When our national security is at risk because not enough young men and women can qualify to serve in its defense, it sounds an alarm.
Condoleezza Rice, former U.S. secretary of state, is calling the country to arms in support of a more comprehensive educational system.
Rice maintains large swaths of the United States fail to meet national standards, adding that by simply looking at zip codes she could tell whether an area is failing its students. Rice spoke on the PBS news program, The News Hour, Tuesday night, along with Joel Klein, former chancellor of New York City schools.
Beyond the needs of the U.S. military, Rice contends the country’s businesses and social fabric are coming apart at the seams because education is no longer the great leveler between the haves and have-nots
“We’ve always been held together by the belief that it doesn’t matter where you’ve come from. It matters where you’re going,” she said.
Those days are gone, Rice maintains. In fact, among industrialized nations, the U.S. consistently ranks 15th, 27th, or lower on test scores. As for entering the Armed Services, the Department of Defense estimates that 75 percent of young Americans are not eligible to serve in the military because they either didn’t graduate from high school, are obese, or have criminal records.
For applicants who do have high school diplomas, 30 percent score too low on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery to be recruited.
To return to the top, Rice believes national standards need to put more emphasis on science, history and foreign languages. She also contends U.S. families should have more “choice,” i.e. charter schools, for their children’s educations. The competition for students, she maintains, inherently makes them better institutions of learning.
PERHAPS PUTTING education in the context of national defense will get the attention of legislators before they whack away more at its bone.
We need not look any further than our own leaders of today to prove education is a great leveler.
Speaker of the House John Boehner is the son of a bartender and the first member of his expansive family to attend college and become a success in business and politics.
Harry Reid, leader of the Senate, and the son of a miner, also grew up in impoverished circumstances in rural Nevada. Reid earned a law degree from George Washington University Law School.
And our president, Barack Obama, had the cards stacked against him growing up biracial and the son of a single mother. Obama graduated from Harvard Law School and was president of its prestigious Harvard Law Review.
No silver spoons for any of the three — but boundless opportunities because they had a shot at as good an education as a Rockefeller because of scholarships and grants.
