The United States of America, which for generations has been the richest, most powerful nation in the world, is under attack and our position of pre-eminence is at grave risk. This threat is more dangerous than anything Al Qaeda or the Taliban can throw at us and it is also more dangerous than our current economic challenges and our proclivity to spend beyond our means. It is even more dangerous than a stalemated Congress that has forgotten that democracy only works when a people are willing to work together to find common ground.
The U.S. is like a major league baseball franchise that has become so complacent with winning that it has begun to view success as an entitlement and this entitlement mentality is pervasive. The nation’s payroll of its leaders, whether political or economic, has become so burdensome and disproportionate that operating in the red has become a default decision; but even this is not America's team’s greatest problem.
Historically, our team’s ability to compete was constructed on the foundation of a player-development system that was second-to-none. Over the years, however, our system of player development has become lackadaisical. On the one hand, we have lost sight of the fundamentals but, more importantly, the percentage of the population of young people who not only want to compete but are motivated to excel has diminished exponentially.
Of course, U.S.’s player development system is nothing other than the American system of private and public education. It is a documented fact that American children are falling further and further behind. According to the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the U.S. ranks 25th in math, 17th in science, and 14th in reading out of the 34 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries.[1]
In school systems throughout the U.S., teacher’s are being held accountable as student performance on various competency examinations fails to rise to expectations. Even more frightening, in some communities, we are lowering our expectations in response to this decline in performance, which is the absolute last thing we should be doing.
Sadly, our propensity for blaming teachers for the problems of public education, particularly in our cities, is a travesty. Because a number of special schools have been able to demonstrate remarkable results only serves to reinforce our belief that our public schools are doing something wrong. The dramatic difference in the performance of private, parochial, suburban, and some rural school districts only reinforces our misguided notion that urban public schools are failing, miserably. That white students out-perform minority students and that children from affluent families out-perform children from poor families further obscures what should be an obvious truth. The burgeoning gap between African-American students and their white counterparts confuses the issue even more.
So what is the obvious truth that we seem to be overlooking? The truth is that the key to educational success is student motivation which, itself, is a function of the extent to which the parents of those children value education and the level of responsibility those parents accept as partners in the education of their children. The success of special schools, private and parochial schools, and suburban public schools is not because they are better schools populated by better teachers. Their success is the result of the fact that these schools have become magnets that draw-in parents who are committed to the vital importance of education along with their motivated students. So blind are we to this penultimate truth, we fail to see that our mindless insistence on offering voucher programs so that more families can pull their children out of urban public schools only exacerbates the problem. Voucher programs may appear to be a salvation for some families but they are daggers to the hearts of urban public schools and the unheralded professional educators who labor there.
What remains are urban communities where the predominant culture, whatever the ethnic or racial make-up, not only devalues education but, most important of all, they have lost faith and hope in America; they have given up on the American Dream.
In the interim, other nations and their emerging economies, with China leading the way, threaten to supplant the United States of America as the richest, most powerful, and best educated nation in the world. This past holiday season, the American consumer has been asked to pay attention to whether or not the consumer goods we purchase are American made. What we have all seen, if we have taken the time to look, is that the products of China and other foreign economies dominate the shelves of retailers throughout the U.S. This is nothing more than hard evidence that we are losing the war for economic supremacy.
Recalling the performance of American fifteen year-olds in PISA rankings, we should be absolutely terrified by the fact that the nation that leads all categories of the PISA study is China. This author’s prediction is that, if we do not commit ourselves to changing this reality, in fifty years China will look to the U.S. workers for their cheap labor.
This threat to our way of life as Americans is more serious than any threat we have faced since the Civil War and the key to our success or failure in the next half century will be determined by the quality of our systems of education, both public and private.
It is absolutely imperative that our political, economic, and spiritual leaders, at all levels of our society, join forces to revitalize “the American Dream” and to reinforce in the minds of American parents of all racial, ethnic, and economic status that the ticket to the American Dream is a quality education. This will require not only that American parents relentlessly instill the importance of education in the minds and hearts of their children but that they make a commitment to become full partners, working hand-in-hand, with their children’s educators.
This is a formidable challenge that requires an unprecedented level of positive leadership on the part of all Americans. If we fail to rise to this challenge, as a people united in a common purpose, our grandchildren and great-grandchildren's futures are stark. They will never experience what it has been like for us to be "proud Americans."
[1] www.oecd.org/edu/pisa/2009. “The Programme for International Student Assessment is an internationally standardized assessment that was jointly developed by participating economies and administered to 15-year-olds in schools.”
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