TechNet, an industry advocacy group, counts education reform as a top priority, as does the Information Technology Industry Council and the Semiconductor Industry Association. Intel CEO Craig Barrett has argued fiercely for improved math and science education.
Then why are the tech industry's proposals to repair the admittedly broken system of public education in the United States so modest?
The latest exercise in incrementalism came last week, at--of all places--a Department of Homeland Security meeting here, at a presidential advisory committee meeting. Speakers included luminaries such as Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers, Akamai CEO George Conrades and outgoing DHS Undersecretary Frank Libutti.
Al Berkeley III, former president of Nasdaq and current chairman of a software development firm, warned of the importance of providing "incentives to attract students into technical fields" and said he wanted better "cybersecurity curricula" for universities.
"We are concentrating on identifying successful programs" such as a testing Web site created by the Council on Competitiveness, Berkeley said. "We have good conversations going with the Department of Education."
Thomas Noonan, chairman of Internet Security Systems, suggested that his fellow committee members seek advice from former astronaut Sally Ride, who became a physics professor at the University of California at San Diego. "She may be a tremendous resource for us," Noonan said. Other proposals circulated in such circles usually call for more testing and more government spending.
Huh? Repairing the states' woeful educational system will take more than a Web site, a phone call to a former astronaut or "conversations" with midlevel government bureaucrats. If more spending did the trick, D.C. (with the highest per-pupil spending) would top the charts instead of finishing all the way down at the bottom.
Unfortunately, the tech industry isn't willing to talk--at least in public--about more aggressive measures that might be able to fix the problem.
By now, the bleak statistics should be well-known: In 2002, China and India graduated five times the number of engineers did the United States, which ranks a dismal 19th in eighth-grade math skills. Japan, South Korea, Norway and the Czech Republic boast far higher high-school graduation rates.
But modest, incremental measures have scant chance of working. As Bruce Mehlman, a former Bush administration official who's now the head of a tech trade association, acknowledged in an interview last year, education reform "has been a refrain of the business community and of leaders in both parties for the last 20 years, if not 50 years."
There's a word that describes policies followed for half a century without results: failures. If tech CEOs actually wanted to get something done, they might consider rallying around structural changes. Some suggestions:
• Give education tax credits that let parents pay for private-school tuition with money they'd otherwise cough up in taxes. The concept is less troublesome than school vouchers, would spur competition in schools, and Arizona's experience suggests that it isn't as expensive as it sounds. Didn't many of these same tech firms claim during the Microsoft antitrust saga that competition was the lifeblood of America?
• Curb the influence of teachers' unions, which arguably wield more power than any other single interest group in America. These unions have a strong incentive to block changes that permit poorly performing teachers to be fired more readily or increase competition between government and private schools. If tax credits don't happen, then any real education reform probably means confronting unions through laws that link teachers' pay to performance and make it easier to get rid of poor performers.
• Reduce funding to state-run universities. State universities' below-cost tuition is helping to force some private schools out of business. Thanks to subsidized government schools, more than 300 U.S. private colleges closed their doors between 1970 and 1993. Giving tuition grants directly to students should help create a more level playing field and increase competition and education quality.
It's true that these proposals risk offending powerful political interests including, for starters, state university employees, teachers' unions and Democratic politicians who rely on these groups for votes and money.
But if the tech industry is truly serious about a well-educated work force, those political risks might be worth taking. This is, after all, a big-thinking industry that makes billion-dollar gambles almost every day, as when Intel decides to build a new chip fabrication facility or Apple Computer announces a no-screen iPod and yet another cubelike computer.
The risks of continued incrementalism in the form of Web sites, phone calls to astronauts and meetings with bureaucrats might be even more costly: a steady decline in the education of generations of Americans over another 50-year stretch.
Biography
Declan McCullagh is CNET News.com's chief political correspondent. He spent more than a decade in Washington, D.C., chronicling the busy intersection between technology and politics. Previously, he was the Washington bureau chief for Wired News, and a reporter for Time.com, Time magazine and HotWired. McCullagh has taught journalism at American University and been an adjunct professor at Case Western University.
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education, proposal, CEO, conversation, Washington
The truth of the mater is we do not want a more technologically educated population. That would mean that industry would have to pay higher wages. That is the reason that so many jobs are already being sent to the third world.
There are countries that have excellent technology education for their people. Germany is just one example, and their graduate students pay far less then their American counterparts. The big complaint is that German industry has to pay its workers too much because of their skill level.
Further, blaming the teachers unions is just more right wing union bashing. The only reason that we have any standard of living left is because of unions.
