Download Tough Choices or Tough Times: The Report of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce fb2

This report, the result of the second Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce in thirty years, represents "the canary in the mine." It is a warning to law makers, educators, students, parents and business people that we must overhaul the American educational system. Emphasis on creativity and innovation needs to be added to student learning and assessment as well as high levels of critical thinking. Instead of pushing toward analysis, teachers need to devise ways in which students can synthesize their learning; for example, thematically combining the content of a World Civ class with scientific breakthroughs. Creativity and innovation is the only way in which we can claim U.S. superiority in the fast approaching future. Countries like India and Japan are already ahead of us. We need to catch up quickly or lose our standing in the world marketplace.

As far as I can tell, this is a very intersting book filled with very good, concrete, and implementable suggestions on how to revamp our public schools.

But those attempting to read this on the amazon kindle, don't. I only got partway through the first chapter before the chapter abruptly cut off (mid-sentence) only to begin (again) at the start of the same chapter. This edition is in need of some serious, serious editing.

Get the print edition. I certainly will.

As a father of two young children about to enter school, I picked up this book hoping to get some insight into the state of American education, trends and reforms in the making, the latest ideas for changes, and some insight into what is occurring in other countries. What I got was a long-winded, lofty proposal of reforms, many of which are politically impalatable to teachers' unions, and which fail to address many of the failures of the American education system. I will divide my review into two parts, a summary of the book, followed by a critique of what was left out.

The book begins with a short summary of its previous work that was undertaken and completed by the early 1990s. In short, that earlier work emphasized the susceptibility of routine jobs to be replaced by machines and of low-skill labor to be outsourced. This statement has been proven correct. The book then states that the current work is founded on the premise that even high-skilled labor can be outsourced because low-cost countries, like India and China, are producing high-skilled professionals in the fields of medicine, science, engineering, and IT services at an astounding rate. This premise has also been proven correct in the half-decade since the book's publication. The book then states that America's education system as a whole is not preparing enough Americans to compete for the highest-paying jobs with this globalized workforce. I agree with this statement.

The book then suggests several institutional changes to fix this failure. The first change is the establishment of standardized testing called Board Exams for college entrance. This testing would be available at the beginning of high school. Students would have multiple chances to pass these exams. Both of these concepts are practiced in the countries, and is universal in those whose school systems have surpassed America's. No Child Left Behind is correctly described as a step in this direction, though this book fails to mention that America already has three well-established versions of this Board Exam; the SAT exams, ACT exams, and AP classes and ensuing tests. The second change is the conversion of teacher compensation from a blue-collar union-style system with low wages and high retirement benefits into one closer to professionals, with high salaries based primarily on performance, and lower retirement benefits. This of course will be a tough sell at either the national or state level. Even Arizona, my home for 25 years, and an open-shop state, has schools taught by unionized teachers. Another major change is to make adult education more responsive to the needs of employers, specifically high-paying employers. This is a key point, and one that the book should have supported by citing the high rate of employee turnover and business failures in many industries. The book correctly states that English education for new immigrants is a key part of adult education. The last major change suggested by this book is for states to fund schools, either via teacher salaries or contracts with schools, instead of local districts. This is touted as a way to equalize funding between rich and poor districts, and presumably equalize performance. This is a laudable, and probably doable proposal. The book concludes by saying that the implementation of these changes will fix our nation's education system. The book also comments on several other topics, such as the mixed performance of charter schools, the need to not ignore the social sciences, fine arts, and humanities in standardized testing, etc....

