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CIO: IT Skills Gap is Really an Education Gap
IT Skills Gap Is Really an Education Gap
– Gary Beach, CIOOctober 14, 2013
Based on six years of research I invested in writing my book The U.S.Technology Skills Gap, I agree with Davidson. And with Glen Whitney, the founder of the Museum of Mathematics, the country's only math museum located in New York City, who says math (and science) are subjects Americans "love to hate and believe were done by dead Greek guys 1,000 years ago."
CIO.com's Gary Beach discusses the education gap in the United States.
In his work, Klein tracks a precipitous 41 percent drop in the percentage of American high school students enrolled in math courses from 1909 through 1934. Even at a time when there was incredible technological innovation in America like the Henry Ford's Model T automobile(1908), the radio circuit (1918) and Polaroid photography (1931).
[Related: Is the Technology Skills Gap Fact or Fiction?]
That American kids were not math whizzes should not have come as a surprise. Education was not valued in America at the time. In fact, though the inventions just mentioned were brought to market by Americans, the world's center of technological innovation in the 1930's was not America. It was Germany -- a country where math and science skills were revered. A country that was putting those math and science skills to work building massive war machines in the country's run up to World War II under Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.
I often ask CIOs and IT executives this question: Who was/is the most famous scientist in the history of America? More often than not, the reply I get back is "Albert Einstein."
Technically, the answer is correct. Einstein was an American citizen for the last 15 years of his life. But he never was taught in an American classroom. Rather, Einstein was educated in Switzerland and Germany and immigrated to the United States in 1933 as Hitler was about to come to power in Germany.
After America entered the war in December 1941, the United States War Department bluntly awakened America to its math and science problem. Though the American military at that time had more mules than tanks, the new equipment the War Department did have was more sophisticated than war equipment used at the end of World War I. Equipment that demanded intelligent people to operate complex machines.
The hitch was this: though millions of patriotic men and women lined up to serve, many of them lacked skills in math, science and cognitive thinking. The War Department, therefore, was forced to quickly assess those deficiencies by creating an aptitude/IQ test called the "Army General Classification Test."
Introducing this test to the American public, the War Department claimed it was necessary "to minimize the effects of public schooling."
The goal of the Army General Classification Test was to identify intelligent people to fly the new planes, drive the new tanks, command the new ships and operate the new canon. One year after the test's deployment, the Army General Classification Test issued this assessment of the intelligence of the recruits: Nearly 40 percent had the mental capacity of eight-year-olds.
Regardless of their intellectual abilities, these brave men and women fought, and won, World War II. But as they returned home from war, they confronted with weak U.S. public school system that the U.S. War Department sought to "minimize" as the war started. A system where 60 percent of students dropped out of high school before graduation.
And a system that was not prepared for the onslaught of the Baby Boomer Generation, a generation of Americans born from 1946 - 1964. A history-defining generation of Americans who entered the U.S. public school system in 1952 at a staggering pace of two million additional students per year. A generation of Americans that crippled an already ailing school system and infrastructure.
Prior to World War II, the process of teacher certification was arduous. After the war, however, as millions of Baby Boomers created overcrowded classrooms, another huge problem arose. There was not enough teachers to teach these Baby Boomers. In fact, there was a shortage of 132,000 K-12 teachers in America.
To address the situation, many states lowered, or abolished entirely, teacher certification programs. Teachers, who would have never qualified to be a teacher prior to the war, now stood in front of millions of young American students.
Life magazine, in March 1958, ran a four-part series on the state of American education entitled "Crisis In Education" where it compared lives of teenagers in America to those living in Moscow. A comparison that didn't fare well for America.
Just as the Life magazine was being published, the U.S. Government, coming just months after the Soviets launched Sputnik into space, sent two delegations from the U.S. Office of Education to the Soviet Union, our country's cold war adversary, to study how their school system functioned. The delegations conclusion read, "we came back deeply concerned about our poorer schools now suffering neglect with this question: will we Americans work and sacrifice to improve public education in the United States?"Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, Baby Boomer students, many of taught by incompetent, unqualified teachers, didn't learn their math lessons well. Here's proof. American high school students generally take their SAT tests when they are 17. Do the math. The first group of Baby Boomers to turn 17 did so in 1963. And how did they do? Not very well. For 14 consecutive years, from 1963 through 1976, SAT math and verbal scores for Baby Boomers declined year-after-year-after year.
