“The first question these kinds of studies raise is, ‘If we’re so dumb, why are we so rich?’ ” said Anthony P. Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. “Our economic advantage has been having high skill levels at the top, being big, being more flexible than the other economies, and being able to attract other countries’ most skilled labor. But that advantage is slipping.”
The funny thing is, he's right, but he's drawing the wrong conclusions.
Yes, the US' economic advantage has always been, in corrected order:
1) We're big (lots of resources, human and material).
2) Being flexible.
3) High skill levels AT THE TOP.
4) Attractive to the skilled labor of other countries.
And the study showed that we still have high skill levels at the top, but we've hollowed out the middle:
In several ways, the American results were among the most polarized between high achievement and low. Compared with other countries with similar average scores, the United States, in all three assessments, usually had more people in the highest proficiency levels, and more in the lowest. The country also had an unusually wide gap in skills between the employed and the unemployed.
This tracks with the economic transition over the same 30+ years, with more people becoming richer, more people becoming poorer, and the middle-class hollowing out. The relationship between SES and educational attainment is well-established.
And if you look at the top scorers, they all enjoy high standards of living, fueled in large part by rich social programs. They're not rich in the global economic sense because they're not big, and because for various reasons they're not attracting skilled labor from other countries.
So in other words, this is less a report card on the American education system than it is on the American society in general.
