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THE RECENT report of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce is a startling document, both for its findings and for its recommendations. It finds, for example, that the American middle class is "shredding. It is not true that all of its members are getting poorer. It is much more accurate to say that there is a clear divide between those who have some college and those who do not. The former are becoming ever better off. The latter are sinking fast." Human capital or the lack thereof is the subtext of the whole report. Now this is hardly news. To my knowledge, for example, Cornell University Professor John Bishop and his colleagues, among others, have been writing about the divide between the education haves and have-nots for at least two decades, possibly more. Strictly speaking, of course, human capital includes more than formal education; it includes health, talent, ability, acquired knowledge and skills, and such dispositions as creativity, energy, imagination, work ethic, and so on. In the New Commission's case, educational attainment is used as a proxy for human capital, as it is by many analysts. But the notion that education (developed human capital) is the source of most wealth is by now old news. (Nobel Laureate Gary Becker's book, Human Capital, was published in 1964, after all.) What is new news is that the phenomenon is now global and includes the developing world, not just the member nations of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). And, thanks to high technology, human capital is ever more fungible. Not so long ago, human capital was similar to physical capital in one important respect: proximity was paramount. Bench scientists and engineers (human capital personified) worked side by side. No longer. At least, they no longer need to be physically close: virtual proximity will do. That is why Pune, India, has become an English-language call center for American businesses that still provide customers with access to a human being on the other end of the line. It is finally the case that a telephone is a telephone is a telephone. (About one thing you may be sure, as voice recognition software and artificial intelligence become more sophisticated, human beings at the other end of the line will become as scarce as hen's teeth.) Speaking of human contact, think of what is by now an old standby, the ATM. Who could do without automated tellers now? 'Twas not always so. When they were introduced, they caught on very slowly. The typical bank customer wanted -- indeed, expected -- to see and talk to a human teller. Today, the ubiquity, simplicity, convenience, and speed of the ATM have overcome the initial reluctance of customers to engage with a machine. The future has arrived already. But Marc Tucker and the New Commission are right in their assertions about globalization, even though it is no longer a novelty. A genuine revolution is taking place, with a global work force of three billion (as contrasted with a domestic work force of slightly more than 150 million). And Americans need to be educated better than ever to compete, both at home and abroad. What is new, of course, is scale and timing. Xerox scientists and engineers are no longer confined to PARC (Palo Alto Research Center); today, they can work together across the globe in real time, only a phone, fax, e-mail, or WebEx away from colleagues in Tokyo, Amsterdam, or Stamford. And what American business can do, so can Indian and Chinese business. The policy key is education. Indeed, it is no surprise that, more than two decades ago, management guru Peter Drucker foresaw this general phenomenon. He sagely observed then that every nation would become absorbed with education because it is the source of wealth in the postindustrial era. And so it has come to pass, with India and China, no less than the U.S., consumed with educational improvement. That the New Commission would zero in on these issues is, then, not startling. What is startling are the nature, extent, and sweep of the panel's recommendations. The full range of the recommendations and how they came to be made are beyond the scope of this article. Permit me to explore just two of the more controversial ones, about which I have mixed feelings, and to offer one bit of commentary. The first is accelerated graduation: expecting American students to complete a demanding course of study by age 16 (as is the case in Europe and Asia). The second is the recommendation that school boards abandon their prerogative to oversee the schools in their bailiwick and instead contract with education providers to offer education. The bit of commentary has to do with the New Commission's "imaginary fund." These three items boggle the mind, but for very different reasons. For example, the accelerated graduation recommendation is no more than a thinly disguised scheme to reintroduce the concept of student effort into the education reform debate. As such, it is a welcome and long-overdue development. But, unhappily, it has little chance of enactment. To put teeth into it would require us to do what the rest of the world does -- institutionalize serious incentives and rewards. In the case of secondary school students around the world, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow takes the form of the opportunity to attend a selective postsecondary institution. It is the passport to lifetime success. But American education policy has moved resolutely in the opposite direction for the past 50 years. Access and equity have been the rallying cries of the higher education community. God forbid they be accused of elitism. With 3,500 institutions of higher education, merit scholarships (or grants) are the farthest thing from the minds of most people involved in higher education policy (nomenclature that, given the context, leads one to ask, Higher than what?). The opportunity to use higher education as the gatekeeper of quality was forfeited long ago. Imagine what the effect of a technically simple but politically explosive reform initiative would be: award Guaranteed Student Loans and Pell Grants on the basis of academic merit alone. No more, no less. Or how about using a mixed, sliding scale, made up of income along one axis and academic accomplishment along the other. Do what the competition does. Enough said. To me, at least, the New Commission's most truly startling recommendation is to strip school boards of their authority to "operate" schools: "instead, they would . . . contract . . . with third parties . . . that would run the schools under performance contracts." Am I the only one who remembers the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity's performance-contracting fiasco more than a third of a century ago? Apparently, because the New Commission offers this not as a trial, or demonstration, or experimental solution, but as the final word on school management and organization. Finally, the New Commission (apparently as both a literary device and a thought experiment) costs out its reform suggestions by creating an "imaginary fund" from which to finance its reform recommendations. For example, the "savings" realized by early graduation would be available to early childhood education; the savings realized by ending remediation in college would be available for . . . follow the bouncing ball. What is missing from this picture? A sense of the harsh reality of public finance. As everyone who follows the field knows, every year since the founding of the Republic, public expenditure for education has increased. It has never decreased; there have never been savings; there has never been an education dividend occasioned by program improvement or budget slimming. Indeed, the New Commission's name for the fund is more apt than the members may have intended: "imaginary fund" indeed. DENIS P. DOYLE is co-founder and chief academic officer of SchoolNet Inc., New York, N.Y. He is also the author of The Doyle Report (www.thedoylereport.com), a weekly e-newsletter that covers the intersection of school improvement and technology. |
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