Many increasing returns cont.
Here's an opportunity for leadership, change, and increasing returns:
A report [warning, large pdf executive summary] has been released by a panel called the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, organized by the National Center on Education and the Economy (funded by foundations, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Annie E. Casey Foundation, Hewlett Foundation). As reported by both Time Magazine and the New York Times, the New Commission states bluntly that leadership in the new world order of digitized global industries requires a “deep vein of creativity” that, in turn, requires substantial education (”comfort with ideas and abstractions”) that we're not providing in this country.
So our standard of living is going to fall. Inevitably.
To address this problem, the report (based on two years of work, many major economic and labor studies, lots of international comparisons) makes several recommendations about how education should work in the US. Students should take board examinations in subject areas at the end of the 10th grade, which will serve to direct some students to community college and some to additional high school work towards eventual college admission. And we should persuade the best students eventually to become teachers, by paying them more in the early years of their teaching careers and providing them with better benefits. We should test students for the skills that will help workers in this new world, like creativity, self-discipline, the ability to work well with a team. We should change the way schools are managed, by privatizing them and making them accountable for their funding to the state rather than the local area — and allowing parents to send their children to any school whose reported results they liked. We should provide high-quality early childhood education, provide continuing education to adults, and generally make learning a lifelong (and competitively provided) experience.
Paul Romer is quoted in the Times coverage saying that this change-the-world effort “was driven by improvements in technology, much as advances in the early 20th century led to universal high school.”
Investing in the educational changes suggested by the report could substantially increase our productivity as a nation — many increasing returns. And technology — particularly an open internet — could help a great deal.
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