High school is where America’s young people enter the adult world, not just socially, but more important, economically. Whether they realize it or not, it is where they begin preparing themselves for the economic environment in which they will compete and earn their livelihoods. Its importance is seen in the alarming reality that the United States has one of the lowest graduation rates of all developed nations, in the strikingly low percentage of students ready to use high school as a springboard for success in college and beyond, and in the pressing need for lifelong learning and effective citizenship in an increasingly demanding era of technology and global linkage.
High school is now the front line in America’s battle to remain competitive on the increasingly competitive international economic stage.
Trade in services was once seen as America’s ace in the hole. And, in fact, America has a variety of very strong service industries, from education to software to entertainment, that sell to customers around the world. But America’s trade surplus in services is steadily shrinking—service imports have grown faster than service exports for seven straight years.
The result is firms are now making themselves more competitive by breaking down into their constituent activities and making sure that each activity is being done in the “right” place. As a result, more of these services are becoming tradable, and more of the American economy-- including more of its higher-value services—is exposed to global competition.
How Will America Respond?
Despite sporadic successes, the American response to date has been one of complacency leading to mediocrity. The towering heights of American achievement remain unmatched around the world—our Nobel-winning scientists, the cutting edge of American technology, the balanced working of the American economy and its entrepreneurial culture. But below these heights, the base is withering. Consider these facts alone:
-A recent study by the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) showed that America’s literacy rate is average among the nations of the industrialized world and that our high school graduation rate—73 percent—is one of the lowest among the industrialized nations.
-Once the leader in education, the United States now ranks 14th in the number of years a 5-year-old may expect to attend school during the course of his or her life.
-The U.S. university dropout rate—38 percent—is among the highest in the industrialized world
-Of the 21 countries participating in the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, American high school seniors outperformed only students from Cyprus and South Africa and ranked behind such nations as Sweden, Canada, New Zealand, Russia and the Czech Republic.
-Non-U.S. residents with temporary visas accounted for a third of the Ph.D.s awarded in science and engineering in 2003, despite any post-9/11 difficulties they might have experienced.
Economists Anthony Carnevale and Donna Desrochers found almost all categories of employment now require more advanced education today than they did 30 years ago. They show the share of office workers with “some college” has increased from 37 percent to 60 percent over that span; the share with a bachelor’s degree has almost doubled, from 20 percent to 38 percent. Even factory work demonstrates the trend—the share of factory workers with some higher education has increased fourfold, from 8 percent to 31 percent in the past three decades.
As foreign suppliers step into more advanced service industries, American workers must respond by becoming more productive. Thus, America is faced with a stark choice—we can either climb the productivity ladder and re-create the American middle class, or we can watch our nation’s middle class fade away as other countries’ teenagers continue to outperform our children.
It is high school, specifically, where the failure occurs. For example, international student comparisons show American students report levels of both accomplishment and interest in math and science on par with their counterparts in other nations at both the 4th and 8th grade levels. But by grade 12, they fall far behind in their proficiency and report dramatically lower levels of interest. It is between 8th and 12th grade where the failure occurs.
Research from the U.S. Department of Education indicates that the rigor of high school coursework is more important than parent education level, family income or race/ethnicity in predicting whether a student will earn a postsecondary degree.
The share of high school students who take a course load preparing them for college is as low as 34 percent, and the share of high school students who are actually “college ready” is only 32 percent.
Together, the 50 states spend $63 billion annually to subsidize higher education. Obviously, this is an important part of a strategy to build local economies and attract a skilled workforce. Yet these investments will not yield the expected dividends unless high schools do a far better job of preparing students for postsecondary education.
And high school builds a better citizenry. Aside from the obvious benefits of educational achievement—lower demands for social services, lower rates of incarceration, better parenting and public health, and better preparation of the subsequent generation of small children for school, among many other—higher levels of education prepare our citizenry for the ever more sophisticated issues they must confront.
The average wages of high school graduates and those individuals who never graduated high school have fallen over the last two decades; the average incomes of those who went beyond high school have risen. This demarcation promises to become even starker in the coming years, as technology and trade separate the economy into two camps—those with the skills to participate in the global economy and those who lack them. If we do not make a concerted effort to move our society beyond this boundary, we will find ourselves a society cut in two—one side enfranchised in the modern economy, experiencing its affluence, the other lacking the means of access to the future. In short, we run the risk of losing our middle class.
High school lies at the center of this crisis. Fifty years ago, it was finishing school for the American middle class. Today, it must be more. It must be a bridge to higher education, to a productive and innovative economy, and to an informed citizenry. It is time to transform our country’s high schools to reflect these new realities.