VICTIMS OF OUR SUCCESS

Victims of Our Own Success



Victims of Our Own Success

Introduction

If anything, American public education has been successful. It is not an accident that the United States was one of the first knowledge economies in the world. American public education created the knowledge worker that made such an economy possible, but the result is a double-edged sword. In a knowledge economy, employers value education and are willing to pay for it in their employees. Today they pay approximately an 80% premium for a college-educated worker over a high school graduate, but cannot get them in the numbers needed “ demand for college-educated workers in many fields exceeds supply.”(Walker,1985)

Discussion

The creative destruction process that works in market driven economies also works between countries. Other countries have seen the success of American public education and are investing in very successful education systems of their own. Their educational successes will eventually be reflected in product innovation and invention, scientific research and papers, patents and intellectual property, and accelerated economic growth.(Walker,1985) While their corporations and national economic infrastructure develop, their education system will have graduated workers competitive with our own, willing to work at a lower cost and capable of performing at the highest levels. As we have already seen, our jobs will leak overseas for as long as the supply of educated workers in America is in short supply relative to demand. We certainly will have become victims of our own success.(Shenkin,1986)

The escalation in income for the educated worker comes at a particularly tough time for students from low-income families. For decades we have witnessed the narrowing of education gaps based on income, race and ethnicity.(Grimble,1991)

The Curriculum Challenges

To further complicate the issue, the very substance of what we are teaching is being challenged. The computer now allows individuals to work with far more data than ever before, to analyze data with tools never before available, and to communicate to a wider audience with more sophisticated tools than ever before. Frank Levy, an economist at MIT, and Richard Murnane, an economist at Harvard, wrote a book The New Division of Labor, in which they predict shifting rewards in the form of personal income based on the skill sets required by computers.



The New Division of Labor

Murnane and Levy believe that technology will compete with labor for routine and manual jobs resulting in lower wages, while at the same time expanding the demand for ...