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Why It’s Never Mattered That America’s Schools ‘Lag’ Behind Other Countries

A very interesting analysis of America’s competitive position and it’s correlation with our educational system.

Gregory Ferenstein for Tech Crunch 9/16/12

The United States has never ranked at the top of international education tests, since we began comparing countries in 1964, yet has been the dominant economic and innovative force in the world the entire time. Despite this fact, a popular annual education report has once again stoked fears of America’s impending economic mediocrity with fresh stats on how far the U.S. “lags” behind the world in college attainment, pre-school enrollment, and high school graduation.

The reason for the apparent disconnect is because schools don’t prepare students for the real world, so broad educational attainment will have a weak correlation with economic power. Research has consistently shown that on nearly every measure of education (instructional hours, class-size, enrollment, college preparation), what students learn in school does not translate into later life success. The United States has an abundance of the factors that likely do matter: access to the best immigrants, economic opportunity, and the best research facilities.

School Isn’t Educational

The Organization for Economic and Cooperation and Development (OECD), a forum of the top 34 developed economies, released one of its annual education reports yesterday comparing each member’s performance on various school metrics. The scorecard for the U.S. is not pretty:

The U.S. ranks 14th in higher education attainment at 42% of 25-34 with a degree, 20 points behind the leader, South Korea.
The U.S. ranks 26th in early childhood education (69%)
The U.S. is the 6th worst in terms of high school graduation, with 23% failing to attain a diploma

“Based on these trends, the U.S. may find that an increasing number of countries will approach or surpass its attainment levels in the coming years,” reads the U.S. report card.

However, the report implies that education translates into gainful market skills, an assumption not found in the research. For instance, while Chinese students, on average, have twice the number of instructional hours as Americans, both countries have identical scores on tests of scientific reasoning.

“The results suggest that years of rigorous training of physics knowledge in middle and high schools have made significant impact on Chinese students’ ability in solving physics problems, while such training doesn’t seem to have direct effects on their general ability in scientific reasoning, which was measured to be at the same level as that of the students in USA,” wrote a team of researchers studying whether Chinese superiority in rote scientific knowledge translated into the kinds of creative thinking necessary for innovation.

In a massive review of research, the Department of Education’s research arm, the Institute for Education Sciences, could not find any evidence that college preparation actually prepared students for college [pdf]. The only effective tools were (sadly) non-classroom-based strategies, such as teaching students how to fill out financial aid forms.

Students’ time in college isn’t much better. Researchers Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa concluded in Academically Adrift that most students float through college without learning much in the way of critical thinking.

“Indeed, the students in our study who reported studying alone five or fewer hours per week nevertheless had an average cumulative GPA of 3.16,” they write, “given such a widespread lack of academic rigor, about a third of students failed to demonstrate significant gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing ability (as measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment) during their four years of college.”

These facts should not come as a shock. When I taught college, it was commonly known among the professors that incoming high schoolers were not prepared with the requisite critical-thinking skills for our classes. Now as a writer in the private sector, I don’t expect incoming employees to have been prepared in their college classes. Determination, raw intelligence, and creativity are the measures of a successful college student and employee — none of those factors are learned in school.

So What Matters?

It’s easier to know what doesn’t work than what does. We know schooling can’t broadly impact innovation much, because we can track learning step-by-step through the life of a student. Tracking the countless variables that go into creating an innovation superpower is more daunting. But, we can make a few educated guesses.

Most importantly, the innovators at the helm of an economy come from the top quarter of students. While the United States has a dismal track-record of inequality, we treat our brightest minds quite well. The “average test scores are mostly irrelevant as a measure of economic potential,” write Hal Salzman & Lindsay Lowell in the prestigious journal, Nature, “To produce leading-edge technology, one could argue that it is the numbers of high-performing students that is most important in the global economy.”

