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June 20, 2007
Education versus competitiveness
I ran across this AEI publication - Can NCLB Survive the Competitiveness Competition? - which to me serves as a good example why we have trouble getting the competitiveness debate right: too many non-issues and false trails. According to the authors, Frederick M. Hess and Andrew J. Rotherham:
Historically, there always has been an unavoidable tension between efforts to bolster American "competitiveness" (read as efforts to boost the performance of elite students, especially in science, math, and engineering) and those to promote educational equity. Champions of particular federal initiatives tend to argue that the two notions are complementary, but trends of the last fifty years show that the ascendance of one tends to take attention from the other.
Unfortunately, this is a misreading of the competitiveness debate. The argument that competitiveness requires concentration on elite education was never a dominate theme. The only way you can read that in is if you define STEM (science technology engineering and mathematics) as elite.
In fact, during the competitiveness debate of the 1908's, it was often stated that we needed to learn from the Japanese. While the top students in the US did well, the average students in Japan did much better than in the US -- and the poorest students in Japan did better than the average students in the US. The lesson was that we needed to bring up the bottom -- not just concentrate on the top.
I won't deny that there is a tension between emphasis on "rigor" and "equality" as the report describes. But don't blame that on competitiveness. Too often, I suspect, the argument between the two is whether the school board has the political will to flunk the high school quarterback because he failed a science course. That goes to the tension between local and national control over education – something that the report seems to gloss over.
The report does highlight one major concern for competitiveness. As long as "competitiveness" is seen as equal to just STEM, and the extent to which math and science are seen as "hard" subjects to be avoided or relegated to just the super smart folks, we have a problem. First, as I argue over and over again, "competitiveness" is much more that STEM. What about entrepreneurship? What about the creative areas? What about increased innovation and productivity due to organizational, social and cultural skills? Competitiveness = math & science is the worst type of blinders.
Second, equating math and science for only the brainy kids is a losing self-fulfilling prophesy. Everyone needs a basic understanding of the STEM areas. If we don't make STEM interesting and relevant to everyone, we have lost the competitiveness game before we even take the field.
So the authors of the report have done us a favor in raising the issue. It’s just not the issue they thought they were raising.
Posted by Ken Jarboe at June 20, 2007 8:52 AM
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