The Comeback (14 page)

The United States needs foreign investment because it lowers the cost of capital for U.S. corporations. Moreover, we need foreign buyers to be able to come to the United States to purchase our goods. As the producer of the nation’s largest trade show, the International CES, we see how our own government policies make it so difficult to host important buyers and officials from around the world. Every discouraged foreign buyer means a lost sale to a competitive country, or it means that American businesses have to travel overseas to try to make a sale.

Encourage and enforce clear and strong intellectual property policies.
Our innovation and creativity in the United States and worldwide must be protected by strong intellectual property laws. However, these should focus on commercial piracy and be clear enough to allow innocent infringement and not dissuade innovation. Copyright laws can go too far. Innovation in America faces increasing hurdles from copyright laws that impose huge fines based on unclear definitions of when the law is violated. This chills innovation.

Trade with other nations is an emotional subject. Those who want us to close our borders and create new factories producing what we consume are well-meaning, but such protectionism would result in a Cuba-style economy.

There is no going back. Americans will prosper by being the most innovative country, and innovation requires access to all the world has to offer. America’s innovators need free trade to innovate. If American politicians shut our doors while the world embraces free trade, we are on a path toward poverty.

“Our nation is at risk. The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity. If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament. History is not kind to idlers.”

—1983 report from the National Commission on Excellence in Education

During President Reagan’s first term, a blue-ribbon panel of prominent American government and private-sector appointees delivered a scathing evaluation of the nation’s education system. The panel’s final report,
A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform
, documented the declining performance of America’s schools and proposed thirty-eight specific recommendations to meet the challenges.

The report dominated news cycles (back when those lasted longer than twenty minutes) for days, but the net result was . . . not much. On the report’s twenty-fifth anniversary, an education
advocacy group reported that “stunningly few” of the report’s recommendations were ever enacted.
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We should have gotten a national wake-up call. Instead we hit the snooze button.

Since 1983, study after study has found U.S. students lagging behind their foreign counterparts across a broad range of subjects. Among the best-known studies is PISA, the Program for International Student Assessment, which measures the reading, math, and science literacy skills of fifteen-year-olds in OECD countries every three years.

In 2003, PISA found U.S. students were ahead of only five developed countries in terms of math skills. Students in thirty-one countries had higher average math literacy scores, including eight of the developing countries who also participated in the test. The 2006 PISA test found very similar results in science, with U.S. students in the bottom third of developed countries.
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Six developing nations reported higher average scores than in the United States.

The same or similar results have been replicated across a wide variety of studies. And we can’t explain away the findings by saying our best students are still fine. In math and science, “even the highest U.S. achievers . . . were outperformed on average by their OECD counterparts.”

On the science test, twelve countries had students at the 90th percentile with higher scores than the United States. Math performance was even worse. U.S. students at the 90th percentile scored well below the OECD average on math literacy. Fully twenty-nine countries had higher scores at that level.

We are doing better in reading. The PISA 2000 test found that the performance of U.S. students was average overall but that the United States had a greater percentage of students performing at the highest level in reading.

The problem we now face is that innovation isn’t something you can bottle and hand over to the next generation. We can’t hoard it or ration it to keep progress going at a steady rate. It’s a renewable resource, but it can only be cultivated indirectly.

An innovation economy can be damaged any number of ways, with bad government policies being right at the top of the list, but ground-breaking inventions have come from places ruled by even the most backward and benighted despots.

The one thing innovation truly needs to survive is an education system that adequately prepares the next generation of innovators. That’s the raw material. That’s why so many high-tech companies want to loosen visa limits to bring more highly educated scientists and engineers into the United States. They can’t find enough here. This is why the decline of the American education system is a national tragedy. Reversing that decline must be a top national priority.

When it comes to education reform, I’m a pragmatist. You don’t have to have studied the education system for years to know we need good teachers working in superior educational environments backed by administrators with knowledge of local conditions and the power to manage according to results. This isn’t that complicated.

Too many education debates get bogged down in large, systemic questions. Consider charter schools, which purport to offer a superior educational experience in exchange for more flexibility in how they run their operations. Millions of research dollars have been
spent trying to answer the question of whether charter schools, as a concept, work. As the popular 2010 movie
Waiting for Superman
shows, some charter schools work much better than many urban schools.

The results have been contradictory so far, which isn’t surprising. There are thousands of charter schools operating in the United States. Some of those schools are going to be great. Others won’t be. What we should be spending our time on is figuring out why the good schools are so good, no matter how they are structured.

Unfortunately, the biggest problem with our education system is that it is dominated by entrenched interest groups that measure success less by student achievement and more by the economic welfare of their members. I’m talking, of course, about the teachers unions.

Understand that I’m not remotely anti-teacher. My father was a sixth-grade teacher, and my mother taught languages on the side. I can remember all the teachers I had in school who opened my eyes to the greater world and made learning the enjoyable activity it should be. Good teachers are one of the most precious resources we have.

The unions that represent them, however, are another story. And I say that despite the fact that my father was an active teachers union organizer and representative until he died in 2007.

