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I just listened to a disturbing news story on National Public Radio, this morning, about how budget cuts may force a Los Angeles middle school to fire half of its teachers. The riffed staff — reported to be mostly young, passionate and well educated — will be replaced with more senior teachers who had initially turned down a chance to teach at this innovative start-up (but who will now come anyway after losing their jobs at other LA. schools).
One anecdote that pointed to the school’s inventive approach to turning low-income inner-city kids on to math: a staff-written horror video starring the seventh-grade faculty. A “crazed kidnapper named Pythagoras” gives ransom messages that can be solved only through the use of math. The kids loved the story — and the Pythagorean Theorem became indelibly etched into their gray matter.
I can understand California’s budgetary dilemma, but the problem is that the real losers when schools sideline good teachers — young or old, new or experienced — is always our children. And can we really afford to jettison caring, passionate and well-trained educators at a time like this?
"This" being the waning age of U.S. economic and entrepreneurial supremacy. Or at least that’s the rather compelling picture that venture capitalist Bob Compton has been painting in some documentaries that he’s developed over the past four years. He and I spoke just yesterday about the American educational imperative confronting today’s youth. It’s the theme of the first of his films, “Two Million Minutes.”
Haven’t heard of it? No surprise. It hasn’t had a theatrical release and film festivals that Compton sent it to told him thanks — but no thanks. I screened it, a few weeks back, and would argue that viewing this provocative documentary is worth the investment of every minute.
Its title points to the time between eighth-grade graduation and the end of high school. During this brief period, students must hone the skills and acquire the knowledge that will prepare them for college, their entrée to professions that will define the 21st century economy.
The scary message in this film: U.S. students don’t spend nearly as much time in the classroom or on homework as do a large number of their peers in India or China. They also take fewer math and science courses. And they aspire in far smaller numbers to careers that depend on a proficiency in science and math.
The result, Compton’s documentary concludes: “Compared to the U.S., China now produces eight times more scientists and engineers, while India puts out up to three times as many.” Owing to the lower cost of living in their countries, these Asian professionals work for less money than their western counterparts, which makes them very attractive to high-tech employers the world over. Also attractive to employers, especially in the United States: There’s no shortage of these highly trained professionals in Asia — while there is in some parts of America.
Compton first encountered the East-West contrast in high-school education while hosting a dinner for 100 software engineers in India. He had anticipated spending a boring evening with nerds. Instead, this Harvard educated businessman was shocked to see how “remarkably well-rounded” all of his guests were. “They knew more about American and European politics than I did,” he said. The same was true for European and Chinese history. They could carry on a deep conversation about Shakespeare’s plays or the economic marketplace in which their products would compete.
When he asked how they came to be so knowledgeable about so much, they all gave the same answer: “This is what we learned in high school.”
So the Memphis-based businessman extended his one-week trip into a four-week stay. And started visiting urban Indian schools. Which proved an ever bigger eye-opener.
While visiting a first-grade class, he asked a single question: What would you like to be when you grow up. And the answer: engineer, engineer, scientist, cardiologist, astronomer, scientist, engineer, teacher, fighter pilot, army officer, engineer, engineer, engineer. “I was stunned,” he now recalls, at how revered science and technology were among children as young as five and six.
Back in the States, he asked the same question in 10 first-grade classrooms. “And I heard lots of interesting careers — everything from pro-wrestler to rock star and celebrity,” he says. “But two careers never mentioned were engineer and scientist.”
Urban Indian and Chinese schools also make specialized science and math classes mandatory. In India, Compton notes, from middle school on students must take four years of physics, of biology and of computer science. Moreover, he learned, teachers aren’t considered for such classes unless they have both undergraduate and graduate degrees in the field they would teach. At least this is true for private schools, which educate half of India's urban students, he notes.
On a whim, Compton asked one Indian principal what she would consider him qualified to teach. “Second grade,” she said. “You’d be good with young children.” But he lacked the training for more advanced classes, she pointed out — especially at the middle- and high-school levels.
