Educational Decline in America?

Even if you dislike the theme of American decline, everyone seems to agree about the dangerous state of public education in the U.S. While American universities lead the world, our high schools lag terribly.

The documentary “Two Million Minutes” (which I have yet to see) is making waves because it compares not just the median American, Chinese and Indian students, but elite students in all three countries. The comparison shows Americans, even at the top, socializing and playing games while the foreigners master violin and calculus. According to Vivek Wadhwa, a Harvard/Duke professor, Kauffman grantee, and former tech entrepreneur,

[T]hings aren't as dire for U.S. students as they might appear in the documentary. As an academic, I have been researching engineering education and have taught many graduates of Indian, Chinese, and American universities. It can take longer for Indians and Chinese to develop crucial real-world skills that come more easily for some Americans. Yes, U.S. teens work part-time, socialize, and party. But the independence and social skills they develop give them a big advantage when they join the workforce. They learn to experiment, challenge norms, and take risks.

Read the whole thing here.

My experience tells me that Vivek is right – soft skills are the key to workforce success, not hard skills. It may be difficult to measure creativity, perseverance, and flexibility, but they not only underpin entrepreneurship, but also serve as the basis for productive teamwork. The danger I see is a school system that is increasingly managed from the top, emphasizing measurable hard skills, but too politically correct and legalistic to enforce classroom discipline, teacher excellence, or personal responsibility. Of course, competition is another cultural advantage America once had, but the very idea of competition among children is becoming a taboo.

So it comes as a slight surprise to see Vivek promoting hard skill training for older workers. He hints at increased "training," but I am skeptical. The empirical results of skills training are not very promising. Wouldn’t it be better to have policies that simply get people back work, which is the incomparably best place for learning soft skills?

To clarify, here is what I think I think:

• Hard skills like science and math education are really important -- for careers, and for innovation externalities.
• Soft skills like creativity and independence are really important -- for careers, and for entrepreneurial externalities.
• Foreigners tend to do better teaching science, math, and other quant abilities.
• The U.S. has traditionally been better at emphasizing creativity and independence.
• Efforts to fix education through central authority (mixed with the PC culture of building self-esteem) is not helping the development of hard skills, and eroding our advantage in soft skills.

If you know of any research or articles along this line, please let me know in the comments. Thanks!

Comments

[Vivek Wadhwa]

Tim, there is a big difference between new graduates who enter the workforce and have to learn everything from scratch and workers who have many years of experience. The new workers assume they have to learn and companies assume they have to teach them.

The problem is that once these workers are trained, they usually lose the incentive to keep learning new skills and companies lose the incentive to keep training them -- because it is cheaper to train fresh recruits. This is particularly so in the technology sector.

What I am saying about workforce development is that we need to keep training our workforce in new skills and provide the incentives for these workers to received this training. This is even more necessary in a rapidly globalizing world in which many types of jobs are going overseas or disappearing altogether.

Bottom line: Everyone needs to keep learning. And math and science are great, but don't make as much difference as is hyped.

By the way, I don't agree about the "dangerous state of public education". Yes, American education can and should be improved, but we have the best system in the world. The real problem is that we are not providing the same level of education to minorities and disadvantaged groups as we are to the majority. We need to focus on this crowd first -- that will make the biggest difference. Why? because having no education almost always leads to failure. Having more education doesn't always lead to success. Let's focus on bringing these people up to a decent level and then raise the bar for everyone rather than just focusing on those that already have good education to start with.

[Bob Compton]

Tim,

I am the creator and Executive Producer of the documentary Two Million Minutes. For full disclosure, you might also want your readers to know that I served on the Board of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and on the Board of the Foundation's former Center For Entrepreneurial Leadership during the 1990's.

I would encourage you to actually watch my film before blogging a critique.

I'd like to know more about your experience that tells you "Vivek is right" - recent experiences in India or China - either in business or K-12 education.

