The American Education System Needs Some Help

A recent op-ed piece by Thomas Friedman, of The New York Times, discusses the current state of neglect that our system of education is facing. According to Mr. Friedman, while the erosion of our education system has happened gradually over the past 30 years, due to lack of funding the deterioration is accelerating. For example, the college graduation rate in the U.S. in now slightly below the average across all industrialized economies. In addition, because of the recent economic slowdown, more than 143,000 state and local education jobs have been lost or eliminated over just the past five months.

While we are facing very difficult economic times at the moment, and cuts are being made across government, Mr. Friedman asks us to ask ourselves the question “Is it wise to continue making these kinds of cuts in education when the future prosperity of our society is so heavily dependent upon a highly educated workforce?”

Click here to see the full New York Times article.

How do we hire when we can’t tell who’s right for the job?

In the current issue of the The New Yorker magazine.

By Malcolm Gladwell

Published: December 15, 2008

On the day of the big football game between the University of Missouri Tigers and the Cowboys of Oklahoma State, a football scout named Dan Shonka sat in his hotel, in Columbia, Missouri, with a portable DVD player. Shonka has worked for three National Football League teams. Before that, he was a football coach, and before that he played linebacker—although, he says, “that was three knee operations and a hundred pounds ago.” Every year, he evaluates somewhere between eight hundred and twelve hundred players around the country, helping professional teams decide whom to choose in the college draft, which means that over the last thirty years he has probably seen as many football games as anyone else in America. In his DVD player was his homework for the evening’s big game—an edited video of the Tigers’ previous contest, against the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers. Click here to read the full article.