Bottom line: The best schools in India and China have much more rigorous academic programs than America has and they set much higher standards for graduation. Overall, China and India each graduate some four times as many high-school students each year. The fact that there aren’t even enough colleges available to absorb them all is what contributes to the high number of these Asian students applying to U.S. universities, especially for science and engineering programs, Compton says.
The difference in the nations’ academic expectations was the focus of “Two Million Minutes,” which followed a pair of boys and girls throughout their senior year in India, China and a highly ranked school in Indiana. Frankly, the film makes Americans look like real slackers.
Of course, Compton's film is anything but a statistically significant sampling of college-bound kids in any of these countries. And there are other sources out there, such as James Tooley's new book, "A Beautiful Tree," that find Chinese or Indian students who must rely on public education might envy even poorly financed, inner-city U.S. schools. Their experience, as Tooley recounts it, departs greatly from the education garnered in the high-priced private schools that the Asian children in Compton's film had attended.
But the message Compton brought home from his travels — and that emerges from his film crew’s interviews with these kids, their families, their teachers and entrepreneurs — is that there is a growing cultural divide between the United States and the huge middle classes in the world's two most populous nations. Where Americans prize celebrities and leisure pursuits, India and China prize intellectual pursuits and are investing in new colleges, research parks and small-business incubators — centers that support innovation and high-tech start-up companies.
In these Asian nations, Compton says, research and its practioners are held in much the same esteem as sports and athletes are in America. Indeed, that has been the experience of one Indian-born IT entrepreneur, now working in North Carolina, who was interviewed for “Two Million Minutes.” Observed this engineer, with a smile, every time he goes back home he’s treated like a “rock star.” (Although I suspect a Bollywood star, or certainly a soccer star, would give him a run for the celebrity money.)
Still, America's complacency about its place in the world is dangerous. To remain a leader, it has to invest more on education generally — especially the training and support of elementary- and secondary-school teachers. Students from Asia and elsewhere will not only compete with their U.S. counterparts in the classroom, but increasingly in the marketplace. And there's no certainty that we in America are preparing our students to handily win those competitions.
But for an American educational renaissance to be effective, support must start at home — literally. In discussions over the dinner table we have to prize educational achievement, the media have to cover educational triumphs and contests as they now do local sports, parents have to push their kids to do all they can, and taxpayers have to stop grousing about the costs of budgeting for legions of energetic, passionate, well-trained specialists in local classrooms.
Compton has started putting his money and time into campaigning for just this. But unconvinced that America's ready to take the global view in this regard, he has already begun warning his teenage daughters that they might graduate college only to find that — at least in the high-tech sector — their best career move will require emigrating to some industrial park in Asia. Or being outsourced, by their Chinese employer, to some tax haven — perhaps a rust-belt inner city in the economically depressed American Midwest.
Found in: Computers, Education, Physics, Science & Society and Technology
- Kahn, C. 2009. L.A.'s Urban Schools Hardest Hit By Teacher Layoffs. Morning Edition, National Public Radio (June 17). [Go to]
- Robert A. Compton, Exec. Producer. 2007. Two Million Minutes (December). [Go to]
- Tooley, J. 2009. A Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World's Poorest People Are Educating Themselves. Cato Institute Press (April). [Go to]
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- On the Scene : Vying for the title of World's Fastest Cell
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In the IT field, the shortage of "highly trained professionals" is baloney propagated by companies who just want cheap and captive H1-B labor, mostly from India. They fire Americans, then cry over the lack of these same workers, and demand more H1-B visas. After the H1-B visa expires most of these workers return home, taking American training and IP with them.
Wonderful system, bought and paid for by US companies who just want cheap labor, and to propagate the idea that the trained workers they fired don't exist.
