Carnegie
Corporation
of New York
Summer 2005
Says current Corporation President Vartan Gregorian, “Teaching middle
and high school students to read with comprehension is a critical goal
for the nation. At the Corporation we have enlisted some of the most creative
minds in the nation to work with us to advance literacy.” He adds,
“Together, we will do what it takes to ensure that the spectacle
of American students shutting down and dropping out of high school at
the appalling rate of 3,000 a day quickly becomes one of those shameful
memories in American history that we are all eager to forget.” He
concludes, “What does America’s magnificent legacy of free,
universal public elementary and secondary education mean if we fail to
provide every American child with the reading and writing skills they
need to succeed in higher education, to become productive citizens in
the workplace—and, dare I say it—to fulfill their own happiness?”
Evidence is mounting that America’s failure to provide these basic tools for success and happiness is increasingly taking its toll. Thomas Friedman of The New York Times tells us that the world is flat after all1, and that American workers are stumbling on this increasingly leveled playing field. In a recent article in the Washington Monthly2, Benjamin Wallace-Wells describes a disconcerting shopping excursion to Best Buy. “Whereas a decade ago the most creative, groundbreaking stuff came from Silicon Valley,” he observes, “now it all seemed to come from overseas. The plasma televisions were from Korea; the computer-like cell phones were from Finland; the feature-packed digital cameras were from Japan.” Wallace-Wells cites a report of the Council on Competitiveness, a group comprising 400 CEOs of blue chip companies and university presidents. According to the Council’s report, while it took fifty-five years for the automobile and thirty-five years for the telephone to spread to a quarter of the country, it took a mere seven years for the Internet to accomplish this. Indeed, observes Wallace-Wells, in the past, falling behind five years in the building of car factories meant the loss of some profits, but in our twenty-first century economy, “[F]all five years behind on hybrid cars and you may have lost an industry.”
For America to remain competitive in a global environment in which the diffusion of knowledge across a newly flattened horizon and the development of new technologies move at warp speed, we must ramp up the process of education reform and tend to that most basic challenge of all: insuring that America’s children—all of them—develop the literacy skills necessary to get the job done.
1. “It’s a Flat World, After
All,” by Thomas Friedman, The New York Times, April 13, 2005.
2. “Off-Track” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells, Washington Monthly,
March 2005.