree of professional autonomy for
teachers in the classrooms, where teachers get to participate in shaping
standards and curriculum and have ample time for continuous professional
development. So teaching is not treated as an industry where teachers
just spew out and implement the ideas of others, but rather is "a
profession where teachers have ownership of their practice and
standards, and hold each other accountable," said Schleicher.
We're going through a huge technological transformation in the middle of
a recession. It requires a systemic response. Democrats who protect
teachers' unions that block reforms to give teachers more ownership and
accountability, and who refuse to address long-term entitlement spending
that threatens to deprive us of funds to invest in the young, are
harming our future. Republicans who block investments in things like
early education and immigration reform — today we educate the world's
top talent in our colleges and then send them back to their home
countries — are harming our future.
Conservatives need to think differently about the near-term safety nets
we need to ease some people through this period, and liberals need to
think more seriously about how we incentivize and unleash risk-takers to
start new companies that create growth, wealth and good jobs. To have
more employees, we need more employers. Just redividing a slow-growing
pie will not sustain the American dream.
Can't We Do Better?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: December 7, 2013 4 Comments
THE latest results in the Program for International Student Assessment,
or PISA, which compare how well 15-year-olds in 65 cities and countries
can apply math, science and reading skills to solve real-world problems
were released last week, and it wasn't pretty for the home team. Andreas
Schleicher, who manages PISA, told the Department of Education: "Three
years ago, I came here with a special report benchmarking the U.S.
against some of the best performing and rapidly improving education
systems. Most of them have pulled further ahead, whether it is Brazil
that advanced from the bottom, Germany and Poland that moved from
adequate to good, or Shanghai and Singapore that moved from good to
great. The math results of top-performer Shanghai are now two-and-a-half
school years ahead even of those in Massachusetts — itself a leader
within the U.S."
Not good. We're now in an era in which globalization and the information
technology revolution have merged to drastically shrink what was the
basis of our middle class for so many years: the "high-wage,
middle-skilled" job. In a less integrated and less automated world of
walls, where unions held more sway, many Americans could live an average
middle-class lifestyle with average skills. In today's hyperconnected
world without walls — when more Indians, Chinese, computers, robots and
software can perform more average blue-collar and white-collar jobs —
the only high-wage jobs are increasingly high-skill jobs. "Over the last
decade, job growth in the industrialized world has almost exclusively
been at the top end of the PISA skill distribution," explained
Schleicher, "while routine cognitive skills, the kinds of things that
are easy to teach but also easy to digitize and outsource, have seen the
steepest decline in demand."
President Obama noted last week that this is one reason that the top 10
percent in America now takes home half of our national income, up from a
third in 1979. One response is to raise the minimum wage and provide
national health care. I hope both work, but neither will solve the
problem. "Since the link between skills, jobs and growth is becoming
ever tighter, it will be harder and harder for governments to address
inequalities through redistribution," argues Schleicher.
To his credit, Obama has also been calling for more investment in
preschool, tech-ed and affordable colleges, but Republicans will only
talk about tax cuts. Tax cuts alone won't cut it either. Our kids face
three big adjustments. First, to be in the middle class, they will need
to be constantly improving their skills over their lifetime. Second, to
do that, they will need a lot more self-motivation. The "digital divide"
will soon disappear. Fairly soon, virtually everyone will have a screen
and an Internet connection. In that world, argues futurist Marina
Gorbis, the big divide will be "the motivational divide" — who has the
self-motivation, grit and persistence to take advantage of all the free
or cheap online tools to create, collaborate and learn. And third,
countries that thrive the most will be the H.I.E.'s — the high
imagination-enabling countries — that attract and enable talent to be
constantly spinning off new ideas and start-ups, the source of most new
good jobs.
So now let's look at the latest PISA. It found that the most successful
students are those who feel real "ownership" of their education. In all
the best performing school systems, said Schleicher, "students feel they
personally can make a difference in their own outcomes and that
education will make a difference for their future." The PISA research,
said Schleicher, also shows that "students whose parents have high
expectations for them tend to have more perseverance, greater intrinsic
motivation to learn." The highest performing PISA schools, he added, all
have "ownership" cultures — a high degree of professional autonomy for
teachers in the classrooms, where teachers get to participate in shaping
standards and curriculum and have ample time for continuous professional
development. So teaching is not treated as an industry where teachers
just spew out and implement the ideas of others, but rather is "a
profession where teachers have ownership of their practice and
standards, and hold each other accountable," said Schleicher.
We're going through a huge technological transformation in the middle of
a recession. It requires a systemic response. Democrats who protect
teachers' unions that block reforms to give teachers more ownership and
accountability, and who refuse to address long-term entitlement spending
that threatens to deprive us of funds to invest in the young, are
harming our future. Republicans who block investments in things like
early education and immigration reform — today we educate the world's
top talent in our colleges and then send them back to their home
countries — are harming our future.
Conservatives need to think differently about the near-term safety nets
we need to ease some people through this period, and liberals need to
think more seriously about how we incentivize and unleash risk-takers to
start new companies that create growth, wealth and good jobs. To have
more employees, we need more employers. Just redividing a slow-growing
pie will not sustain the American dream.
Comments
Post a Comment