The United States, they find, has among the highest percentage of top-performing students in the world. Whether the abundance of smart students is a product of U.S. culture, an artifact of the genetic lottery, or some unknown factor hidden in our education system is anyone’s guess.

We do know where some of our best talent comes from: other countries. In some ways, the United States steals its way to economic superiority: it rangles the world’s brightest minds to immigrate. The U.S. holds roughly 17% of the world’s International students, compared to 2nd-place Britain (~12%) and far more than education powerhouses, Korea, Switzerland, and Sweden (all below 5%).

A quarter of CEOs in technology and science are foreign born and 76 percent hold key positions in engineering, technology, and management, according to Stanford researcher and TechCrunchcontributor, Vivek Wadhwa.

“More than 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies in the U.S. were founded by immigrants or their children, and these firms alone employ over 10 million individuals. Some of our country’s most iconic brands – including IBM, Google, and Apple – were founded by an immigrant or the child of an immigrant. And nearly half of the top 50 venture-backed companies in the U.S. had at least one immigrant founder,” wrote Aol founder Steve Case (Aol is the parent company of TechCrunch).

And, our brightest native and immigrant minds are greeted with extraordinary research and economic opportunity. After World War II, the United States emerged as an economic superpower. Massive investment poured into universities and scientific research, which became the genesis for the Internet, itself.

While its difficult to speculate why the U.S. persists as a titan of innovation, we need not be scared into trying to be like other countries. America has been at the top inspite of a lack-luster education system.

Source: TechCrunch

Old and in the Fray: The Coming Entrepreneurship Boom — The American Magazine

Contrary to popularly held assumptions, it turns out that over the past decade or so, the highest rate of entrepreneurial activity (a measurement of new business creation) belongs to the 55–64 age group. The 20–34 age bracket meanwhile—which we usually identify with swashbuckling and risk-taking youth (think Facebook and Google)—has the lowest. Perhaps most surprising, this disparity occurred even during the decade surrounding the dot-com boom—when the young entrepreneurial upstart became a cultural icon.

In every single year from 1996 to 2007, Americans between the ages of 55 and 64 had a higher rate of entrepreneurial activity than those aged 20–34.
For the entire period, the 55–64 group averaged a rate of entrepreneurial activity roughly one-third larger than their youngest counterparts.
These trends seem likely to persist: in the Kauffman Firm Survey, a longitudinal survey of nearly 5,000 companies that began in 2004, slightly less than two-thirds of firm founders are between the ages of 35 and 54.
Additionally, Kauffman research has revealed that the average age of the founders of technology companies in the United States is a surprisingly high 39—with twice as many over age 50 as under age 25.

Why More Experienced CEOs Will Stay At the Forefront of Tech Innovation

Some day – maybe not this century, maybe not this millennium, but some day – Microsoft, IBM, Procter & Gamble, Exxon, General Motors, General Electric, News Corp., even Apple will be gone. It is inevitable. And in a nearer future, within most of our lifetimes, the leaders who now run those companies will be gone. Replaced. Retired. Dead. Forgotten. It is the nature of things. As one of the central tenets of Buddhism pronounces – impermanence is what defines our existence.

This fact seems central to why we prize youth in business so much. After all, young executives, it is assumed, are statistically farther from their exits. Their youth means the lifespan of what they create will be longer and will be farther from dissolution or extinction or, worse still, irrelevance. We also prize youthful leaders because of their spunk, their willingness to take risks, to sleep on threadbare cots and to drink copious amounts of Red Bull, while they are building those world-changing businesses that only young minds can conjure.

Problem is, those assumptions are not supported by the facts. Dane Stangler, a director at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, observes, “The United States might be on the cusp of an entrepreneurship boom—not in spite of an aging population but because of it.” Another Kaufman study reveals that the average age of founders of technology companies is a surprisingly high 39 – with twice as many over-50 executives as those under 29 years old.