As for who is getting the degrees, last year a third of the advanced degrees in science and engineering went to non-citizens and another third went to people who had at least one parent who was foreign-born. We don't graduate American engineers because those degrees don't pay the big bucks plain and simple. Even so, America's colleges and universities are still the best in the world.
Unfortunately the same can not be said for the K through 12, and that is where the problem rests. What is needed is a non-partisan national vision that is more then just sound bites (no child left behind). It works in most of the other modern industrialized nations and it can work here if we have the will and the resources. For what has already been spent in Iraq the federal government could give every school district in the country nearly 10 million dollars free and clear.
Mr. McCullaghs position is just more Fox News claptrap that has very little to do with reality and everything to do with political agendas.
Second, response 1 ("Statistics") bears some consideration but also some correction: China's population is 1.3 billion; India's is 1.0 billion; the US has 294 million (i.e. .3 million). Thus China has 4.3 times the people and India about 3.4 times. But more importantly, even these statistics fail dismally to convey the magnitude of the problem. While China and India educate few technologists who are non-citizens, both countries send huge numbers of students to Europe and America for hi-tech graduate degrees. From my admittedly limited and subjective observation in technical departments of state graduate schools, only about 15% of advanced hi-tech graduate students or degrees granted by American schools relate to American citizens.
Third, I believe xpgeek's statistics about American advanced degrees would be more shocking if one separated higher tech from engineering, and broke out the universities by rank in the particular fields. I remember the advanced computer arithmetic class I audited at a prestigious local university; of the 25 registered students two were native-born American and one other grew up here, the son of Arab diplomats stationed here. Similar situations now pertain in areas like statistics, computational biology, and almost all engineering research departments of the same university.
In statistics, I've seen a dramatic change in the past thirty years: from ~20% PhDs to non-Americans in the 1970s to ~50% PhDs to non-Americans in the 1980s to ~85% in the 21st century. Such statistics are rarely published by the academic community or professional organizations so as not to alienate the growing fraction of non-Americans, who might take publication of such data as a racist hostility rather than as a legitimate concern about the American future.
American hi-tech business management, like business management everywhere, always wants cheaper labor and as America shared its technology and hi-tech education, has pursued a strategy to free itself from the laws of supply and demand for labor by changing the paradigm. Of course, as soon as one company is freed from paying the prevailing wage, all companies need to join the fray to remain competitive. Up to about 1990, their primary method was to plead a shortage of qualified American hi-tech applicants and to import foreigners and sponsor them for citizenship; since there were plenty of jobs and most advanced graduates of American hi-tech programs were indeed American, there was little opposition. In the 1990s, the H1-B visa program was passed, allowing American hi-tech companies to import non-citizens under the pretense of unavailable skills and then switch then to permanent residence or citizenship status, effectively selling American citizenship (was the government to challenge the hi-tech management's claims about prevailing wages?). But Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) with China (PRC) and the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) in 2000, and the high internationalization of high-tech programs in taxpayer-supported American universities permitted American high-tech to push a further paradigm shift -- since American technology was being exported by multinational corporations before the research dollars (including tax subsidies!) could be recouped and since manufacturing was being expatriated to China and India, it bacame advantageous to American management for American universities to educate large numbers of foreign nationals, to hire them to work in America for several years under H1-B visas in order to acculturate them to the corporate culture, and then transfer them back to their native lands to support the technological off-shoring. Meanwhile, high-tech continues to plead for government subsidies ("so America won't fall behind technologically") and tax abatements ("to remain internationally competitive" and "to keep American companies from moving their headquarters off shore" since "America is one of the few countries that taxes repatriated corporate profits earned outside America").
America has removed almost all advantages to business being located in America by its massive export of technology and the access to the American marketplace that free trade affords. But don't worry, US taxpayers, the "free trade" policies of PNTR and GATT are devaluing the US dollar so rapidly that the American standard of living and wages will equilibrate with the PRC in the next twenty years, about the time that America has few jobs outside the import and government sectors, can afford no further technology, and no further service on its massive indebtedness. I won't draw out the rest of this miserable scenario, but it has ominous implications for American society and liberty.
Indeed, by that time the currently prevailing level of American education will suffice for the government jobs and menial service jobs that remain.
Same here.
