HOUSTON — a major shock to the education system came during World War II when the armed services reported an appalling degree of illiteracy among recent school graduates. They complained the typical public-school graduate had trouble writing a respectable English sentence and many soldiers were woefully ignorant of elementary facts about the nation’s history.
El sistema educativo recibió un gran choque durante la segunda guerra
mundial cuando las fuerzas armadas reportaron un pésimo nivel de
analfabetismo entre soldados recientemente egresados de la escuela
secundaria.
With the launch in 1957 of Sputnik by the Soviet Union, the National Defense Education Act of 1958 got the federal government involved in all levels of education that had previously been almost exclusively a state and local public-policy niche. The federal government encouraged strengthened curriculums in math, science, languages and disciplines that needed attention, as well as grants, loans and graduate scholarships for students.
In his 1959 book, “Education and Freedom,” Admiral Hyman Rickover claimed low-level knowledge impeded the United States from competing better with the Soviet Union, which was preparing its youth for a technological world. “Even the average child now needs almost as good an education as the average middle- and upper-class child used to get in the college-preparatory schools,” he wrote.
Then the mid-twentieth century’s focus on the Cold War military and economic security experienced a paradigm shift. Juan Enríquez of Harvard Business School argued in his 2000 book, “As the Future Catches You,” that nations previously needed massive agriculture and industrialization to prosper. Now an educated, entrepreneurial people were replacing natural-resources as wealth. The USSR’s gold, oil, uranium and forests could not keep it from going broke while its great scientists and mathematicians lacked freedoms that come with entrepreneurship.
Enríquez pointed out that Nigeria, Indonesia, South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, Congo, Mexico, Colombia, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela had vast natural resources but their people were poorer than 20 years before. Small countries, lacking natural resources, often generated more real wealth per person than large, resource-rich countries.
Small counties, with a knowledge-based economy thrived. “The small can do very well given open markets, smart people, and relative peace,” Enríquez wrote.
There is good reason to be wary about the Obama administration approaching school reform the way it did Wall Street — by throwing money at the problem in hopes of getting the system’s billionaires operating again and later doing the reforms needed. It looks like tinkering under the hood of an old jalopy and not paying enough attention to connecting the wires. The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce in “Tough Choices or Tough Times” made the [point clearly.
The administration’s eggheads often pay too much attention to deliciously anonymous statistics and use them like guide dogs instead of paying attention to examples such as, for example, one in the Texas Rio Grande Valley.
In 2007, Hidalgo High’s 810 students, all Hispanic, from families where half never finished school, achieved a 94 percent graduation rate. Out of 19,000 public high schools in the nation, it ranked eleventh best by U.S. News & World Report. Since 2006, Hidalgo’s incoming freshmen are allowed to earn up to two years of college credit or an associates degree in addition to their high school diploma. So far, about 192 seniors have earned up to 30 credits from University of Texas, Pan American in nearby Edinburgh, the school’s college partner. Hidalgo High looks like the schools that the “Tough Choices” report suggests should be the norm.
The school is a stone’s throw from the border in one of this nation’s poorest regions. As Admiral Rickover was writing those words about needing public school preppies, the parents and grandparents of today’s graduates were routinely leaving their communities to do seasonal migrant agricultural work in distant northern states. Now, this part of the country is beginning to compete in productivity with Singapore, Finland and other smart-economy nations.
Meanwhile the rest of our nation dithers and theorizes about school reform, feeling smug the whole time because they are in a natural-resources-rich country.
[José de la Isla is a former assistant professor of education at the University of Oregon. His latest digital book, sponsored by The Ford Foundation, is available free at www.DayNightLifeDeathHope.com. He writes a weekly commentary for Hispanic Link News Service and is author of The Rise of Hispanic Political Power (2003). E-mail him at
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