Gary Beach on the Technology Skills Crisis

"These educational gaps impose on the United States the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession."
—McKinsey & Company

In a country that spends $583 billion each year on public education, the taxpayer deserves a better return on investment. For nearly two decades, America’s fourth-, eighth-, and twelfth-grade students have performed poorly in math and science compared to their peers in other countries. In a slightly longer time frame, as our country’s education policy shifted to accountability under President George H. W. Bush, the results in domestic math and science assessment tests have been worse: SAT scores for math have stagnated since the 1980s, and verbal scores are now the worst on record for the SAT.

I have no “street cred” as an educator, although I did teach theology to high school freshmen in my first job out of college in 1972. But 30 years of conversations with information technology (IT) executives does afford me a small soapbox to step up on and broadcast loud and clear an escalating point of pain they shared with me: America’s schools are not producing individuals with the strong quantitative and communicative skills necessary to compete in the twenty-first-century global economy.

The skills landscape has changed significantly in America over the past 173 years. In 1840, 80 percent of the American labor force worked in the agricultural and manufacturing sectors. Only 20 percent were employed in service jobs. By 2010, the composition did a near complete reversal, with 78 percent of American jobs in services and 22 percent in agriculture and manufacturing. Critics of the American school system claim that what, and how, we teach schoolchildren is largely based on the 1840 percentages. And a 2012 McKinsey and Company report flatly states that “a skills shortage is a leading reason for entry level vacancies that cause significant problems [for American firms] in terms of cost, quality, time, . . . or worse.” The Computing Technology Industry Association reported in 2012 that a whopping 93 percent of employers indicated that there is an overall skills gap.

Reading and literacy was the key subject for American education in the 1950s. Rudolph Flesch, in his 1955 best-selling book, Why Johnny Can’t Read: And What You Can Do about It, touched a raw nerve with the American public. Fifty-eight years later, the key skills for American schoolchildren are math and science proficiency. But no one has yet authored Why Johnny and MaryCan’t Do Math and Science. Although many reports have tried to discuss this subject, American students, parents, teachers, politicians, and teacher union leaders just don’t seem to really care.

I do.

There are three important reasons that America must improve the math and science skills of its students.

1. The first is economic. In 2009, McKinsey and Company researched the results of the international math and science assessment tests, created a proprietary measurement tool, and reported that if America’s students matched the proficiency of Finland’s students in math and science, the U.S. gross domestic product would be 16 percent larger each year.

2. The second reason is employment. With the world connected by millions of miles of fiber cable that allow work to be done anywhere on the planet, Americans are no longer competing with the person in the next cubicle for their next promotion or job. Their competition for work in the twenty-first century will be tens of thousands of miles away. The U.S. unemployment rate will remain historically high as businesses look to hire the best skills for the best price. Right now, America is losing that battle, according to a January 2012 report published by the Harvard Business School. It found that 58 percent of senior business leaders in America believe that the nation’s K–12 education system is currently worse than that of other countries, and nearly 80 percent of these leaders said that the American education system is continuing to fall behind that of other countries.

3. The third reason to improve math and science skills is just starting to surface: the national security of our country. Throughout the history of humanity, the arenas of war have been ground, sea, air, and space. Now, in the twenty-first century, add cyberspace to the list. To protect our country’s financial, utility, and defense infrastructures, we must produce more, rather than fewer, students with strong skills in math and science.

In 2007 I began the journey that resulted in my book, The U.S. Technology Skills Gap. During the early phase of my research, I read a famous speech that Sir Winston Churchill delivered to the House of Commons in November 1936. Later known as the “Locust Years” speech, it warned the members of the House of Commons about the dangers of a rearmed Germany. One line from the speech is a good description of America’s twenty-first-century education challenge:

"The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences."

Actions speak louder than words. My goal is to offer IT executives and business leaders a primer on the last seven decades of missteps in American education.

Chinese culture is famous for prescient sayings. The following one encapsulates well the content and recommendations of my book:

If you want one year of prosperity, grow grain.
If you want 10 years of prosperity, grow trees.
If you want 100 years of prosperity, grow people.

It is time for America to grow people—people with strong math and science skills. Our nation’s era of consequence is upon us.