Gates Foundation's John Deasy on Education for Competitiveness

Posted by: Steve Hamm on June 16

At the Aspen Global Leadership Network gathering I had to dig around to find an appropriate person to answer one of the questions that came from a GlobeSpotting reader. The topic was the role of education in national competitiveness. The answer came from John Deasy, Deputy Director of Education at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Here's the question, from a reader who goes by the handle, A Parent:

"For me, the really big question is something like this:

How can egalitarian societies (i.e. societies that make a real effort to spread wealth among the whole population) survive *price* competition with societies that use a more cost-efficient radical division of labor (e.g., they don't expend money teaching quadratic equations to someone whose allotted destiny is to be a street sweeper).

An educated general population is more *productive*, to be sure, but an uneducated general population will always be *lower-cost*.

In past generations, educated populations dominated the world through warfare. Higher total productivity and a literate rank-and-file soldiery give a huge advantage in war. This is how the North defeated the slave-based economy of the South in the Civil War.

But now we are in an age of price wars. How can the inherently more costly educate-everyone model survive in an age when price is paramount?"

Deasy and I chewed the question over for a while, and here's what he came up with:

For starters, he made the point that all the research shows that the more education an American gets, the higher their potential lifetime earnings. "If you want a society with citizens who are productive and earning a living wage, it's incumbent on us to provide a high level of education for all," he said.

He urged a reordering of America's spending priorities. "Per capita, we incarcerate more people than any other country. That's very expensive. If we want a more productive society, we need to spend more up front on education so we can spend less later on criminal justice."

He worried allowed that the $100 billion that has been targeted on education in the stimulus bill won't be spent well. Instead, it will be used by school systems just to save jobs. "I think it should be used to leverage the greatest amount of opportunity for students in poverty. The best most effective teachers should be put in from of those students."

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