The long tail of overcrowded classrooms and incompetent teaching of this era remains with America to this day as about 40% of the current teacher population in the United States are Baby Boomers. Teachers whose generation was subjected to horrendous education conditions in America. Teachers whose generation did not learn well math, and science, skills from teachers who shouldn't have been teachers.
(Aside: if you took the SAT test prior to 1995, I can guarantee you that reading The U.S.Technology Skills Gap will add over 100 points to your score. I am not kidding.)
Other cracks were forming in the United States' education gap. One year after the SAT train wreck began in 1963, the First International Mathematics, organized by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, was fielded in 1964 among eighth grade students around the world.
America's students didn't do well. They came in 13th.
Out of 14 countries included in the study.
Seven years later, in 1971, the same organization conducted a science assessment test again among eighth grade students. Different subject. Same result. America's students came in next to last among the 13 countries that participated in the test.
Those results should have shocked America. Instead, it was pushed aside by even more prominent news as the political assassinations of President Kennedy, Martin Luther King, racial tension in America's cities, the growing involvement of our country in the Vietnam War and Watergate dominated headlines across the United States.
Read this paragraph. After you do, I have two questions for you.
"Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world. While we can take justifiable pride in what out schools and colleges have historically accomplished and contributed to the well-being of the United States, the education foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur. Other nations are matching and surpassing our educational attainments. If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might have well viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. America has been, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament."When was it written? And, by whom was it written?
This paragraph is extracted from A Nation at Risk, a report released by the U.S.Department of Education in April 1983 (http://datacenter.spps.org/uploads/sotw_a_nation_at_risk_1983.pdf). The report was an immediate hit with the media with headlines like "Education Panel Sees Rising Tide of Mediocrity", "U.S. Education Unsatisfactory" and "Failure in Education" appearing in editorials across the country.
But the findings and recommendations of Nation at Risk, a report written to warn Americans about how our country was falling behind Japan in key industries like automobiles, electronics, photography and office automation, were not embraced.Besides the attention grabbing headlines, the report did little to stem the tide of mediocre student performance in academic assessment tests administered by the U.S. Department of Education or private organizations like the College Entrance Examination Board who conducts the well-known SAT test.
Over the next 30 years, from 1983 - 2013 , as a litany of results from other tests were released by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (1995, 1999, 2003, 2007, and 2011), the Programme International Student Assessment test (2000,2003,2006, 2009), and more stringent national testing mandated by law through the U.S. Department of Education's National Assessment of Educational Progress's "No Child Left Behind" initiative, this sombering picture of America's education gap came into clear focus:
The deeper an American student proceeded through the U.S. public education system, the further behind the rest of the world American young people fell even though, as a nation, the $600 billion the United States spends annually on public education is, by far, the most of any nation in the world)
Here's a story that illustrates why America's education gap threatens our country's future prosperity. Earlier this year I attended a technology conference that included a keynote panel on the topic of the "skills gap."
The panel members included a high-ranking official from the U.S. Department of Labor, and several business executives. As the panel began, the government official claimed that despite 12 million unemployed Americans, and nearly 4 million open job postings, jobs that cannot be filled because employers say applicants do not have the right skills for the job, "there is no skills gap in America because if there was, the Department of Labor would be monitoring higher weekly wages (because employers would have to compete with higher salaries for valued workers ) and
The existence of a national skills gap would mean lengthening of hours worked per week (because employed workers would have to work overtime to do the work of open job positions)."
As the Labor Department official ended his opening comment, one of the business executives on the panel disagreed strongly with the secretary's comments and said the following:
"Mr. Secretary, I respectfully disagree with your point of view. Wages per hour and number of hours worked per week are so 20th century labor measurement points. Right now, I have an open position for a software engineer. I haven't been able to find one here in the United States. So tomorrow I am making an offer to a German engineer who lives in Berlin. And I am going to pay her a lot of money. Mr.Secretary, those wages will never show up on your domestic reports."
