August 20th, 2014
In early 2011, President Obama had a dinner event with many of the Silicon Valley’s titans. One of the guests was the late Steve Jobs of Apple, Inc. During the time, the US economy was still struggling, and the discussion of job creation was the highlight of the conversations. One of the most discussed response that evening to the question posed by Obama regarding bringing jobs back to the US was made by Steve Jobs:
“Apple had 700,000 factory workers employed in China and that was because it needed 30,000 engineers on-site to support those workers. You can’t find that many (engineers) in America to hire…”
Several years after the meeting I came across a report published by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which measures students’ reading, mathematics, and science literacy. PISA collects test results from 65 countries and their local jurisdictions and reports the rankings of each country every 3 years. The latest result was published in 2012. Based on the assessment report, Education Week stated the following:
“In mathematics, 29 nations and other jurisdictions outperformed the United States by a statistically significant margin, up from 23 three years ago.”
“In science, 22 education systems scored above the US average, up from 18 in 2009.”
“In reading, 19 other locales scored higher than US students – a jump from nine in 2009.”
Countries with jurisdictions that performed at the top of the PISA were China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Macao and Japan.
As a father and an active member in academia, I was alarmed by the information and data. I started looking into the question, ‘What may have led our nation to its current state within our educational system, and more importantly what can I do to become part of the solution to this downward trending of our future generation’s competiveness and capabilities?’. As you can imagine there are plenty of articles from various disciplines that all provided views as to underlying root causes. More recent information on this topic shows two primary rationales that tend to stand out. One revolves around the financial investments into the educational system with the premise of more resources translating into better outcomes, and the other around a broader social view within the context of ‘culture’ as a whole.
The monetary perspective was quickly discounted within the PISA report which stated “While the US spends more per student than most countries, this does not translate into better performance. For example, the Slovak Republic, which spends around USD 53,000 per student, performs at the same level as the United States, which spends over USD 115,000 per student.” A more recent report titled The Learning Curve, released by Pearson Education, also suggested that monetary resources and educational outcomes are not directly correlated when we are analyzing why our students were not able to achieve desired outcomes. This leads to the second perspective, which The Learning Curve report discussed more elaborately, and I believe more strongly that ‘culture’ is both the issue and possibly the solution for the future.
A few key findings within the Pearson report stated, “More important than money, say most experts, is the level of support for education within the surrounding culture. Although cultural change is inevitably complex, it can be brought about in order to promote better educational outcomes.” The report also pointed out that policymakers need to focus on educating for the future, not just the present. The report stated, “Many of today’s job titles, and the skills needed to fill them, simply did not exist 20 years ago. Education systems need to consider what skills today’s students will need in the future and teach accordingly.” Although the reports do not illustrate a positive view of our current educational system, one key point to make is that although the US is falling behind other nations in educating and preparing the future generation, it does not mean our schools and teachers are not doing their jobs. It is simply that our educational system and culture towards education became stagnant, while other nations have a better culture for improving and adapting their educational system towards the future and are getting better results.
So what does all this mean? Well, if we change the context from education to training, national impacts to organizational impacts, and students’ capabilities to staff’s capabilities, then the articles become relevant and applicable to us as an organization. For instance, as an organization, those that hold senior positions and/or have experience are assets to the organization because of their intellect and knowledge about what we do today. Those in that position as a whole, shape the educational (mentoring, training, adopting change, etc.) culture within our organization based on what and how we train others. In other words, simply teaching what we know and how we operate in the same ways, increases the chance of the organization becoming stagnant in its approach to improve productivity and efficiency, and fails to recognize the needs of the future and train accordingly. As mentors to others, we must all open our minds to new tools and ideas, comprehend the new skills required for tomorrow, and provide opportunities for others to explore and try new concepts to prevent the organization from falling into the same challenge as our nation’s education system.
As I have mentioned in newsletters before, we operate in a rapidly changing environment and it requires constant adjusting of our mindset at all levels of the organization to ensure we remain effective and efficient in our operations of providing services. The paradigm of teaching/mentoring for those in positions to do so, is no longer teaching what I know so one can repeat and replicate, but teaching how fast we all can know so we can continuously adopt, apply and evolve for the better. To achieve this, all levels of the organization have to participate in shaping the culture of continuous learning, exploring, experimenting, improving, and adapting to the new. More importantly, the mindset of the organization has to believe in the ‘learning culture’ concept to foster it from within.