Investing in Human Capital - accountability in standards-based education

School Administrator, March, 2001 by Anthony P. Carnevale

Our education system must do more than produce foot soldiers for the economy

The current wave of education reform has become a play in two acts. The curtain has already come down on Act One, with education standards in place across the country. Act Two, the long march toward the alignment of standards with assessments, curricula and the professional development of teachers and administrators, has just begun.

Act One was the easy part. Act Two will be far more difficult. Setting standards entails little more than making fond wishes for American youth. Meeting those standards will require enormous effort and new resources.

Some say we put the cart before the horse, that we should have provided the resources necessary to meet standards before we raised the stakes on educational performance. Others argue that a superficial alignment among standards, tests and classroom practices will produce little real learning and will fail to produce broader problem-solving, communications or creativity skills.

If the standards-based accountability movement degenerates into a constant stream of failed test performances or is dismissed as superficial "teaching to the test," they say, leaders will get cold feet about accountability. In the worst case, lower standards and a backlash against the standards movement will result.

The current wave of education reform will have its ups and downs as we lurch and learn our way forward. But standards-based reform is here to stay because this time there are relentless economic forces behind it.

The Education Ante

While no one can predict the future, today's economic realities suggest the shape of things to come. One certainty already evident is that in today's new knowledge economy, the way in which we produce and distribute education determines our economic competitiveness as a nation and the apportionment of economic opportunity among individual Americans and their families.

Let's look at the facts.

* Education has become the key ingredient in the 21st century recipe for growing the economic pie. Human capital in the form of high levels of educational attainment is the collateral for successful technology investments. In modern economies, about 25 percent of increasing wealth and productivity improvements come from investments in technology; the other 75 percent come from increases in educational attainment and related advances in applied knowledge that allow us to use our technology investments effectively.

* Educational equity pays for itself in increased wealth for all. For instance, if we could equalize the opportunity to learn among blacks, Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites, the resultant productivity improvements would add more than $230 billion in national wealth and $80 billion in new tax revenues every year. No one is going anywhere in the new economy without some postsecondary education and training.

* Jobs that require at least some college increased from 20 percent of all prime-age jobs (ages 30 to 59) in 1959 to 56 percent of all prime-age jobs in 1997. Access to college has become the new threshold for realizing our individual hopes and aspirations as well as for supporting a family financially.

* The education ante for good jobs has been driven up consistently. In 1973, for example, 59 percent of managers and professionals had at least some college education and 33 percent had only high school diplomas. By 1998 more than 80 percent had at least some college and 18 percent had only high school diplomas.

* High-technology jobs follow a similar pattern. In 1973, roughly 60 percent of high-technology workers had at least some college; that number grew to 85 percent in 1998.

* Education and health care workers always have been highly educated, but even among them, the proportion with at least some college has risen from 83 percent in 1973 to 95 percent in 1998.

* The proportion of skilled blue-collar workers with at least some college has increased from 17 percent to 28 percent since 1973. The share of clerical workers with at least some college has more than doubled, from 25 percent to 54 percent.

New Skill Requirements

The new economy requires not only higher levels of cognitive skills, but a new set of problem-solving and behavioral skills as well. Going back to basics won't give young Americans the skills they need in the new knowledge economy.

The new skill requirements have emerged, in part, as a result of the changing occupational structure. High-technology employment is growing quickly but still represents fewer than 10 percent of all jobs. Service jobs in education, health care and in white-collar office jobs represent the vast majority of good jobs in the highest quintiles of the wage distribution in the new economy.

Service jobs require greater interpersonal and problem-solving skills because the work entails more human interaction and personalized responses to people's wants and needs. These same skills are required in high-tech and manufacturing jobs as well because the technology itself takes on more of the rote, manual processing tasks, allowing employees to spend more time interacting with each other to meet new competitive requirements.