And then another panel member, this one the CEO of a global manufacturing firm, said, "Mr.Secretary, my firm has just concluded an internal audit of our employment needs in the coming three years. The audit claims for us to remain globally competitive our company will need to hire 5,000 IT workers. 5,000 workers"
He continued, "my business, the business of manufacturing, is changing rapidly. In fact, it has become a software-driven business. A business where software drives robots, lasers and computers on my manufacturing floor. I can source work anywhere in the world where a talented job candidate has a computer and an Internet connection. My audit concludes we will not be able to find those workers here in America."
America's education gap is real. After 60-years of widening, many, including myself, feel it is rapidly reaching a national tipping point that threatens our nation's future economic growth, the employability of our workers and our national security as the prospect of cyberwar lurks on the horizon.
I have heard this analog several times: America seems like the proverbial frog in the pot of water, content as the temperature rises slowly. But then unable to escape as it reaches 212 degrees.
In 1962, as President Kennedy was encouraging Americans to look to the end of the decade and land a person on the moon, an obscure Japanese physicist by the name of Mitsutomo Yuasa was looking back 450 years. In an essay in a Japanese scientific journal, he concluded since 1540 the world's center of scientific activity has shifted west from one country to another every 80-110 years.
Yuasa placed the mantel of worldwide scientific leadership on the East Coast of America in 1920. Do the math. If Yuasa's theory, often referred to as Yuasa's Phenomenon, is in play again, it claims between now and 2030 another country, a country to America's west, will take over as world scientific leader.
Some say the next center of world scientific activity by 2030, if Yuasa's Theory is to be believed, will be the People's Republic of China. I am not thoroughly convinced it will be. But what I am sure of is this: If America wants to prolong its position as world's scientific leader it must continue to excel at innovation and invention. Two areas that put a premium on a country's ability to produce a world-class education system.
In 1990, the Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, released a report with a provocative title that read "America's Choice: High Skills or Low Wages?"
Sadly, in my opinion, America has not yet made that choice.
Our nation's education gap continues to widen.
The temperature of the sea of mediocrity that America seems to content to swim in is fast approaching 212 degrees. Our nation remains at risk.
Gary Beach is Publisher Emeritus for CIO.com and CIO Magazine. Follow him on Twitter @GBeachCIO.Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline, Facebook, Google + andLinkedIn.
© 2013 CXO Media Inc.
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Boomers Face Caregiver Shortage as U.S. Offers New Rules: Jobs
Boomers Face Caregiver Shortage as U.S. Offers New Rules: Jobs
By - Sep 26, 2013
Carolyn Gay, a certified nursing assistant of 20 years, says she wants to inspire teens to become caregivers to the elderly.
“I’m getting older, and in another 10 years, I’m going to need one of these girls to look after me,” said Gay, 72, a Polk County, Florida, resident who speaks at area high-school career days. It’s not always an easy choice to advocate, she said. “It’s embarrassing to explain why the wages for this job are so low.”
Well-prepared helpers for seniors and disabled Americans soon could be harder to find. The current workforce is aging, and low pay may make the career unattractive to entrants, said Catherine Ruckelshaus, legal co-director of the National Employment Law Project, which focuses on low-wage workers. Immigration changes that could alleviate future shortages are stalled in Congress. And while state rules exist, there are no federal training standards for personal-care aides.
- Special Report: The Future of Retirement
Need is escalating: By 2020 the U.S. will require 1.6 million more direct-care workers than in 2010, based on an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data by the New York-based Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute. That’s a 48 percent increase for nursing, home-health and personal-care aides over the decade.
“If people want their parents and grandparents to be able to be cared for at home, and they want that opportunity themselves, we need to make this job a competitive job in the marketplace,” said Steven Edelstein, national policy director at PHI, a nonprofit that provides consulting services and workforce development for home health-care workers and groups. “If we care about the quality of the services, we need to care about the training of the workforce.”
Caregiving Profession
The challenge is to make caregiving attractive as a profession while still providing affordable care, as responses to a Labor Department ruleissued last week showed. Minimum-wage and overtime protections will be extended to most in-home care workers, Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez said Sept. 17.