The reforms suggested by the book are good and laudable and on the whole, beneficial. However, none of them address the key reasons for failures in the US education system, which I will now elucidate. For beginners, the primary key to success in children's education is parental involvement. This is true regardless of income level, race, religion, nationality, language, etc... And here is where America fails. First of, America has some of the longest working hours in the world, which by definition takes parents' time away from their families. Add this to the fact that most households in America that do contain children usually do not have multiple generations of adults to compensate for long work hours by the parents. Contrast this with the rest of the world where households often have grandparents, parents, and children within one house. Throw in the high divorce rates and high percentage of out-of-wedlock births in America, and one can see why so many children fail in American schools; there just is not enough adult attention being paid to children in many households. One fact ignored by this book is that the children of recent immigrants, when raised in nice suburbs with good schools, often do great and go on to win scholarships, go to graduate school and have great careers. Apparently the school system did not fail them. In fact, the range of success (or failure) within the student population of any given school is probably as wide as that seen between schools. The latter might be fixed by the proposals of this book. The former, however, is due to issues not mentioned in this book. Proposed fixes include a strengthening of the 40-hour work week, more holidays, raising the minimum vacation employers must provide their employees, more rigorous enforcement of child support decrees, etc...

Another key point missing from this book is the prevalence of cheating. As standardized testing has become all the rage in the US, more and more reports surface in the print, online and TV media about cheating, often enabled by or allowed by teachers and principals. This book does not mention anything about cheating, or how to reduce it. And if America were to go a Board exam system for college entrance, as proposed by this book, then cheating is only going to get worse. How to reduce cheating? Maybe the first step is to eliminate the use of textbooks in classes. Oxford and Cambridge Universities in the UK, and public schools in France, are notable in that many of their classes do not proscribe the same textbooks for all students. Instead, students choose reading material from lists handed out by their instructors. As the reading materials tend to come from the institution's libraries, each student often ends up with their own unique study material, which inherently eliminates the need for cheating. This in turn reveals poor-performing students quicker and earlier, thereby allowing instructors and parents to intervene.

A third key omission of this book is school schedules. The end of the book lists various institutions visited by the book's authors in research for this book. These spanned the globe from India to New Zealand, and covered both government and private organizations. Surely the authors should have noticed that in many countries, schools often have 2 schedules, one from early morning to noon, and one in the afternoon to early evening. Many people, me included, are not effective early in the morning, and prefer reading, working, studying and exercising later in the day. Why not accomodate this preference in American schools. Schools should offer both morning and afternoon classes and allow students to pick the schedules they prefer. I am sure many would pick classes later in the day. This by itself would increase attention in class as fewer students would be falling asleep. This would also reduce expenditures on school construction. Instead of having to build a school to house 1000 students simultaneously, a smaller building could be constructed, one to house 500 students at at time. Such practice is already common in many Asian countries such as Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, China, etc...

Maybe the last key ommission of this book is the need for competition among students. The book's authors correctly state that there needs to be competition between teachers and competition between schools. But what about competition between students? In just about every other country, and especially those with schools that outdo American schools, student test scores (good and bad) are published in public places for all to see and scrutinize. This generates competition among students, and hence focuses their efforts on their studies. This is almost unheard of in America, and as a result, failures are ignored and are not subject to the same amount of peer pressure as that seen in other countries. Other ways to increase competition include offering substantive rewards at the classroom level to the top performers. For example, a high school could reward 2 free tickets to any sporting event to the top student in each class at semester's end. This will encourage competition at the classroom level, which is key to getting more students interested and participating in school.

So in all, a letdown of a book. All of the book's contents have been presented before by other groups in multiple formats, and could have been presented in fewer pages. And the book omits many key issues. Overall, a waste of time to read this book.

This an excellent book that is thought provoking as our world and how we do business is becoming more global. I believe we need to re-think how we want to educate our children. Preparing them today so that they can survive tomorrow.

Great

The report was critical of the educational system because students are graduating with an eight grade reading and writing level but the report was barely written on an eighth grade writing level; it was full of run on and incomplete sentences. Some of the statements that were made were racially offensive as well.

It was written in a retrospective and futuristic manner!Policy makers should read this! Easy to understand and an awareness on globalization of education.

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 "An Introductory Latin Course: A First Latin Grammar for Middle Schoolers, High Schoolers, College Students, Homeschoolers, and Self-Learners" and other works.