One question for you: if "soft skills are the key to workforce success", how do you explain America's $1.5 TRILLION trade deficit with China? The US has not had a positive trade balance with China since Mao.

Or the nearly $100 Billion trade deficit with India?

Or the fact that China is the second largest lender to the US (holding $150 billion in Treasury securities), just behind that other hard skill nation - Japan?

The "hard skill" Chinese are our supplier of goods and our banker. Their economy has expanded dramatically since Deng Xiaoping said "getting rich is good" and since reopening the universities in 1977 after the Cultural Revolution.

Just 30 years from economic stagnation and population starvation to be the third largest economy in the world. Not bad for a population that you believe lacks the "soft skills" that are "key to workforce success".

I agree with your five final bullet points, but I believe the level of "hard skill" erosion in the US education system is vastly more severe than you believe.

And I see plenty of "soft skills" in the more than 400 Indian and Chinese engineers who work at my companies.

As a result of my own observations and global business experience, I think our children's generation faces serious economic challenges - on the scale Detroit is now witnessing - and that we do our kids a disservice by not telling them about the competition they will face and by not helping them prepare.

[Suresh]

Tim -

It is disappointing to note that you have not yet seen the documentary, but profess to know what the film is about. Someone with your background in 'education research' should at least watch the complete documentary before posting.

Just to clarify - the documentary film is about "high school education" experience and comparison of that process in India, China and US.

Mr. Wadhwa's research is on "workforce development" in INDIA. His paper has no specific recommendations on workforce development in US - other than a broad recommendation "invest more in training".

[Tim Kane]

Great comments all, thank you!

Vivek, I think you are right in this sense: alarmism is often overdone and misses the strengths of the traditional U.S. approach to education and culture. But I also think it is beyond dispute that U.S. schools are failing inner city kids.

Bob and Suresh, I will watch the movie. I didn't mean the post to be a movie review -- rather using Vivek's sharp essay as a launching point to the topic in general. More to the point, I believe that I am agreeing with you that the U.S. could do a much better job of teaching science and math. My two cents is that the way to get to a world where science and math are taught really, really way to American students is through a competitive education market (school choice, teacher choice, charters, vouchers) not through a command and control education bureaucracy.

Here's my promise: I'll watch the movie and write a post about it alone.

For those questioning my creds to discuss this issue, that's a fair question. I'm a child of the public education system (all my degrees are from public schools). I've spent a few years teaching college students, and more years working on public policy issues focusing on poverty and economic development. But the biggest qualification I have is one I share with hundreds of millions of Americans: I have children. My wife is Japanese, so I get a daily does of her approach (which works) to drilling math skills. And I'm a teensy bit obsessed with this topic because our oldest child starts his two million minutes in a few weeks ...

[Freddie]

I find your invocation of competition immediately following praising classroom discipline, teacher excellence, and personal responsibility... weird. All three of these things, it seems to me, demonstrate the limits of competition, not the benefits. All three-- certainly the first and the last-- are values that can really only exist individually, according to some sense of absolute value, rather than relative value, which is what competition creates. That to me is the problem with assuming that competition is the panacea to solve all of our educational problems (I'm not suggesting you think that way, just that many do.) Competition generally can't create a sense of personal growth or moral and ethical worth; it can only create the notion of being better or worse than other people. It removes personal achievement from any sense of real moral value.

I worked for awhile in a public high school, and the last thing I would say about the juniors and seniors was that they weren't competitive enough. Indeed, I'd say that the mad dash to get into the most competitive colleges created a mercenary, win-at-all-costs culture, rampant oneupmanship and genuine distrust among peers. And the students would constantly cut corners, grade grub or cheat, every time excusing the behavior because it was just so hard to get into college. The college competition, one of the most fiercely fought and most bitter, doesn't improve a student's worth as a student. It just compels him to become better at working the system and playing the game.

[Clint]

Have a look at Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind, in which "soft skills" are presented in terms of right-brain thinking.