I wished the article had just been honest enough to report that the better teachers will be replaced by worse teachers because that’s the real predicament facing America’s educational system: ability, performance and results have become secondary criteria to protecting entrenched and unenthusiastic non-performing union teachers merely because they have more seniority. It’s the lack of any merit system that has caused the problem; that today’s budget constraint has brought this to the forefront of public attention is immaterial. Los Angeles and California and America’s schools have been failing for decades because we refuse to replace bad teachers and bad school administrators.
One of the article’s conclusions is that, “taxpayers have to stop grousing about the costs of budgeting for legions of energetic, passionate, well-trained specialists in local classrooms.” But this is a false choice. Every taxpayer wants to retain those well-trained better teachers. It’s the teachers unions and the education bureaucracy who protect their worst failures while ignoring both real world results and the wishes of the taxpayers. Instead of real solutions, we are told to spend more money. Yet, more money will not obscure this failed logic.
Likewise, American complacency, though a serious issue, cannot be solved with a greater investment (i.e. more funding through higher taxes), especially while the current investment is failing to provide any measurable return. Often ignored is the reality that failure in Asia has REAL consequences and can destine a family to horrendous lifetime poverty. America has numerous government funded safety nets, even after welfare reform, which permits complacency to persist. China and India have none of those backstops. Failure here in American, by comparison, is merely inconvenient.
The article’s other point is that India and China’s embrace of higher education now threatens America’s economic supremacy. If I might paraphrase Mark Twain, the rumors of America’s economic death have been greatly exaggerated. Good news for China and India need not be bad news for us (though I think it will mean bad things for old Europe).
I have heard about Bob Compton’s documentary, "Two Million Minutes" and I look forward to seeing it soon. Hearing through his documentary that India and China’s youth celebrate engineering and the sciences is encouraging. America used to do so also. But what few reporters ever mention is how far behind America these countries are even today and how much growth they will need just to catch up with Western living standards. It’s misleading to state that “China and India each graduate some four times as many high-school students” without also disclosing that China’s 1.33B and India’s 1.15B people are four times America’s 0.303B population. It’s also misleading to compare their best private schools to our average, or even best, public schools. A more significant fact is that, despite decades of growth, China’s GDP per capita is still only $6,100 while India’s is a mere $2,900, compared to America’s $48,000.
The infrastructure needs of both Asian countries are far greater than America’s, so more engineering graduates are needed for their own internal growth. More grads are a good thing and not necessarily threatening. Both of these countries, as well as many other Asian countries, will need far more entrepreneurs and engineers than the now produce just to catch up to America. India and China’s technical needs combined with a surge of technicians will almost assure that their economic growth over the next generation will surpass ours. This will raise the living standards for nearly 2 billion people and that’s a good outcome, not a bad one. And their internal growth, in and of itself, is not a threat to America’s standing. Of course, it’s also possible that America will simultaneously renounce its free market economic principles, abandon economic growth as a national priority and thereby shrink its GDP, so parity may not be so far off as one might think (let’s call this the Obama option).
Neither China nor India compares well with 21st Century America; in fact, both look much more like America at the end of the 19th Century. Then, America celebrated its own entrepreneur class and lauded industrialists like Mellon, Morgan, Carnegie and Rockefeller. America’s free market philosophy produced entrepreneurs like the Wright Brothers, Henry Kaiser, Donald Douglas, J. Paul Getty and Henry Ford. But within a generation, these same heroes were derided as “Capitalist Robber Barons” which helped usher in America’s age of progressivism that has survived ever since. America’s productivity dropped from 3-8+ points above Europe’s to just 1-3+ points ahead (excluding WWII and the post war decade). Please don’t misunderstand, many of those early reforms, like workplace safety rules, along with the food and health rules, had a positive effect on America. Yet most efforts since 1930 have not been as economically or socially beneficial.
