That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back

by Thomas L. Friedman

Neighbors: The role of neighbors today is to appreciate the importance of the public school down the street, even if their own children have long graduated or they have no children at all. Good schools are the foundation of good neighborhoods and communities. Money may be saved in the short term by voting down tax increases to fund schools. But if that results in higher dropout rates and higher unemployment, the overall cost to the community will certainly be higher. When the performance of local schools drops, it usually is not long before the value of nearby houses drops as well. In March 2010, Tom attended the Intel Science Talent Search, a national contest for high school students designed to identify and support the nation’s next generation of scientists. “My favorite chat was with Amanda Alonzo, a thirty-year-old biology teacher at Lynbrook High School in San Jose, California,” he wrote at the time. “She had taught two of the [Intel] finalists. When I asked her the secret, she said it was the resources provided by her school, extremely ‘supportive parents,’ and a grant from Intel that let her spend part of each day inspiring and preparing students to enter this contest. Then she told me this: Local San Jose Realtors are running ads in newspapers in China and India telling potential immigrants to ‘buy a home’ in her Lynbrook school district because it produced ‘two Intel science winners.’” While every child’s educational experience should matter to everyone as a matter of principle, good education is also good economics—for everybody.

  McKinsey & Company made that very point in its report entitled The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools (April 2009). The report asked what would have happened if in the fifteen years after the 1983 report A Nation at Risk sounded the alarm about the “rising tide of mediocrity” in American education, the United States had lifted lagging student achievement. The answer: If black and Latino student performance had caught up with that of white students by 1998, GDP in 2008 would have been between $310 billion and $525 billion higher. If the gap between low-income students and the rest had been narrowed, GDP in 2008 would have been $400 billion to $670 billion higher.

  “We simply don’t have the capacity to carry large pockets of our population, whom we know are unskilled and have a life that has a ceiling on it, and think that the United States can still soar and be unique and be the number-one source of good in the world,” Kasim Reed, the mayor of Atlanta, told us.

  Parents: In January 2011, Yale University law professor Amy Chua set off a firestorm of debate across America when The Wall Street Journal published an excerpt from her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. While Chua’s child-rearing strategy was extreme and her book evoked a sharp backlash from many parents and educators, we think she ignited a useful debate. It was a wake-up call. Whatever you think of Chua’s ironfisted parenting style, we urge you to keep this in mind: She is not alone in her parenting methods, and her approach is not at all rare in Asian culture. It is the norm.

  “A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids,” wrote Chua.

  Well, I can tell them, because I’ve done it. Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do: attend a sleepover, have a playdate, be in a school play, complain about not being in a school play, watch TV or play computer games, choose their own extracurricular activities, get any grade less than an A, not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama, play any instrument other than the piano or violin, not play the piano or violin … Even when Western parents think they’re being strict, they usually don’t come close to being Chinese mothers … Studies indicate that compared to Western parents, Chinese parents spend approximately 10 times as long every day drilling academic activities with their children … The Chinese believe that the best way to protect their children is by preparing them for the future, letting them see what they’re capable of, and arming them with skills, work habits and inner confidence that no one can ever take away.

  We would not expect every parent to mimic Chua in the tough-love department; there is a fine line between involved parenting and making your kid neurotic, which even Chua acknowledges. In general, though, we believe Chua is right about two things: the need to hold children to the highest standards that push them out of their comfort zones, and the need to be involved in their schooling. When children come to school knowing that their parents have high expectations, it makes everything a teacher is trying to do easier and more effective. Self-esteem is important, but it is not an entitlement. It has to be earned.

  Arne Duncan tells a story from President Obama’s 2009 trip to South Korea to drive home that point to American parents: “President Obama sat down to a working lunch with South Korean president Lee in Seoul. In the space of little more than a generation, South Korea had developed one of the world’s best-educated workforces and fastest-growing economies. President Obama was curious about how South Korea had done it. So he asked President Lee, ‘What is the biggest education challenge you have?’

  “Without hesitating, President Lee replied, ‘The biggest challenge I have is that my parents are too demanding.’”

  That anecdote usually makes Americans chuckle, says Duncan—and then wince. The president of Korea’s parents are complaining that he hasn’t done enough with his life.

  “I wish my biggest challenge—that America’s biggest educational challenge—was too many parents demanding academic rigor,” said Duncan. “I wish parents were beating down my doors, demanding a better education for their children, now. President Lee, by the way, wasn’t trying to rib President Obama. He explained to President Obama that his biggest problem was that Korean parents, even his poorest families, were insisting on importing thousands of English teachers so their children could learn English in first grade—instead of having to wait until second grade.”

