Competing with the world

03/26/2006

Star Tribune
March 26, 2006

Forget that Minnesota sends a bigger share of its high school grads to college than all but two other states. Don’t get excited about Minnesota’s college-bound high school students topping the nation in ACT entrance exam scores. Stop boasting about being seventh in the nation in high school graduation rates. Don’t compare Minnesota to the rest of the nation, say a growing number of the state’s educators and CEOs, because American education isn’t keeping pace with the world’s leaders. If Minnesota is going to prosper in the global economy of 2025 and 2050, it has to keep up with Norway, Singapore and China. And there is reason to worry that it is not. Among those who are worried are David Laird, president of the Minnesota Private College Council, Steven Rosenstone, dean of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota, and Mark Chronister, partner at the Minneapolis office of the business accounting and consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. They met recently with editorial writer Lori Sturdevant to share their concern about the educational competition and their ideas for staying in the race. Here are themes and excerpts from their conversation:

The leading indicators on educational competitiveness are in, and for America, they’re not good.

Rosenstone: The numbers that we frequently cite are lagging indicators. That we are a very educated population is a lagging indicator, not a leading indicator of our future. The leading indicators are eighth- and 12th-graders—how many are prepared to go on to college and graduate school, and how many are being left behind. That’s where the alarm bells should be going off very loudly.

Look at what’s been happening to the number of science teachers we have, the preparation that schools are providing in K-12, the way in which the resources we’ve invested as a society in K-12 have dwindled, the way class sizes have grown.

The preparation of students in math in this country and other countries is dramatically different, and for us, it’s going in exactly the wrong direction. A couple of facts: Twenty-nine percent of the U.S. elementary grade students who took an international test in mathematics performed at a proficient level. American 12th-graders in 1999 were last among 20 nations who took a mathematics test. In 2003, U.S. 15-year-olds ranked 24th among students in 29 nations tested in mathematics.

This is about as real as it gets. But there isn’t a Sputnik. There isn’t a Pearl Harbor. There isn’t a 9/11. It is the frog sitting in the water, and the water is getting warmer and warmer.

Laird: Minnesota may be leading the nation in ACT scores and the share of people going to college. But that’s leading a group that’s going downhill. It’s not recognizing who our real competition is.

Laird (continued): Nations around the world are investing huge sums of money to ensure that they will have the most prepared students, in every field. Twenty or so nations have made huge strategic investments in higher education in the last 20 years, and that does not count what India and China are planning for the next 20. China is going to build 800 new universities in the next 10 years. Eight hundred! They will each serve somewhere between 20,000 and 35,000 students.

The education gap is about to become more evident.

Chronister: Here’s something that will exacerbate this problem. Business is looking at the biggest retirement cohort that it has ever seen. Where are the knowledge workers going to come from when the baby boomers retire?

Laird: The cohort in our population now with the highest educational attainment is the one that is stepping into retirement. Nothing behind them so far is comparable. As it stands, we cannot replace those who are retiring.

For Minnesota, education matters more than in some other states.

Rosenstone: A fundamental difference in Minnesota now, compared with a century ago, is that the key industries in our state are not tied to natural resources, except for human capital. Taconite and agriculture are not the lifeblood of our economy the way they once were. The financial services industry can locate anywhere in the world. Cargill can go anywhere. General Mills is not tied to the river. 3M is not tied to St. Paul.

Why do they want to be in Minnesota? It’s the human capital—the educated workforce. That’s why, in education, we can’t just be hanging on. We have to be leading.

Minnesota’s white/nonwhite achieve- ment gap has got to go.

Rosenstone: The segment of the Minnesota population that’s growing most rapidly has the lowest probability now of going on to college, and therefore the lowest probability of being prepared to fill the jobs that Minnesota needs if it is going to prosper in the future. Minnesota can’t afford to leave so many kids behind.

Chronister: We in business think that in this global environment, you have to have a diverse workforce, and you have to have an environment in which diverse people are comfortable. The more diverse our workforce is in Minnesota, the more successful our businesses will be.

The people we’re leaving behind now in this state are primarily minorities. By 2050, the U.S. Census Bureau says this country will be 53 percent white, 47 percent minority. If we can’t figure out how to educate the students we’re leaving behind now, then by 2050, we could become a cold New Orleans.

Minnesota has the wherewithal to change this picture. Here’s how:

Laird: Look at the experiences of Singapore and Norway. Both of those nations are close to our size. Both have been through the process of determining their strategic goals, and they have people working in yoke to get there. They are outperforming us at every level of education. The kids in Singapore typically study five languages, and take calculus in the 10th grade. There’s no reason we can’t do it, too.

We need an ongoing assessment of our competition. Our competition isn’t South Dakota and North Dakota. It’s offshore. We are flying blind in that regard.

Rosenstone: Imagine what would happen if college students, as part of their education, would engage with K-12 students as mentors. Businesses have hundreds of partnerships with K-12 now, but they are not coordinated in a way that’s pulling together. Imagine if they were. Imagine if we could develop our own Teacher Corps of recent college graduates and retirees, reaching into K-12 in a way that keeps kids on track.

Imagine if every college ensured the kind of access that we are trying to offer at the University of Minnesota, so that the message is crystal-clear to every fifth-grader in this state: If you are prepared for college or university, there will be a place for you. You will have access.

Those are all things that are in our reach. We can make this a state project, if we have the will. This can be our moon shot.

Chronister: Here’s an analogy. Look at what happened when we started to say that we don’t have enough women in college. Now we have student bodies that are 55 or 60 percent female. Why can’t we do something similar here?

Needed: A statewide summit meeting on increasing educational attainment. Soon.

Chronsiter: We have a window of opportunity to address this. We need to move before the baby boomers retire.

Rosenstone: The punch line here is a cry for a state summit on education. We need a statewide conversation that engages the leadership of every sector—business, education, government, philanthropy, everyone who has a stake in improving education. Together, we’ve got to take this on. This is the issue that will determine the future of this state.