School choice prepares kids for the world

Private school vouchers are shaping up to be a hot topic at this year's Legislature. Unfortunately, it's the kind of heat that gets passions burning, and when that happens, people stop listening.

So it might help for everyone to calm down a bit and look at the problem from a different perspective.

OK, I know. Even using the word "problem" is a problem. Supporters of the status quo don't think there is much of a problem, or at least that it can be solved within the current framework.

That's why a recent report from the National Center on Education and the Economy is so interesting. It defines the problem fairly well and in ways difficult to refute.

The report, by the way, was supported by foundations that typically don't strike fear in either side of this debate — people such as the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

The problem, as the report sees it, centers less on competition between public and private schools in America and more on the competition between America and the rest of the world.

"Over the past 30 years, one country after another has surpassed us in the proportion of their entering work force with the equivalent of a high school diploma," the report's executive summary says. "Thirty years ago, the United States could lay claim to having 30 percent of the world's population of college students. Today that proportion has fallen to 14 percent and is continuing to fall."

And the surprising aspect to this is that other nations are producing highly educated people willing to work for much less than our own highly educated people. Even if we succeed in producing more engineers and mathematicians, employers would rather hire theirs for less.

The answer, the report says, is to be the country that produces important new products and technologies and, therefore, can "capture a premium in world markets. ..."

Success "depends on a deep vein of creativity that is constantly renewing itself, and on a myriad of people who can imagine how people can use things that have never been available before, create ingenious marketing and sales campaigns, write books, build furniture, make movies and imagine new kinds of software that will capture people's imagination and become indispensable to millions."

And, quite frankly, our current system of public education, with its agrarian-based, Industrial Age assumptions, isn't cutting it.

I learned about this report from John Fund, an editorial writer at the Wall Street Journal. I sat next to him recently before he spoke to a group of school-choice supporters in Salt Lake City.