Get ready for tough choices or tough times, educators warn

"Tough Choices or Tough Times" is not recommended reading for bedtime, if you're hoping for a good night's sleep. The 26-member Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce's new report updates its 1990 report in which a wakeup call was issued amid the emerging trend of economic globalization. This new 2006 report is no jargon-laden bureaucratic screed, but a plainspoken and urgent proposal for a top-to-bottom reworking of the American education system.

"Tough Choices or Tough Times" is not recommended reading for bedtime, if you're hoping for a good night's sleep. The 26-member Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce has produced a new report on the skills of the American workforce, updating its 1990 report in which a wakeup call was issued amid the emerging trend of economic globalization. This new 2006 report is no jargon-laden bureaucratic screed, but a plainspoken and urgent proposal for a top-to-bottom reworking of the American education system unlike any we've undertaken since the dawn of the Industrial Age.

And it is not for the faint of heart. "Either we do a much better job of giving our young people the world-class skills and knowledge they need to compete in a swiftly integrating world economy, or we condemn them to working ever longer hours for ever lower pay," is the blunt message of Marc Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy and vice chairman of the private, nonpartisan commission. The new report doesn't shirk from issuing the daunting challenge to completely revamp our nation's workforce education and training systems — and do it without delay.

Less bang for more bucks

Tucker says changes in the American education system enacted by the federal government and the states over the past three decades have required more money but have produced no significant results, and this is why more substantive changes are needed now. In the report's preface, the challenge is made clear:

"This is a world in which a very high level of preparation in reading, writing, speaking, mathematics, science, literature, history and the arts will be an indispensable foundation for everything that comes after for most members of the workforce. It is a world in which comfort with ideas and abstractions is the passport to a good job, in which creativity and innovation are the key to a good life, in which high levels of education — a very different kind of education than most of us have had — are going to be the only security there is."

Today's global marketplace, where Indian engineers make $7,500 a year against $45,000 for an American engineer with the same (or lesser) qualifications, is a far different world from only 16 years ago when the commission's first report was issued. Indeed, the first commission "never dreamed that we would end up competing with countries that could offer large numbers of highly educated workers willing to work for low wages," according to the new report.

But China and India are doing just that. U.S. citizens have grown accustomed to feeling comfortable in their assurance that we are the best-educated workforce in the world — a fact that is no longer the case. Not only are other nations outpacing us in math and science skills, they are attaining a level of literacy, reasoning skills and technological expertise that our current system fails to match. Students in China and India are hungrier for education while ours are, for the most part, content to coast through high school and even college with little motivation for high achievement.

Our teaching force is aging, and many are burned out from a system laden with ever-increasing and conflicting bureaucratic mandates and pressures to "teach to the test." Meanwhile, our nation spends more per pupil than almost any other competing nation while students are falling further behind on skills. Those who move up to college often drop out, and they are laden with debt from the outset of their adult years. The prospect of continuing education is only a dream for many adult workers at a time when the changing nature of the workplace demands new knowledge, flexibility and education to keep up with the global competition.

A test of collective courage and will

The commission frankly admits such sweeping change will take extraordinary acts of will, courage and leadership. However, the members agree it can be done; Part 2 of the book is dedicated to describing a scenario in which a hypothetical future commission report outlines exactly how the challenge was met over the course of 15 years.

A controversial aspect of the proposal is that states and school districts will need to contract with private authorities or independent contractors to enact the changes needed to stay nimble and flexible in the face of changing economic demands of the global marketplace. And in what is perhaps the most debatable aspect of the scenario, the commission asserts that all of this can (indeed, must) be accomplished without spending more than we do today.

The key, according to the report, is reallocating resources — taking $67-billion from the current system and using that money to prepare some students for community college by the end of 10th grade, to change the way elementary and secondary teachers are trained and recruited, and to pay those teachers more. The report outlines the following steps to re-conceptualizing the system:

• Assume that we will do the job right the first time. This means we would match other leading nations whose children are expected to be ready for college at age 16. "Further assume that we want to send everyone, or almost everyone, to college. Now set up a system to do it."
• Make much more efficient use of the available resources. The report outlines a "redeployment of resources" to make this happen within our current education budget.
• Recruit from the top third of the high school graduates going on to college for the next generation of schoolteachers. We would do this by changing the current "back-loaded" teacher compensation system to one that offers higher compensation at the beginning of a teacher's career ladder.
• Develop standards, assessments and curricula that reflect today's needs and tomorrow's requirements. Move from the current model of student testing to examinations assessing creativity and innovation, facility with ideas and abstractions, self-discipline and organization needed to attain the next level of education.
• Create high-performance schools and districts everywhere (how the system should be governed, financed, organized, and managed). The role of school boards and administrative offices would change. Schools will be operated by independent contractors, owned and operated by teachers. Local authorities would write performance contracts and monitor operations — changing or cancelling contracts as necessary.
• Provide high-quality, universal early childhood education. Provide high-quality early childhood education for 3- and 4-year-olds.
• Give strong support to the students who need it most. State-level administration and funding would make it possible to achieve better equity between students from wealthy and disadvantaged backgrounds. Individualized plans would be applied to local school populations.
• Enable every member of the adult workforce to get the new literacy skills. This step proposed federal legislation to entitle every adult worker to free education required to attain the standard designed for most young people to meet by age 16.
• Create personal competitiveness accounts — "a GI bill for our times." This step is designed "to provide a foundation of high literacy among our entire workforce." The accounts would be set up by the federal government with an initial $500 deposit and contributed to by individuals and their employers throughout their working lives, tax-free. The accounts would be used for tuition at any work-related program of study.
• Create regional competitiveness authorities to make America competitive. The nation is too big for one system to work. In order to keep up with ever-changing demands of a fast-paced economy, the main administrative and funding responsibilities will fall to each state and its private contractors, rather than the federal government.

Outmoded system 'built for another era'

The report emphasizes the urgency of its call with its assertion that: "The core problem is that our education and training systems were built for another era in which most workers needed only a rudimentary education. It is not possible to get where we have to go by patching that system We must get where we must go only by changing the system itself." It will be interesting to see what educators and policymakers will make of this report.

In 1980, the groundbreaking A Nation at Risk report galvanized educators and policymakers to move toward reform of an educational system drifting into irrelevancy and lack of accountability. In 15 years the nation will view this report as either a watershed moment for the emergence of a world-class knowledge workforce, or an unheeded clarion call to a nation destined to fall ever farther behind in the global workplace.