[chris coyne]

I am a high school teacher and this debate is central to what I am trying to do. We are forced to test hard skills, and the soft skills, which may be more important and should include non creative traits like perseverance, politeness, promptness, following directions, attention to details, are ignored in favor of "hard teaching" or teaching to the test. The Heckman article "Schools, Skills, Synapses" gets to heart of what I see day to day: the failing American domestic situation destroys soft skills, and a student's ability to get it together to acquire needed hard skills.

In terms of the competition angle--I teach Juniors and Seniors, and they are so blase about competition now because they inherently know that they will get by somehow, in Community College, or whatever. Aside from the Ivy go getters, most of my students are more interested in social/myspace type competition than anything concrete for the economy or their own future. To me this is the downside of the lack of balance in soft skill formation, and does not necessarily foster a positive sense of useful creativity.

[Mike D]

Soft skills are great. But lets look at some "Money where your mouth is" criteria.

Go look at the pay by college major. I see the hard skills majors getting paid a lot more and having a lot more job offers than the soft-skills majors.

Lesson: sure, it's great to have engineers with great soft skills. But it's more important to have engineers rather than mass comm majors.

[Karthik]

Mike,

But I see the elites in "soft skills" majors being paid far higher than those in "hard skill" major. The earning potential for somebody very strong in soft skills such as creativity is far, far higher than somebody who rigidly adheres to hard skills. Creativity and independence are the backbone of entrepreneurship and they have driven the American economy.

[Bob Compton]

Creativity and independence are the back bone of entrepreneurship, but a company made up entirely of creative, independent people who don't understand math or science would not survive.

It is crucial to an economy to have a large base of "hard skill" educated people - people who can run product development, manufacturing, logistics, customer support, finance, etc.

Why has America lost the hard skill focus it had during WWII and after Sputnik, because hard skills are...well, hard.

We have our largest trade deficits with "hard skill" nations - with the exception of the natural resource countries.

Can anyone name the countries with which we have a trade surplus?

[William M. Fox]

Our individual futures, as well as the future of our nation, will be strongly influenced by our understanding of the power of values for good or bad, and what we can do to nurture the right ones in ourselves and in others - in family life, in our schools, in political leadership, in the administration of justice, in domestic and international business, and in other aspects of our daily lives.

In addition to thoroughly documenting the problems that have been created by a moral decline in America, my book, AMERICAN VALUES DECLINE: WHAT WE CAN DO, presents some 30, on-going, successful interventions and programs for dealing with them.

It presents compelling evidence as to why certain values are more productive than others - for us as individuals, and for society as a whole. It shows how these values have made the U.S. great, and how they are compatible with the rules for productive living of most of the religions of the world. In addition, it shows how they are shaped from birth by both heredity and environment - for good or bad - and what we can do to enhance or negate these effects.

About it, Cindy Penn, of THE MIDWEST BOOK REVIEW, writes that "William Fox's extraordinary book...is a must read for every American...I found myself quickly caught up in Fox's prose as he lays out the historical and cultural ramifications of values. His examples are thought provoking ideas that quickly inspired me to consider my own situation, family and work world."

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[Stu Pidazzle]

I LUVS PUBLICS SCHOOOLZ. WE AMERICAN HAVE MANY FINEEE EDUCTATIONS AND WOMENz ARE OFF THE HOOKZ. NO WAY IS A foREIGNER SMARTER THAN US! WE ARE AMERICA AND WE NEVer goING TO BE POOR! CAUSE WE WILL BLOW STUFF UP AND FIND OUTHER COUNTRY GOLD

LOVe,
PRESIDENT BUSH

[jie C]

when i read this article on mar 30,2009..i do believe ur americans need soft skill as our nation does...

so im going to laugh the "Stu Pidazzle | March 07, 2009 at 03:43 PM "..coz he said your american never go to get poor!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! thus.in this year, are you poor and still rich?????????

i think u should get the lesson now!!!!!

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