The change will apply parts of the Fair Labor Standards Act to many who aid the elderly and disabled in their homes. That workforce is 90 percent female and 56 percent minority, according to an analysis by the Washington-based Institute for Women’s Policy Research.
On average, home-health aides make $10.49 an hour, nursing assistants earn $12.32 and personal-care aides are paid about $10, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates.
Travel Time
While workers usually earn more than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, when they serve multiple clients their travel time often isn’t compensated and those extra hours could take them below that level, Edelstein said, adding this stands to change with the new rule.
Regulations often take effect 60 days after being issued. This rule is delayed until Jan. 1, 2015, to give families that use home-care workers and state Medicaid programs time to prepare, according to Laura Fortman, principal deputy administrator for the Labor department’s wage and hour division.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Republican Representatives John Kline of Minnesota and Tim Walberg of Michigan are among those who say the change could make home help too expensive.
“While the delivery of care has changed in recent years, the crucial need for affordable in-home companion care has not,” the lawmakers said in a Sept. 17 press release. “Faced with higher costs, some individuals will have no choice but to leave their homes and enter institutional living.”
Public Dollars
About 75 percent of home-care services are paid for with public dollars, PHI estimated based on U.S. Census Bureau data from 2010.
A semi-private room in a nursing home costs about $6,235 per month, based on 2010 data compiled by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, or about $75,000 annually.
In-home health aides cost $21 an hour on average, based on the data. That means a 40-hour week of care would cost $840, and a year about $44,000. Round-the-clock care, however, would be more expensive.
The new overtime-pay requirement could hurt home-care businesses, since many clients require more than 40 hours worth of care, said Jay Perron, vice president of government affairs and public policy at the Washington-based International Franchise Association.
If companies rotate caregivers to avoid paying time-and-a-half overtime, it could interrupt continuity of care, said Perron, whose group’s members include Interim HealthCare Inc., a care, hospice and medical-staffing company, among other home-care franchises.
Profit Margin
Such businesses usually make about a 5 percent to 7 percent profit margin after insurance, background checks and other costs, Perron said, and so have limited room to pay higher wages.
“Home-care companies will have little choice but to employ workers part time rather than full time as Medicaid payment rates and consumers with limited incomes cannot afford higher costs,” Andrea Devoti, chairman of the National Association for Home Care & Hospice, a Washington-based nonprofit, said in a Sept. 17 statement.
At the same time, the overtime rule could protect caretakers from being overworked, and having national requirements may improve industry oversight, Ruckelshaus said. Fifteen states provide both wage and hour protections to direct-care workers and an additional six and Washington D.C. require minimum wage, yet she said many lack resources for enforcement.
First Step
“It’s a good, really exciting first step,” said Jane Henrici, a study director at the women’s policy institute. “It’s not the end.”
Demand for direct-care workers is outpacing labor-pool growth, PHI found. The average age of in-home health-care workers is now 44, based on a 2011 PHI analysis, and the number of women ages 25 to 54, the main labor pool from which direct-care workers are drawn, is projected to increase by only 2 percent in the decade ending in 2020, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
Immigration-law changes could help create a sustainable caretaker workforce. Immigrants make up 28 percent of in-home health-care workers, according to an analysis Henrici co-wrote, and an estimated one in five is undocumented.
The high number of undocumented caregivers is a result of the limited legal immigration options, said Ai-jen Poo, director of the National Domestic Worker’s Alliance, which advocates for in-home workers’ rights.
Immigration Bill
The immigration bill that passed the Senate this year -- and has now stalled as it faces opposition in the House -- would create a W visa with a potential path to citizenship for low-skill workers, including home-care aides.
The lack of federal training requirements for personal-care aides could also affect quality in-home help, Edelstein said. Certified nursing aides and home-health aides have more defined standards.
“In some instances, we have personal-care aides who haven’t had any formal training administering medication,” Edelstein said, because clients can in some cases give aides permission to do so.
Gay, who still works for private clients, says she remains in caretaking because she “loves it.”
She is concerned with ensuring that future at-home caretakers are well-prepared to take care of her and her peers, she said. Even more, she said she wants home care to be a positive career choice for the high school students she knows.
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