  American young people have got to understand from an early age that the world pays off on results, not on effort. Not everyone should win a prize no matter where he or she finishes. Indeed, America today reminds us a little too much of that scene in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in which the Dodo is organizing a race:

  First it marked out a race-course, in a sort of circle, (“the exact shape doesn’t matter,” it said), and then all the party were placed along the course, here and there. There was no “One, two, three, and away,” but they began running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over. However, when they had been running half an hour or so, and were quite dry again, the Dodo suddenly called out “The race is over!” and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking “But who has won?”

  This question the Dodo could not answer without a great deal of thought, and it sat for a long time with one finger pressed upon its forehead (the position in which you usually see Shakespeare, in the pictures of him), while the rest waited in silence. At last the Dodo said “Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.”

  All must have prizes! Krista Taubert is the Washington-based correspondent for Finnish Broadcasting Company. She has two children in the Washington, D.C., school system, a nine-year-old and a five-year-old. Since Finland has one of the highest-rated school systems in the world and Tom met her at a movie about Finland’s schools, he could not resist asking her to compare her daughters’ educational experiences in America and in Finland.

  In America, Taubert remarked, “I noticed sometimes in talking to other parents that they reward their kids for effort, not for excellence. My daughter plays soccer and as a nine-year-old she already has these huge trophies, and she actually hasn’t won anything. My brother played professional hockey in Finland for a number of years, and he doesn’t have any trophies as big as the trophies my daughter has.”

  Andreas Schleicher oversees the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), to which we referred above. The program is administered by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based group that includes the world’s thirty-four major industrial countries. Schleicher said in an int
erview that one of the things that the program tested in 2009 for the first time was the impact of parental involvement. “We interviewed between three thousand and five thousand parents of the fifteen-year-olds that we tested in sixteen different countries,” said Schleicher. “There was a clear connection between parental involvement in their children’s education and their PISA scores. Those young people whose parents were involved with their education—doing as little as asking them each day ‘How was school?’ or ‘What did you do in school today?’—or read books to them clearly performed better on the PISA test than those whose parents were not involved. In some countries it was also clear that the involvement of parents was more important than many traditional school factors.” Public policy in education tends to be all focused on institutions, Schleicher added, “but what we have seen in our work is that schools that are really open to parents, that are really community centers that invite parental involvement, like those in Scandinavia,” generate more parental involvement in their children’s education, and that translates into better performance on tests. “You cannot just call for more parental involvement,” said Schleicher. “Parents don’t want to be involved in a closed institution. Schools have to be part of the community. People have to feel that. The trick is to get the parents from the less-well-educated backgrounds involved in the school and their children’s learning.” In Finland, up to high school, said Schleicher, “students meet with their teacher and parents together at the end of the year” and “discuss what they have accomplished and what they should have accomplished and set their goals for the next year.”

  A December 2005 study by four researchers in the United States and Australia entitled Scholarly Culture and Educational Success in 27 Nations, based on twenty years’ worth of data, found that

  children growing up in homes with many books get 3 years more schooling than children from bookless homes, independent of their parents’ education, occupation, and class. This is as great an advantage as having university-educated rather than unschooled parents, and twice the advantage of having a professional rather than an unskilled father. It holds equally in rich nations and in poor; in the past and in the present; under Communism, capitalism, and Apartheid; and most strongly in China.

  The study went on to say that Chinese children who had five hundred or more books at home got 6.6 years more schooling than Chinese children without books. As few as twenty books in a home made an appreciable difference.

  Students: We cannot exempt young people themselves, particularly by the time they are in junior or senior high school, from responsibility for understanding the world in which they are living and what it will take to thrive in that world. On November 21, 2010, The New York Times ran a story questioning whether American young people have become too distracted by technology. It contained this anecdote:

  Allison Miller, 14, sends and receives 27,000 texts in a month, her fingers clicking at a blistering pace as she carries on as many as seven text conversations at a time. She texts between classes, at the moment soccer practice ends, while being driven to and from school and, often, while studying. But this proficiency comes at a cost: She blames multitasking for the three B’s on her recent progress report. “I’ll be reading a book for homework and I’ll get a text message and pause my reading and put down the book, pick up the phone to reply to the text message, and then 20 minutes later realize, ‘Oh, I forgot to do my homework.’”

