Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Face the Devastation

Devastating stuff from the new McKinsey report. Friedman is practically willing to let the report speak for itself.

According to the report:
"The longer American children are in school, the worse they perform compared to their international peers".

There are millions of kids who are in modern suburban schools “who don’t realize how far behind they are,” said Matt Miller, one of the authors. “They are being prepared for $12-an-hour jobs — not $40 to $50 an hour.”

And the kicker:

According to the report,
If America had closed the international achievement gap between 1983 and 1998 and had raised its performance to the level of such nations as Finland and South Korea, United States G.D.P. in 2008 would have been between $1.3 trillion and $2.3 trillion higher. If we had closed the racial achievement gap and black and Latino student performance had caught up with that of white students by 1998, G.D.P. in 2008 would have been between $310 billion and $525 billion higher. If the gap between low-income students and the rest had been narrowed, G.D.P. in 2008 would have been $400 billion to $670 billion higher.

1 comment:

  1. For any science or technology teachers on college or secondary school level, this conference may be of interest --http://www.highimpact-tec.org/index.php

    It is certainly germane to the second part of the observation - US GDP. It is also germane to the mission statement of this blog: "see students benefit from and gain experience in real-life problem solving, task determination, and creative thinking through total immersion in an authentic 21st century digital workplace."

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