8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A well-written wake-up call., February 3, 2007
This review is from: Tough Choices or Tough Times: The Report of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce (Paperback)
This book by the Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce is well written in clear terms with summaries and simple graphics. It is a must read for anyone interested in the future of the US economy. The Commission points out the risks of our poor pre-university education to the US economy. India and China are now competing with the US in the high skilled labor market (not just low skilled) and at lower wages. With the Internet, many jobs can be done anywhere, and companies will hire the best at the lowest cost (Indian engineers make $7500 annually with the same qualifications as US engineers who make $45,000).
The Commission describes how US universities continue to be the best in the world, but grade schools and high schools have fallen behind. In the 20th century the US pioneered universal education, and received an influx of talent, from scientists fleeing Germany before World War II to a more recent influx of Asian students, who stayed and worked here. But now, other countries have passed us in pre-university education and many foreign students are going back to their own countries after graduating.
"A Nation at Risk" came out in 1983, saying "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre education performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war." The Tough Choices Commission points out that since then we've had a more than doubling of spending on education (inflation adjusted) with only modest improvement. The Commission concludes that the main improvement, standards testing, turns out to be misguided because it is multiple choice, not essay, and thus doesn't teach the creative, out of the box thinking needed for the US to maintain its lead. Multiple choice tests are by definition "in the box" tests.
"A Nation at Risk" proposals in 1983 for merit pay for teachers were resisted, and teachers continue to come from the bottom 1/3 of University graduates. The Commission proposes merit pay for new teachers, with an opt-in choice for existing teachers, combined with higher salaries made possible by eliminating pensions and using 401Ks instead, like other professions. Other proposals include universal pre-school, school choice with funding following students, less bureaucracy and more independence for individual schools, adult education coordinated with the business community, and inter-city schools and supporting social services being coordinated under one person, such as the mayor. Finally, partial funding can be found by reducing the number of students in the last 2 years of high school by allowing board testing at the 10th grade, with those passing going to community college then a university, directly to trade school, or directly to work.
I have separately read that having funding follow the student to encourage competition among schools has been implemented successfully at the city level in San Francisco. The Commission shows that if pensions and vacation time are included, current teacher salaries are actually somewhat competitive. But talented young people prefer money now, and don't know that they would stay in teaching long enough to earn a pension. Thus, pension money could be moved to up front salary and portable 401Ks, with existing teachers having the option of opting in or staying with their pensions.
The proposal to coordinate social services with schooling to help the disadvantaged, such as by putting all under a mayor has been done in New York recently, with great success. By providing programs for kids until 5 PM, and help to their families, the disadvantages of a poor home situation can be addressed. The US economy is healthy because of the waves of immigration it has had over the past 15 years, and we can't afford not to train those immigrants so our business have a talented labor pool to draw on.
The board exams proposed at the end of the 10th grade will provide badly needed motivation to students, since they can get out of school earlier if they work harder, rather than marking time.
To cut bureaucracy, the commission proposed principals be given free reign on how to spend the money they get (which is based on the number of students). Also, school boards would not run schools, but would contract with others (such as private companies, groups of teachers, etc.). The school boards would then become performance contract managers.
Finally, the report proposes training of people in the workforce, since these people will be the largest part of our workforce for some time, and will need more advanced and creative skills.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
It's Time to Put the Professionalism in Teaching, January 28, 2007
This review is from: Tough Choices or Tough Times: The Report of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce (Paperback)
While there are some debatable aspects of the TOUGH CHOICES OR TOUGH TIMES report, the call to elevate teaching to the professional level it deserves is certainly long overdue. One problem the report doesn't explicitly mention is that our education system right now is a two-tiered heirarchy in which educrats--the professional ruling class of policymakers, administrators, and midlevel bureaucrats who don't actually teach--wield far too much power and often earn staggering salaries, while teachers are treated like common day-laborers, underpaid and (often) undermined by the flaky, self-serving policies that educrats impose on them.
The report recommends raising teacher salaries to attract the best and brightest, i.e. those who would otherwise be doctors, lawyers, and other ambitious career professionals, by doing away with current teacher-retirement systems in favor of higher up-front cash rewards and 401(k) packages. Astonishingly, the NEA and other powerful teacher unions are opposed to this. But the fact is our schools are failing us, in part, because teachers are not treated like professionals. Yes, there are plenty of attractive benefits to teaching already, like summers off and seniority-based salary schedules. But the trade-off is that many teachers are willing to give up intellectual authority over their profession and allow themselves to be infantilized by condescending educrats. This is a Faustian bargain, and it's time to break it.
If the commission's compensation plan were implemented, more young and bright professionals would be drawn to the classroom, and they'd (hopefully) stay there rather than hopscotching up to an administrative desk job as soon as they could. They would be unafraid to challenge the bad policies of educrats, and they would serve their constituents (the students and their parents) in far more creative and effective ways, because real professionals do not allow themselves to be bullied. Teachers would finally have intellectual authority over their profession, the same way that doctors, lawyers, and other true professionals do. It may mean sacrificing some comfort and standing up to our own unions, but the long-term results would be well worth it. Independence, as we already know, sometimes comes at a high price.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Education and national health, January 18, 2007
This review is from: Tough Choices or Tough Times: The Report of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce (Paperback)
The catastrophic decline in the quality of American public education has been diagnosed repeatedly since the 1950s in works such as James B. Conant's The American High School Today [The Conant Report] (1959), The Shopping Mall High School (1985), or E. D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy (1987). Now, a new report in this tradition offers up perhaps the most scathing indictment of our system yet. The report, issued on December 14, 2006, by the National Center on Education and the Economy's New Commission of the Skills of the American Workforce, is titled Tough Choices or Tough Times. The title suggests that if we do not make the difficult decisions that are required to resuscitate our schools, our future health as a nation is bleak.
The report is a thorough, strong, and incisive analysis of the extent to which American dominance in education worldwide has eroded along with our dominance in economics and market competitiveness. Moreover, despite some minor weaknesses in the report caused by its attempt to predict the global future and its occasional political caution, it should launch a national dialogue on our public education system.
[from my column in "The Sunday Paper" (Atlanta, GA)]
--Dr. Robert Zaslavsky, author of the recently published "The First Latin Course"
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