March 18, 2010--Race to the Bottom

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which helps coordinate policies for 30 of the world's richest countries, reported recently that of these 30, only New Zealand, Spain, Turkey, and Mexico have lower high school completion rates than the United States. (See linked New York Times article.)

In addition to the UK, Germany, France, Canada, Sweden, and Norway, countries doing better than us include South Korea, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia.

So Slovakia is trouncing us and we're grouped with Greece and Spain and Mexico--all of which might outstrip us in educational achievement within a decade if current trends continue. And we know what's happening with them: Spain has unemployment as about twice the rate as we; Greece as a country is functionally bankrupt; and about the situation in Mexico the less said the better.

Testifying before Congress last week about the O.E.C.D. report, one of the world's leading experts on national school systems, Andreas Schleicher, said that the reason we are slipping further and further behind is not just because we have so many dysfunctional schools (which we do) but also because too many of our families, and our culture, "undervalues education."

Senator Tom Harkin agreed, asserting that we are "over-entertained and distracted." He could also have said that in addition to the distractions that we pursue as we saturate ourselves with sports and video games, we make things worse by trivializing the news when we turn political discourse into just another form of entertainment, ironically where the fake news on Jon Stewart's Daily Show is more serious and nuanced than what we get from the networks and cable channels.

The world used to turn to us to learn what to do to enhance social and economic development. In my early years as an educator, during the 1970s and 80s, a steady stream of Europeans, Asians, Latin Americans, as well as Africans, regularly came to visit our public schools, colleges, and universities. We and these institutions were the envy of the world. These visitors realized that our economic vitality, frankly our global dominance, was as much the result of our expansive and high quality public and private education system as the American form of capitalism.

They took these lessons home, build more and more schools, expanded access to educational opportunity at all levels, and developed better and better ways to provide instruction.

Now we need to turn to them to see what we can learn. For some this will mean swallowing a little pride--we teach other countries what to do, super-patriots say, and we have little to learn from anyone else. But there may be things we can take from Finland, which has the world's best-performing education system. Largely because of the way they recruit, train, and reward teachers.

And while we struggle to figure out how to help more of our young people graduate from high school--at best only between 60 and 70 percent do--South Korea which was devastated after World War II and the Korean War now boasts the world's highest high school graduation rate--more than 95 percent. What are they doing that we might benefit from knowing? We should find out.

Our long term survival in a very competitive world that values and requires all citizens to be well educated could depend on what we can learn from Poland and Slovakia. We may not like to acknowledge this, but we had better get our act together or we will be rapidly overtaken.