Everyone must understand that much of the growth you now see in Asia will evaporate once they experience their period of “progressive enlightenment” which should occur once they have a true middle class. The change in America’s public attitude in the early 20th century introduced various categories of rent seekers into our economy who sought to earn their living through manipulation of our economic system rather than by creating any product or service of sustaining value. Let’s call these rent seekers: attorneys (which includes the subcategories of politicians and lobbyists). China and India have both been more socialist in their recent past, so while their new free market experiment is to be applauded, a rent seeker class already exists in both countries because of all those years embracing socialism. No one should expect their current accelerated growth to last more than a decade or two at most. Those rent seekers are already awaiting their moment to step into any void once it appears and they can only siphon away net growth.
Despite all the doomsayers, America’s economic future, though not guaranteed (see Obama option above), should still be much better than the any other nation on the planet. So my advice, don’t bet against the U.S.
Artists in America think their job is to oppose the scientific or rational perspective, and since Americans get their perspective on the world from the arts, this has been a hugely successful strategy. Today's kids think exactly what they're supposed to think: human beings are supposed to be artists, and an interest in the sciences is a disease to which one loses one's humanity. A scientific outlook is seen as a social problem that needs to be cured, not as something to aspire to.
The U.S. education system must be evaluated in terms of the effectiveness and efficiency with which it produces graduates with a minimum set of basic skills for socioeconomic survival and an appropriate proportion able to matriculate to college or university with the ultimate goal of obtaining jobs that fulfill socioeconomic needs for which they are compensated with a competitive wage. By this or any other measure, it is failing at every level: too many drop-outs, too many graduates with less than minimum basic skills, too few K-12 graduates going on to obtain undergraduate and graduate degrees, and too few of those degrees in science and engineering. The solution is not standardized tests, homogenous classrooms, or other politically correct but educationally wrong-headed concepts. Standardized tests have their place of a measure of how effectively basic concepts and information have been taught, but teaching to standardized tests is destroying our educational system. The solution is not to teach to standardized tests but to do whatever it takes to engage the interest of and teach the students, including but not limited to parental involvement at every stage of child intellectual development and educational exposure.
The question then becomes of why the schools are failing. Are we not spending enough or spending an appropriate amount inefficiently? I would argue that it is both. We are spending too little, especially on teacher salaries, so we have in inadequately trained and motivated teacher work force, but also on schools and educational materials. Teachers should not have to buy supplies or sweep the floors. What we are spending is also being spent inefficiently, especially in terms of administrative overhead. As to how we should make up the funding shortfall, property taxes are not the way to go. Instead, I propose a federal sales tax to make up the deficiencies. Of course, proposing any new tax is political suicide, but that is a legacy of the Reagan values that distorted every aspect of our social, economic, and political life. More on this later. Obama needs to exercise real political leadership on such issues and break the stranglehold that Reagan values has on our society, especially that of no new taxes.
Regarding respect for an education and teachers, respect must first translate into paying attention and not acting up in class to create an environment here learning can occur on the part of the students and a willingness to pay a competitive wage for teachers. The punishment for students acting up in class is not detention, which is a reward, but more classes, including summer school classes at summer camps taught by drill instructors with an attitude. It also must translate into respect rather than disrespect for fellow students who excel academically. If necessary, students who excel academically must be assigned athletically gifted body guards who are tutored by the academically gifted students.
Regarding the demand for scientists and engineers, if someone with a business degree gets a $500,000 bonus his or her first year on the job on Wall Street, what message does that send to the best and brightest students? Scientists and engineers with far greater technical skills than doctors are remunerated at far lower starting rates, and the cumulative disparity grows over time, so why shouldn’t somebody with strong science and mathematics skills go into medicine? Granted, doctors generate their own revenue streams in private practice, while most scientists and engineers require a business infrastructure of some threshold scale to function effectively and efficiently and add sufficient value to the product stream to merit the salary paid. However, highly innovative scientists and engineers who add more value to the company’s bottom line by creating a new drug line for example rarely share in more than a token bonus, while an innovative risk-taker on Wall Street who creates a new advertising campaign that snags a new account or a new security that sells well will be amply rewarded with tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars. Moreover, even for those willing to forego a more competitive wage in a less technically demanding field, as long as companies are able to outsource their demand for scientists and engineers at a less than competitive U.S. wage, the imbalance will continue between the ostensible demand for scientists and engineers and the wages each sector is willing to pay to secure those technical services.
