WCA January 2014

From the Americas

The most highly educated population of Americans – those holding graduate and professional degrees – lagged slightly behind international averages in skills. But the gap was widest at the bottom. Among those who did not finish high school, Americans had significantly poorer skills than their counterparts abroad. Foreign-born adults in the United States were also found to have much poorer-than-average skills – but even the native-born scored slightly below international norms. White Americans scored higher than the multicountry average in literacy, but about average on maths and technology tests.  Predictably, educationists in the United States were stung by the conclusions of the OECD Skills Outlook. Arne Duncan, the US education secretary, related them to socio-economic factors. “We have a real state of crisis,” he told a panel of Education Nation Summit, a gathering on the state of education in America. “This is much bigger than education. We have to close what I call the opportunity gap. The gap between the haves and the have-nots is far too wide.” Also predictably, perhaps, the stimulating effect of the weak showing will fade quickly. In December 2010 the OECD released the results of a previous set of tests, the “Program for International Student Assessment”. Administered in 2009, it showed 15-year-olds in Shanghai greatly outshining their American peer group in reading, maths and science. Mr Duncan was US education secretary then, too. His response at the time: “We have to see this as a wake-up call.” ‘A magnet for immigrants’ With the welcome mat out for newcomers, an Ohio city is enjoying a pickup in its economy and its spirits. “We’ve found that we can repopulate our city and we can educate the people and inspire them to employ themselves. In ten years, when the federal government figures every- thing out, we’ll be thriving.” Mayor Gary Leitzell, of Dayton, Ohio, was taking a dig at Washington, DC at the height of the government shutdown for which a local lawmaker – House Speaker John A Boehner, whose district wraps around Dayton on three sides – was receiving major blame. But the main theme of the mayor’s interview with the New York Times in September was much more positive: the apparent success of a novel initiative to help stem job losses and a population drop in Dayton, a former centre of heavy manufacturing ravaged by industrial decline. In October 2011 the Dayton City Commission voted unanimously for the Welcome Dayton plan to remake the city into a magnet for immigrants, with immigrant-friendly programmes to attract newcomers and encourage those already there.

White House said in September: “[Now] the Detroit Big Three are profitable and gaining market share for first time in 20 years.”

Education

An international study discloses a wide skills lag in the United States, one persisting well past school days “Skills have become the global currency of the Twenty-first Century. What are the hot issues facing countries, companies, and individuals today?” The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development poses this question on its website, and provides answers in its first OECD Skills Outlook. The results presented by the Paris-based coalition of the world’s major industrial powers are based on a new set of tests (“Survey of Adult Skills”) developed and administered in 2011 and 2012 to 5,000 individuals, aged 16 to 65, in each of 23 participating countries. Previous international studies of the kind generally looked only at literacy, and in fewer countries. OECD looked at the key cognitive and workplace skills needed for individuals to function in society and for economies to prosper, assessing literacy, numeracy, and problem-solving in technology-rich environments. (This last category, defined as “using digital devices to find and evaluate information, communicate, and perform common tasks,” was examined in 19 of the 23 countries.) Perhaps the most detailed of its kind to date, the survey of 166,000 people found that, in all three categories of proficiency, Japan ranked first and Finland second in respondents’ scores, with the Netherlands, Sweden and Norway near the top. The United States ranked near the middle in literacy and near the bottom in numeracy and technology skills. In number skills, just nine per cent of Americans scored in the top two of five proficiency levels, compared with an all-countries average of 12 per cent. In Finland, Japan, and Sweden, the average was 19 per cent. As well as showing several other countries surging past the US in student test scores and college graduation rates, the OECD found that the skills gap persists well after diplomas are awarded. American young adults, in particular, fared poorly in comparison with their international counterparts, not only in maths and technology but also in literacy. Even middle-aged Americans – ostensibly among the best-educated people of their generation anywhere in the world – scored barely above middle-of-the-pack in skills.  The American results were strikingly polarised between high achievement and low. Compared with other countries with similar averages in all three assessments, the US usually had more people at the highest proficiency levels and more in the lowest. It also showed an unusually wide gap in skills between the employed and the unemployed.

Dorothy Fabian Features Editor

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Wire & Cable ASIA – January/February 2014