For years, the National Education Association—which has an annual budget in excess of $300 million and more than 550 people on staff—has resisted every attempt to focus on teacher quality. The American Federation of Teachers has marched in lock-step behind them. As a result of their efforts, it can be practically impossible to fire an underperforming teacher without endless delays or crippling legal challenges.

For a look at how bad teachers can linger forever, you can’t do better than the award-winning
New Yorker
article by Steven Brill, “The Rubber Room,” detailing the way New York City spent hundreds of
millions of dollars annually to warehouse hundreds of alcoholic, abusive, inept, lazy, incompetent, or misaligned teachers.
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The problem is the state’s tenure system, which guarantees nearly every teacher a job for life once they complete three years in the classroom. It takes years of long, drawn-out hearings and appeals to force out even the most incompetent teachers; at the time of the
New Yorker
story, warehoused teachers had been out of the classroom an average of three years, with full pay and benefits during that entire time—
and many still weren’t close to a resolution of their cases
.

As one principal explained the situation, the union “would protect a dead body in the classroom.” And even a 2009 partial New York City compromise with the union allowing rubber room teachers to be assigned work was challenged in 2010 because teachers complained the work might be outside the area of the rubber room.

Getting bad teachers out of the classroom—and good teachers in— is a critically important component of any reform effort. A 2007 study funded by the non-partisan Brookings Institute found that a student with a first-rate teacher could expect a ten-point jump in standardized test performance after just one year. The study’s authors note:

[T]he black-white achievement gap nationally is roughly 34 percentage points. Therefore, if the effects were to accumulate, having a top-quartile teacher rather than a bottom-quartile teacher four years in a row would be enough to close the black–white test score gap.
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These results are astounding, and they support what everyone knows—good teachers matter.

Even in the face of such evidence, the teachers unions reject completely the idea of pay for performance. They seem to think education is the one industry in America where we aren’t allowed to acknowledge that there are higher and lower performers, and pay people accordingly.

In Washington, D.C., where forward-thinking school superintendent Michelle Rhee actually fired several hundred teachers in 2009 and 2010, the union retaliated. It contributed over $1 million to defeat the mayor—so that Michelle Rhee would go away. The union succeeded.

There is hope. The
Los Angeles Times
(under the leadership of its president, Eddie Hartenstein) actually published the results of each Los Angeles teacher’s performance in raising average test scores. Brilliant! Why teachers unions defend the worst teachers is unclear. It hurts good teachers, and it hurts students.

Teachers want to teach. That’s why they became teachers. But we would do a better job retaining the very best teachers if we could reward them for their dedication—and results—in the classroom.

Of course, pay for performance already happens. Because education is funded primarily by local property taxes, schools in more affluent areas can afford to pay higher salaries. The best teachers in adjoining districts are often recruited into the higher-paying system.

But rather than support plans that might keep more of those qualified teachers working in underprivileged systems, the unions have fought to keep their guaranteed, across-the-board salary increases based almost solely on seniority. It’s time for Americans to say “enough” and insist that differential pay for teachers be instituted based on teacher competence, subject matter, and skills.

Subject matter, well,
matters
because, as discussed above, we need to focus on math and science education as a nation. Lack of emphasis
on science and math was the biggest issue with the No Child Left Behind Act. This legislation had any number of benefits, but it also had the unintended consequence of putting an intense focus on basic English and math at the cost of de-emphasizing science education.

We do need to teach the basics—good old reading, writing, and arithmetic—but those are mere stepping stones to greater knowledge. We need intense science education not just to train the next generation of scientists and engineers but also because so many of the global problems we face require elementary science knowledge to understand. Think how much more informed important debates like climate change (and frivolous debates like evolution) would be if all Americans were truly comfortable with the scientific method.

We also must teach history, civics, and economics. The founders understood that an informed citizenry was a requirement for democracy to flourish. Our students must understand the true nature of America, its past, and the greatness it has inspired throughout history.

“I arrived at the web because the ‘Enquire’ (E not I) program—short for Enquire Within Upon Everything, named after a Victorian book of that name full of all sorts of useful advice about anything—was something I found really useful for keeping track of all the random associations one comes across in Real Life and brains are supposed to be so good at remembering but sometimes mine wouldn’t. It was very simple but could track those associations which would sometimes develop into structure as ideas became connected, and different projects become involved with each other.”

—TIM BERNERS-LEE, 1995
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You just read how one man created the World Wide Web. He, along with Dr. Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf, are the undisputed fathers of the Internet. (Former Congressman Rick Boucher actually helped birth the Internet by pushing policies allowing its commercial life.) But Berners–Lee’s description of the idea isn’t very interesting, is it?

In fact, were I a venture capitalist and a potential investment walked in my office spouting that jargon, I’d quickly show him the door. Little would I know that I’d just kicked out a guy whose idea helped generate $3.7 trillion in sales in the United States in 2009 alone. I guess that’s why I still have a day job.

Two things happened in 1989 that would forever change the way we live, work, play, and learn. The first was English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee’s proposal of “hypertext” as a way to share information among researchers worldwide. The idea led directly to the creation of the World Wide Web. The second was the official launch of America Online, which at its peak would be the online gateway for more than 30 million U.S. subscribers.