Emily Stover DeRocco Speech
National Association of Workforce Boards
Washington, DC
March 4, 2005
Good morning and thank you. It is good to be here.
Today, our country finds itself in a situation unlike any we have experienced in our history. Advances in the fields of communication, technology and travel have torn down the barriers to global commerce and removed the borders from the global economy. Competition now comes not only from the company across the street, but also from the company across the ocean.
The United States used to be secure in the knowledge that even though others were now making cars or steel or textiles cheaper, we were still the leaders in innovation. We were the ones that would invent the computer operating system or the internet or the Global Positioning System and others would be left merely to imitate. There are signs today, though, that this may no longer be the case. For example:
- Foreign-owned companies and foreign-born individuals now account for nearly half of all U.S. patents.
- In 2003, China overtook the United States as the world leader in direct foreign investment.
- And today, Asian countries now spend as much on nanotechnology as the United States.
These are troubling signs. To ensure we remain the world leaders in the 21st century innovation economy, we must face up to these challenges and manage the necessary changes. We must look at the systems and structures that support and feed our economy and ask if they are equipped to handle the demands of the global economy. Sadly, in too many cases, the answer is a resounding no.
From our health care to our pension to our legal systems, we find barriers and inefficiencies that slow our current economic growth and threaten our medium and long-term ability to compete at all. In each case, however, fiscal realities will ultimately intrude and force resolution to each of these situations, one way or another.
But there is another more pressing challenge before us that does not face the same reckoning but has the potential to damage our ability to compete and succeed in a global economy. That challenge is the deterioration of our education system.
It clearly begins in our nation’s schools. Just this week was an event called the National Education Summit. Perhaps this generation’s finest innovator and entrepreneur gave a speech that I would like to quote from. He begins:
“Training the workforce of tomorrow with the high schools of today is like trying to teach kids about today’s computers on a 50-year-old mainframe. It’s the wrong tool for the times.
Our high schools were designed fifty years ago to meet the needs of another age. Until we design them to meet the needs of the 21st century, we will keep limiting – even ruining – the lives of millions of Americans every year. Today, only one-third of our students graduate from high school ready for college, work, and citizenship.
This isn’t an accident or a flaw in the system; it is the system.”
The scary part about that statement is that Bill Gates doesn’t even speak to the fact that graduation rates are hovering only around 70% nationwide. It also highlights why our workforce system is so critical and also why our jobs are so tough. Not enough of America’s next generation are learning the skills required in the 21st century economy and will soon be looking to us to provide them job training.
To combat this shortcoming, President Bush has proposed standards and accountability for our nation’s high schools. Much has been written and said about the No Child Left Behind Act, but the success seen in the early returns prove that when schools and teachers are held accountable for results, the performance of their students improve. It is now time to extend this principle beyond grade schools to our nation’s high schools.
Even if this were to happen tomorrow, we know that it takes more than a high school education to succeed in the new economy. In fact, 80% of the fastest growing jobs require education and training beyond high school. These are the jobs that will drive the innovation in the world economy and determine which country will lead that economy. And as I identified earlier, we have challengers.
In 2001, India graduated almost a million more students from college than the United States did. China graduates twice as many students with bachelor’s degrees as the U.S., and they have six times as many graduates majoring in engineering. It is true that these countries have four times as many people as the U.S. and the percentage of educated people is embarrassingly low, but the raw numbers still matter.
There is a global war for talent going on in the world today and the best and brightest are no longer automatically being produced by or attracted to the United States. As workforce professionals we should take that personally.
Unfortunately, as the global war for talent heats up, we are too busy engaged in friendly fire to even notice. The states are shooting at the locals and vice-versa. The Employment Service is shooting at WIA and WIA is shooting at the partner programs. Everybody is so concerned about who is getting how much of the pie that we seem to have lost sight of the reason why the pie exists at all.
