Book Talk: The Flat World and Education

By Elizabeth Wahl

STANFORD, CA — Thirty years ago the United States was on its way to closing the achievement gap between whites and minority students. Since then the United States has fallen behind other nations in educational investment that benefits all students, and it has lost ground on racial and ethnic parity in school funding. In her new book, The Flat World and Education: How America's Commitment to Equity Will Determine our Future, Professor Linda Darling-Hammond explains why these trends threaten U.S. competitiveness in a 21st-century knowledge-based global economy.

Darling-Hammond discussed her book in a talk on April 13, co-hosted by the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and SCOPE.

In 1975, black, white, Asian, and Latino students had nearly equal chances of going to college. Never was the United States so successful in shrinking the equity gap between whites and racial minorities.

Since the early 1980’s Darling-Hammond argues, cuts in financial aid, inequitable funding of schools, and entrenched conditions of poverty have set the United States on a path where those gains toward educational equity have been undone. Today fewer students overall can afford a college degree, and among blacks and Latinos, the opportunities to go college are even smaller and shrinking.

Why does this matter? In a wide-ranging study of the United States and other countries, Darling-Hammond demonstrates that even in small countries like Finland, South Korea, and Singapore, where educational investment has been made on the basis of promoting equity in educational opportunities, the results have been stunning.

Today Finland, South Korea, and Singapore rank near the top of all countries in math and science, while the United States continues to fall down the list of international rankings in these areas.

Darling-Hammond points out that the United States’ educational system is still mired in 20^th-century ways of thinking in which only a small percentage of those who completed K-12 education ended up in “knowledge-based” jobs, while most ended up in jobs that didn’t require a college education.

Today’s students not only face a global market where 90% of the jobs require a college degree but also require complex ways of thinking and the ability to collaborate to develop highly sophisticated communication skills. For this reason, she argues that education systems in the United States must develop and support teachers and leaders capable of educating all students for some level of “knowledge-based” work; otherwise, we will continue to create a pipeline from schools to prisons for a significant portion of the population.

But Darling-Hammond finds reason for hope in the United States. Citing the case of New Jersey, she notes that after Governor Christy Todd Whitman put parity funding into place parity funding, traditionally underfunded cities like Camden, Newark and Trenton all saw significant increases in student performance as well as a decrease in the gap between white student achievement and that of minority students. New Jersey also implemented high quality preschool education for low-income children with well-trained teachers and strong investments in literacy development, all key components in Darling-Hammond's view.

As more of the United States’ student population becomes “majority minority” in its demographics, Darling-Hammond argues that it is in the interest of every American to promote funding parity, more financial support for teacher education and salaries, and new methods of assessment that take into account the  best practices of countries on an international level.