I suspect the truest reason why older executives are on the cusp of an entrepreneurship boom: long term success in business requires season more than youthful spice. Writing in the Harvard Business Review, MIT professor Deborah Ancona identifies four character traits of a successful CEO – Sensemaking, Relating, Visioning, Inventing.

In sum, Sensemaking describes being able to make sense of the world and a company’s place in it; Relating describes being able to connect with team members, other executives, and partners; Visioning is a CEO’s ability to create a compelling vision of the future; and Inventing is a leader’s skill at taking her abstract idea to the concrete world of implementation.

Studying the traits carefully, it is natural to conclude that an inexperienced, youthful entrepreneur is likely to possess two of the required traits in spades – Relating and Visioning – the two traits that describe being able to form and keep relationships, and dream big. However, the case can be made strongly that the last two traits – Sensemaking and Inventing – require a good level of experience in order to be able to draw from past observations and failures, to expertly recognize what’s happening in the world, and then deliver, in real terms, on a dream. It is mostly the seasoned entrepreneur, it can be asserted, who has the stuff required to build. To stick with the metaphor, can a novice carpenter construct a building that will withstand the first, inevitable storm? Unlikely. I’ll trust a seasoned hand over a novice, any day.

The calamity plaguing Facebook might be a current case in point. Does Mark Zuckerberg have the Sensemaking trait? Certainly he did at one point, but he now seems to be struggling with truly knowing Facebook’s place in the world. Does he possess the Relating trait? If we’re to believe what has been written about him, perhaps not. Mark definitely had, at one point, Visioning and Inventing, but while a question mark still looms over whether he can vision his way out of his current challenges, the young founder now appears like he’s running dry on Inventing. Facebook’s anemic stock price raises a glaring question about whether a more seasoned executive would have followed his bankers into the imbroglio of a botched public offering.

Don’t get me wrong; there are plenty of examples of seasoned CEOs who failed miserably. Do we need to drop names like Gilbert Amelio to make that point? I choose not to, since they reflect poorly on the codger crowd. But I will counter with a parry against the oft-stated argument that young entrepreneurs have their older competitors beaten in the Visioning trait.

“Aren’t younger founders more visionary?” the arguers pose. Truth is that many entrepreneurs who have changed the world, and have had lasting influence, did it when they were older than forty. Henry Ford. Ben Franklin. Soichiro Honda. Lee Iacocca. These are biographies that are truly testing the theory of the impermanence of reputations.

I will concede one point, however. Young leaders are more spry, surely. They are less likely to complain about sore backs after hours of being stooped over blueprints or spreadsheets. Older executives, though, bring wisdom, something to which investors are now attaching great value, as they too look at the statistics about the history of success stories. While older executives will certainly time and again lose miserably to their youthful counterparts in a bar fight, I contend they’ll outscore young CEOs in a “Jeopardy” test of wits about operational effectiveness.

I believe the business world will undergo a radical transformation that favors more experienced entrepreneurs, driven by a renewed appreciation by VCs of the been-there-done-that crowd. More and more, veteran executives like me are now in the start-up marketplace, thrust into reinvention mode by the economy, and aided by the realization that the surest way to fight impermanence is by being valuable as long as possible. I project this “new generation” of experienced, and more savvy, leaders will surf us down the next wave of innovation.

[Illustration by Hallie Bateman]

Jay Amato

Jay is the founder of JustDecide, a new social decision-making site currently in beta. Prior to that he served as an Executive in Residence for Arklow Capital, a NYC Hedge Fund. He also founded Emmy-nominated PersonalScreen Media, was the President and CEO of the Viewpoint Corporation (NASDAQ:VWPT) , and served as the co-founder, President and COO of the Vanstar Corporation (NYSE:VST). His adventures span network infrastructure, IT services, online advertising, search visualization, 3D imaging technologies, Web video monitization, renewable energy, and Web startups. He is available on twitter @redhookgreen.

Source: pandodaily.com