Keeping Us in the Race - New York Times
The New York Times

October 14, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist

Keeping Us in the Race
By
THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

What if we were really having a national discussion about what is most
important to the country today and on the minds of most parents?

I have no doubt that it would be a loud, noisy dinner-table conversation
about why so many U.S. manufacturers are moving abroad - not just to find
lower
wages, but to find smarter workers, better infrastructure and cheaper health
care. It would be about why in Germany, 36 percent of undergrads receive
degrees
in science and engineering; in China, 59 percent; in Japan, 66 percent; and
in America, only 32 percent. It would be about why Japanese on bullet trains
can get access to the Internet with cellphones, and Americans get their
cellphone service interrupted five minutes from home.

It would be about why U.S. 12th graders recently performed below the
international average for 21 countries in math and science, and it would be
about why,
in recent years, U.S. industry appears to have spent more on lawsuits than
on R.&D. Yes, we'd be talking about why the world is racing us to the top,
not
the bottom, and why we are quietly falling behind.

And late in the evening, as the wine bottles emptied, someone at the
national dinner table might finally say: "Hey, what if we were really
thinking ahead?
What if we asked some of the country's best minds to make a list of the
steps we could take right now to enhance America's technology base?"

Fortunately, two senators, Lamar Alexander and Jeff Bingaman, asked the
National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the
Institute
of Medicine to form a bipartisan study group to produce just such a list,
which was released on Wednesday in a report called "Rising Above the
Gathering
Storm."

Because of globalization, the report begins, U.S. "workers in virtually
every sector must now face competitors who live just a mouse-click away in
Ireland,
Finland, India or dozens of other nations whose economies are growing. ...
Having reviewed the trends in the United States and abroad, the committee is
deeply concerned that the scientific and technical building blocks of our
economic leadership are eroding at a time when many other nations are
gathering
strength. ... We are worried about the future prosperity of the United
States. ... We fear the abruptness with which a lead in science and
technology can
be lost and the difficulty of recovering a lead once lost - if indeed it can
be regained at all."

The report's key recommendations? Nothing fancy. Charles Vest, the former
president of M.I.T., summed them up: "We need to get back to basic blocking
and
tackling" - educating more Americans in the skills needed for 21st-century
jobs.

Among the top priorities, the report says, should be these:

(1) Annually recruiting 10,000 science and math teachers by awarding
four-year merit-based scholarships, to be paid back through five years of
K-12 public
school teaching. (We have too many unqualified science and math teachers.)

(2) Strengthening the math and science skills of 250,000 other teachers
through extracurricular programs.

(3) Creating opportunities and incentives for many more middle school and
high school students to take advanced math and science courses, by offering,
among
other things, $100 mini-scholarships for success in exams, and creating more
specialty math-and-science schools.

(4) Increasing federal investment in long-term basic research by 10 percent
a year over the next seven years.

(5) Annually providing research grants of $500,000 each, payable over five
years, to 200 of America's most outstanding young researchers.

(6) Creating a new Advanced Research Projects Agency in the Energy
Department to support "creative out-of-the-box transformational energy
research that
industry by itself cannot or will not support and in which risk may be high,
but success would provide dramatic benefits for the nation."

(7) Granting automatic one-year visa extensions to foreign students in the
U.S. who receive doctorates in science, engineering or math so they can seek
employment here, and creating 5,000 National Science Foundation-administered
graduate fellowships to increase the number of U.S. citizens earning
doctoral
degrees in fields of "national need." (See the rest at
www.nationalacademies.org.)

These proposals are the new New Deal urgently called for by our times. This
is where President Bush should have focused his second term, instead of
squandering
it on a silly, ideological jag called Social Security privatization.
Because, as this report concludes, "Without a renewed effort to bolster the
foundations
of our competitiveness, we can expect to lose our privileged position."

Posted by Miriam V.