1) All of the countries that have been successful in turning out more tech graduates have never used tax credits to spur their education reforms...instead they have directly subsidized and increased that subsidy ESPECIALLY in regards to collegiate education. It is the state funded educational institutions in these countries which have led the charge and changes. I would in fact say that the American educational system is entirely too privatised. Theprivatised system in America on the surface may make a FEW colleges look better than they are...but end up with essential departments having funding cut back, pahsed out, or given less exposure because of the almighty profit margin. PLus, these governments, who also have much more powerful federal systems than state/province governance put actually weight behind their words...which is harder in America because your ruling party favors less federal presence where it counts (education, utilities, health care, emergency services) and more where it doesn't (privacy, entertainment, sex lives, marriage). It has been shown not only in America but in most every national case all over the world that an unbridled free market DOES NOT benefit the public when it comes to utilities and basic services.
2) Teacher's Unions or equivalents are very strong in many of the nations that are cited as successes ESPECIALLY in South Korea. This writer cites them as obstacles and yet they were instrumental in spurring alot of these reforms in education in these other nations.
This writer always cites competition as a cure for many of the issues he discusses..and yet when he cites contrasting sucesses he neglects to mention the details of WHY those places are successful..because in most cases it would contradict his argument.
Please...can we get someone on this site with opinions that actual have REAL analysis behind them?
It's kind of a surprise to me that the very same CEOs that decry the shortage of highly educated "high-tech professinals" are the same ones that are in the process of offshoring most of those very same processes. Why keep an merican engineer that costs $50 an hour, when you can get one "just as good" in India - or China - or Russia - for $20? Why manufacture something in the US when you can do it overseas for 10% of the cost?
Comment from the CEO of Cypress Semiconductor: "You'd have to be nuts to open a chip fab(rication) plant in the United States today."
It's also a surprise to me that most corporate workers I run into these days - and I don't mean high-tech - are barely literate. The most detailed mode of discourse has become a powerpont deck or a three-sentence email. The pattern for executive communication at my current employer is to keep the deck to four slides.
Math isn't the problem, it's only part of the problem. Basic skills, critical thinking, analytic reasoning are missing.
We do a good job of pretending to be looking for skills, while at the same time "dumbing down" our processes so that those very same skills aren't required anymore.
I vividly recall a manager at a major airline explaining to me how "he didn't want his people to have to learn anything."
I vividly recall management discussions at a former employer, where they were trying to figure out why almost the entire training budget went unspent over the course of an entire year.
The problem isn't with our educational system.
It's with our aspirations.
So long as we aspire to sit in front of a television and drool all over ourselves, or play video games, or or win some reality television "challenge," we can have the best schools in the world and we'll still have a shortage of "highly trained techincal people."
I've had this conversation with some professor friends of mine that teach at one of the top 10 computer science programs in the united states. One comment: enrollment has dropped 50% since the year 2000.
I don't think it has to do with our math grades.
It's all about money.
Engineers in foreign countries are cheap because their employers don't have to pay for expensive infrastructure like roads, airports, defense, or ridiculously spiraling medical costs. They don't have to fund retirement systems. They live in a third world economy.
Engineers in foreign countries are plentiful, because aspiring to be an engineer is still something of value, something mothers encourage their sons and daughters to do, and a mark of distinction that caries social status. Being a teacher matters. It is a valued profession.
In America, it's the size of your car that matters. And teachers, especially high school teachers, are on the lower tiers of the social respect ladder.
How many people do you know that aspire to teach high school math?
Engineers learn math and science, because they look at what America has done, and they want to do it, too. They aspire to master technology and build wonderful things.
We aspire to buy them.
America put a man on the moon in 1962 with a spaceship built by engineers that used pencils, paper, and slide rules. The computers they used to fly the spaceship were 1000x less powerful than the chip in your cell phone. The computers they used to calculate the orbits, monitor the spacecraft in real time, and ensure the safe return of three astronauts after the ship partially blew up were literally 1,000,000 times less powerful than the computer you're reading this article with.
What ever happened to our dreams?
If we aspire to mediocrity, then that's where we'll end up.
As ye sow, so shall ye reap.
- Schools Need Change
- by preston9 April 10, 2005 10:18 AM PDT
- Anybody who says our school system isnt in trouble is either a complete moran or doesnt actually live here. Due to a lack of competition and quality teachers (due to abysmal salaries) schools are in the worst shape ever. We need to privatize schools now. Let's use an analogy: when you get medical services the ones you pay for out of pocket (lasik, etc) are the services that have the highest customer satisfaction. Also, Canada has public healthcare, included in taxes for everyone. Does this actually work? Hell no! Hours long waits, horrible service, and other terrible things are all too common. Because there is no incentive for doctors and hospitals to do well, they don't try and therefore performance suffers.
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