Now this process of downsizing and outsourcing while increasing the demand for goods and services through increasingly easy credit has been going on since the 1980s. It was then that Ronald Reagan and his free-market false prophets hijacked our value system with the assertion that individualism is the focal American value, that acting in your own self interest will be translated by the free market into the greatest good for the greatest number for the longest time, because growing economies eventually float all boats, that how effective and efficient you are in your individualistic pursuits can be measured by how much you earn, and that how much you earn is a measure of your true worth to society. This made a virtue of superficial self-indulgence to increase the demand for an increasing variety of discretionary goods and services.
This was combined with the equally heinous assertion that nobody has a good reason to be on public support, justifying the closure of the vast majority of our mental hospitals and drug and alcohol rehabilitation half-way houses. Among other things, that put a disproportionate number of war veterans suffering from various degrees of post-traumatic stress disorder back on the street, belying Reagan’s claimed respect for and appreciation of the sacrifices made by our veterans to our collective survival and well-being. To add insult to injury, at the same time he cut funding to veterans hospitals and veterans benefits. Every Republican administration since has pursued these anti-veteran policies. Convolved with the issue of how we treat our veterans is the GI Bill and the college-educated work force that it created after WWII and Korea to prosecute the cold war to successful conclusion. It also provided a cadre of well-educated teachers to handle the challenge of educating the growing Baby Boomer student population.
Now it’s time for Obama to retake the moral high ground of socioeconomic values and let the word go forth that your true worth to society is in the effectiveness and efficiency with which you contribute to its collective advancement, because ultimately altruism, and not individualism, provides the greatest good to the greatest number for the longest time in pursuit of a sustainable future. And without the collective pursuit of a sustainable future through the enlightened self-interest of altruism, there will be progressively less quantity and quality of goods and services for those engaged in the pursuit of unenlightened self-interest to obtain until there is no future at all. Those at the front line in our altruistic struggle for survival as a nation and a planet are the teachers in general and those in particular who teach science or mathematics and motivate students to pursue a higher education in science or engineering.
There are many sources of this anti intellectualism from fundamentalist religionists to the MSM and the total effect is, as the author suggests, the eventual condemnation of our country to second rate or worse status. Given that the movement has infiltrated even into the educational establishment and that no administrator who likes her job will defend a teacher who goes against community values and teaches real science, it is difficult to claim that unions protecting teachers' jobs are responsible for the dumbing down of our educational system. No doubt many of the people responsible for the antireality movement are bright enough to understand what they are doing (Bobby Jindal, the Discovery Institute, Mike Behe, and others come to mind), but I suspect that they value their priorities so much that they are willing to sacrifice our country's well-being in order to achieve their ends.
I really don't know how to change things. The inertial forces of knucklehead are difficult to alter.
"The secant had it coming" -- http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/post.aspx?bid=349&bpid=23720
"A Mathematician’s Lament" by Paul Lockhart -- http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf
Ms. Raloff’s conclusion that the U.S. is not spending enough money on education is, unfortunately, not supported by the very example she uses. I was born and have lived most of my life in Los Angeles, and had my own children enrolled in the LAUSD schools for a time so I know first hand how failed and unresponsive they are. Some may claim that unions are not the problem or that teachers are at the forefront of some “altruistic struggle for survival as a nation and a planet”, but neither they nor Ms. Raloff know of which they speak when it comes to Los Angeles. Though LA’s schools have many problems, its teacher’s union is at the center of the convolvement.
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