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Wire & Cable ASIA – January/February 2014
From the Americas
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.
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.
Dorothy Fabian
Features Editor