Everyone, even in these politically paralyzed times, seems to agree that the U.S. is woefully behind many developed nations in the math and science performance of our students.\u00a0 Both presidential candidates bemoan our students\u2019 slippage to the lower tiers of the global education ladder, and insist that nothing less than America\u2019s future as a world power is at stake when future generations cannot compete with Chinese and Czechs alike.<\/p>\n
The problem is real, but the remedies seem all too remote.\u00a0 Will abandoning the No Child Left Behind Act, or tinkering at the edges of classroom size, make a real difference for this generation?\u00a0 Our limited consensus does not even extend to the question of whether or not we need more teachers.\u00a0 See the July 9 Wall Street Journal piece by CATO scholar Andrew Coulson, entitled \u201cAmerica has Too Many Teachers.\u201d\u00a0 And if fixes could be agreed, the results might not show for many years.\u00a0 The Education Problem seems intractable.\u00a0 Most of us, with our web-trained 10-second attention spans, just have more urgent priorities.<\/p>\n
I suggest that we \u201cbuy\u201d educated students, rather than \u201cbuild\u201d them, as a bridge to somewhere later on, in U.S. schools.<\/p>\n
In the corporate world, \u201cbuild vs. buy\u201d decisions are made all the time\u2014especially in high tech, where global changes and constant innovation by competitors makes it impossible to stay ahead without acquiring talent and IP from elsewhere.\u00a0\u00a0 Cisco Systems famously moved this model to prominence, acquiring 15-25 companies a year for their products and their people.\u00a0 So why not \u201cbuy\u201d the best-educated and trained engineers, scientists, artists and architects, doctors and nuclear physicists, from other countries, until we can better educate our own?<\/p>\n
Which raises that other hot-button issue, immigration.<\/em><\/strong> \u00a0I\u2019m not talking about throwing open the southern border to migrant farm workers (however much needed) and drug lords.\u00a0 This is a simple matter of recalibrating our immigration policy along the lines of Australia, or Canada\u2014which, insane though it sounds, is accepting more immigrants than the U.S. these days.\u00a0 Canada actively encourages immigrants who will contribute economically from the instant of their arrival.\u00a0 Interestingly, 3% come from the U.S.\u00a0 Meanwhile Silicon Valley runs out of H-1B visas in the first months of each year.<\/p>\n As the best depart in droves from ravaged economies like Greece, Ireland and Spain, or from less favored climes in China, India and Russia, why are we shunting their ambition and talent off to Canada or other competitor nations?<\/p>\n If America ever needed more citizens like Albert Einstein, Werner Von Braun, I.M. Pei, Madeline Albright, Charlie Chaplin, Andy Grove, Joseph Pulitzer, Irving Berlin and Sergey Brin, we need them now.\u00a0According to a study by the Dallas Federal Reserve, foreign-born citizens made up 14% of the labor force in 2002, yet accounted for 51% of total jobs growth from 1996-2002.<\/p>\n We\u2019re building far fewer great minds these days, and each day more funds are being stripped from the school systems.\u00a0 Until we solve that long-term and much tougher education issue, shouldn\u2019t we get the low-hanging fruit by accelerating our \u201cbuys\u201d from abroad?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Everyone, even in these politically paralyzed times, seems to agree that the U.S. is woefully behind many developed nations in the math and science performance of our students.\u00a0 Both presidential candidates bemoan our students\u2019 slippage to the lower tiers of the global education ladder, and insist that nothing less than America\u2019s future as a world power is at stake when…read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comptonantitrust.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/comptonantitrust.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/comptonantitrust.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comptonantitrust.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comptonantitrust.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=343"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/comptonantitrust.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":346,"href":"https:\/\/comptonantitrust.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343\/revisions\/346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comptonantitrust.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comptonantitrust.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comptonantitrust.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}