Other views: U.S. needs to develop education wisely

Results from the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment show 15-year-old students in the U.S. are performing about average in reading and science, and below average in math. Out of 34 countries, the U.S. ranked 14th in reading, 17th in science and 25th in math. And while this is an improvement compared to the last two times this test was taken in 2003 and 2006, it is still far behind the highest-scoring countries, including South Korea, Finland and Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai in China and even our neighbors to the north, Canada. The PISA exam is one of a handful of tests that compare educational levels across nations, and is considered to be the most comprehensive. The test focuses on how well students are able to apply their knowledge in math, reading and science to real-life situations. Some 470,000 students took the test in 2009 in 65 countries and educational systems, from poor, underdeveloped nations to the most wealthy.

“This is an absolute wake-up call for America,” U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in an interview with The Associated Press. “The results are extraordinarily challenging to us and we have to deal with the brutal truth. We have to get much more serious about investing in education.” Duncan went on to say that “We live in a globally competitive knowledge-based economy, and our children today are at a competitive disadvantage with children from other countries. That is absolutely unfair to our children and that puts our country’s long-term economic prosperity absolutely at risk.”

Take a look at the types of jobs available. Many of them at this point are of the more physically demanding labor jobs, especially in North Dakota. The question becomes: Are we becoming a country that in order to be successful again, we need to do the physical labor? Because we have not kept up to the other countries from a technological standpoint, because it is becoming a global market, because of the continued elimination of the middle class, and in that regard, middle management, should we be emphasizing and developing those future capabilities that we have? Take a look around here. The higher-paying jobs here are the labor jobs. More and more people are doing service-type work to make their money while there really is not much in the way of technological jobs here.

This country is $14.3 trillion in debt. President Barack Obama wants the college graduation rate to be No. 1 in the world again by 2020. Are you doing it just for the sake of numbers? Hopefully there is a plan for all those college graduates. Right now a college education does not guarantee you a higher-paying, secure management job. An ABCNews.go.com student survey showed that just 19.7 percent of all college graduates in 2009 actually were able to secure any kind of job. So if you are going to commit to being No. 1 again in 10 years, you better have a job for them. Or better yet, how about committing to what assets this country does have right now, and develop them?

Tags: other views, opinion, editorials, education