It is no secret the United States has lost its leadership in both our level and quality of education. The disturbing aspects are, though, that few of us realize just how far behind much of the industrialized world we have fallen and that there is nothing on the horizon to affect a change in the situation.A new report, Tough Choices or Tough Times, a summary of which can be found here (Adobe Acrobat is required), issued by The National Center on Education and the Economy points out some rather startling facts –

1. For the better part of the 20th Century, the United States prided itself on having the best educated workforce in the world. Over the past 30 years, however, one country after another has surpassed us in the percentage of workers entering the workforce with a high school diploma, or equivalent. And there are many more countries that will be passing us shortly.
2. Thirty years ago, the United States had 30 percent of the world’s college students. Today, we have 14 percent, and that number is falling.
3. American students and young adults routinely rank in the bottom half of achievement levels in mathematics, science and general literacy.

Not only are we falling, but as we fall, we are falling at a faster and faster rate. The effect of this is not unlike the effect of gravity on a falling object. We’ve all heard that a penny dropped from the top of the Empire State Building can go through the roof of a car. However, that same penny, when dropped from a height of, say, five feet, will land safely in my hand with not the slightest injury to me.

The reason for this is something called the Universal Gravitational Constant. When any object is dropped above the surface of the Earth (Galileo’s famous Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment) it will fall 32 feet in the first second. During second number two, the object will fall 64 feet, for a total of 96 feet. During the third second, it will drop 128 feet, for a total fall after three seconds of 224 feet. And it will continue (disregarding air resistance) to double the distance it falls in each succeeding second – 256, 512, 1024, etc. After 10 seconds, that penny that fell only 32 feet in the first second after it was dropped will have fallen a little more than six miles. In the tenth second, alone, it will fall over three miles.

The precipitous fall in our educational position is like our penny – not only is it falling, but the longer it falls, the faster it falls. At some point, trying to abate the fall will be like the roof of our car – virtually useless.

Tough Choices or Tough Times asserts that our educational system was built for another era; one in which most workers entering the workforce needed only the most rudimentary education and one in which virtually all companies were vertically integrated. That is to say, the bulk of a company’s product was built and delivered within the bounds of the company. With today’s emphasis on “build it only if we can do it better and cheaper than we can buy it” approach to product development, creativity in the integration of disparate “parts” into a single, cohesive end solution requires that workers have a higher skill level than previously required. In particular, they need to know not just the facts of math and science; they need to know the rules behind those facts and how to apply them to new and unique situations.

The report also asserts it is not possible to “patch” our existing educational system to meet the requirements of the new world order. We can only get where we need to go by radically overhauling the system itself.

Here are ten points we must confront –

1. Today, “we recruit a disproportionate share of our teachers from among the less capable of the high school students who go to college.”
2. “We tolerate an enormous amount of waste in the system, failing our students in the early years when the cost of doing the job right would be relatively low, and trying to remediate it later at much higher cost.”
3. Our current system has gotten progressively more inefficient. In recent years, the gains produced by the standards movement “have been leveling off, and the gains have been modest in relation to the increase in per pupil expenditures over the last thirty years.”
4. “The growing inequality in family incomes is contributing heavily to the growing disparities in student achievement.”
5. “We have failed to motivate most of our students to take tough courses and work hard.”
6. “Our teacher compensation system is designed to reward time in service, rather than€¦reward the best of our teachers.”
7. “Our testing system rewards students who will be good at routine work, while not providing opportunities for students to display creative and innovative thinking and analysis.”
8. “We have built a bureaucracy in our schools in which€¦the people who have the responsibility do not have the power, and the people who have the power do not have the responsibility.”
9. Our efforts cannot focus on schools alone. Most of the people who will be in our workforce in the next 20 years are already in it. “If they cannot master the new literacy at high levels, it will not matter what we do in our schools.”
10. While, in one form or another, we send young people off to college, get them educated and launch them into the workforce, we “have done a very poor job of making it possible for adults who have full-time jobs and family responsibilities to get the continuing education and training they need.”

Many of the report’s recommendations, from sending some tenth grade graduates on to college to restructuring teacher compensation packages, will be considered controversial and will meet with significant resistance. However, in the end we must recognize we are in a predicament and begin doing something about it. As the old saw goes, “The first thing to do when you realize you are in a hole is to stop digging.”

We need to stop digging and begin filling in the hole so we are on the same level as the rest of the industrialized world.

We need to stop the penny before it passes right through the roof of the car.