  We wish the figure of 27,000 texts a month came out of Ripley’s Believe It Not. In fact, it is the new normal. On January 10, 2010, the Kaiser Family Foundation released the results of a lengthy study entitled Daily Media Use Among Children and Teens Up Dramatically from Five Years Ago:

  With technology allowing nearly 24-hour media access as children and teens go about their daily lives, the amount of time young people spend with entertainment media has risen dramatically, especially among minority youth, according to a study released today by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Today, 8–18-year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes (7:38) to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week). And because they spend so much of that time “media multitasking” (using more than one medium at a time), they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes (10:45) worth of media content into those 7½ hours. The amount of time spent with media increased by an hour and seventeen minutes a day over the past five years, from 6:21 in 2004 to 7:38 today … While the study cannot establish a cause and effect relationship between media use and grades, there are differences between heavy and light media users in this regard. About half (47%) of heavy media users say they usually get fair or poor grades (mostly Cs or lower), compared to about a quarter (23%) of light users … Over the past 5 years, time spent reading books remained steady at about :25 a day, but time with magazines and newspapers dropped (from :14 to :09 for magazines, and from :06 to :03 for newspapers). The proportion of young people who read a newspaper in a typical day dropped from 42% in 1999 to 23% in 2009.

  One quote in the study captured the trend: “The amount of time young people spend with electronic media has grown to where it’s even more than a full-time workweek,” said Drew Altman, Ph.D., the president and CEO of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

  Source: From The New York Times, January 20, 2010, © 2010 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or transmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.

  At precisely the moment when we need more education to bring the bottom up to the average and the American average up to the global peaks, our students are spending more time texting and gaming and less time than ever studying and doing homework. Unless we get them to spend the time needed to master a subject, all the teacher training in the world will go for naught.

  Business: One of the most unfortunate features of American politics today is that, with a few notable exceptions, the people who know the global labor market best and are most familiar with the skills needed to prosper in it—the members of the business community—have increasingly dropped out of the national debate. Historically, groups such as the Business Roundtable and individual leaders of industry considered it their responsibility to defend, indeed to speak out in favor of, the traditional American formula for greatness. They could be counted upon to go to Washington and lobby, not just on behalf of their own businesses but more broadly for better education, infrastructure, immigration, free trade, and rules to promote constructive risk-taking. That has become less and less true in the last decade. Business leaders are less and less interested in the whole pie and more and more interested in their own slice.

  With the merger of globalization and the IT revolution, when American-based multinational firms meet resistance from Washington, D.C., today—arguing in favor of more visas for high-skilled workers, for example—they just move their research facilities abroad or outsource their work to foreign subsidiaries. When Microsoft couldn’t get more visas for high-skilled immigrants to work in its headquarters outside Seattle, Washington, it opened a research center in Vancouver, Canada, 115 miles north. The flatter the world becomes, the less interested the most powerful companies become in fighting with Washington over visas, or almost anything other than their specific tax and antitrust issues. The standard approach of the American business community toward Washington today is, as medieval maps put it, “Here Be Dragons.” You go there, you lobby for your particular tax break, and then you leave—quickly.

  The turning point may have come in January 2004, when a consortium of eight leading information-technology company executives, known as the Computer Systems Policy Project, gathered in Washington to lobby Congress against legislation designed to restrict the movement of jobs overseas, where labor costs are lower. As part of their public outreach, the then CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Carly Fiorina, declared that “there is no job that is America’s God-given right anymore.” At
the same time CSPP issued a report explaining that America’s lead in high technology was in serious jeopardy due to competition from other nations.

  In an article about the event, the San Francisco Chronicle noted (January 9, 2004) that CSPP offered a long-term proposal to improve grade school and high school education, double federal spending on basic research in the physical sciences, and implement a national policy to promote high-speed broadband communications networks, as Japan and Korea have done. It was exactly the kind of brutally honest intervention from business—here is the world we’re living in and what we need to thrive in it—that we should welcome. Unfortunately, rather than calling for a serious national debate on this broad issue, the subsequent coverage focused almost entirely on Fiorina’s blunt declaration about jobs not being an American right. She got hammered across the country.

  One CEO who was at the meeting, but asked not to be identified, told us seven years later that as soon as the words were out of Fiorina’s mouth, he and his colleagues wanted to tiptoe out of the press conference and out of town because they knew the backlash was coming. And come it did. “We have another idea,” the Seattle Post-Intelligencer wrote in a January 9, 2004, editorial that was typical of the backlash. “Why not export a few chief executives’ suites? We’re certain there’s qualified folks somewhere in a far-off land who might run a company for far less than what CEOs are paid in this country.”

  Fiorina’s words came back to haunt her six years later, when she ran as a Republican for a Senate seat in California against the incumbent Democrat, Barbara Boxer. Boxer made prominent use in her television commercials of Fiorina’s 2004 declaration and of the job cuts she had made as part of HP’s restructuring during her tenure at the company. It is not a good sign when bluntly speaking the truth turns into a negative political advertisement that harms a candidacy.