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Spring seems to finally be here, at least
according to the sports schedules. Major League baseball started
yesterday, and NCAA championship basketball, Illinois vs. North
Carolina, is tonight, 7:20 p.m., KUTV Channel 2.
Showdown Ahead on
NCLB
The biggest political event of the week is a very important meeting
of the Education Interim Committee, tomorrow at 9 a.m., W135, to
discuss federal No Child Left Behind legislation in advance of the
special legislative session April 19-20. See complete agenda here.
Lawmakers in the last session were poised to advance a bill defying
the federal NCLB legislation, but Gov. Huntsman asked them to hold
off pending negotiations with the U.S. Department of Education.
The status of the federal-state standoff will be discussed at the
interim committee meeting Tuesday, chaired by Rep. Margaret Dayton
and Sen. Howard Stephenson.
Testifying will be Reps. Dayton and Kory
Holdaway, State schools Superintendent Patti Harrington,
governor’s Education Deputy Tim Bridgewater, David Shreve
of the National Conference of State Legislatures, and Dee Larsen
and Mike Lee, who are legal advisors to the Legislature and
governor, respectively. Representatives of the Department of Education
and congressional delegation have also been invited to testify.
The committee will also take comments from the public.
This seeming collision course with the Bush
Administration is being watched carefully by the national news media
and by other legislatures and state education departments around
the country.
It’s a Flat World,
After All
If you’re in business, education or government, you really should
read a lengthy article by Thomas L. Friedman, published in
the New York Times Magazine on Sunday. Here’s the link.
This will be one of the most important articles you’ll read in a
long time. The article, published in seven segments on the NY Times
Web site, is based on a new book by Friedman, who is a NY Times
columnist. It’s all about technology and globalization, the unleashing
of millions of high-tech knowledge workers in India, China and other
countries. The ramifications are enormous. Here are a couple of
short excerpts:
“Do you recall ‘the IT revolution’ that the
business press has been pushing for the last 20 years? Sorry to
tell you this, but that was just the prologue. The last 20 years
were about forging, sharpening and distributing all the new tools
to collaborate and connect. Now the real information revolution
is about to begin as all the complementarities among these collaborative
tools start to converge. One of those who first called this moment
by its real name was Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard
C.E.O., who in 2004 began to declare in her public speeches that
the dot-com boom and bust were just ‘the end of the beginning.’
The last 25 years in technology, Fiorina said, have just been ‘the
warm-up act.’ Now we are going into the main event, she said, ‘and
by the main event, I mean an era in which technology will truly
transform every aspect of business, of government, of society, of
life.’”
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“It is this convergence -- of new players, on a new playing field,
developing new processes for horizontal collaboration -- that I
believe is the most important force shaping global economics and
politics in the early 21st century. Sure, not all three billion
can collaborate and compete. In fact, for most people the world
is not yet flat at all. But even if we're talking about only 10
percent, that's 300 million people -- about twice the size of the
American work force. And be advised: the Indians and Chinese are
not racing us to the bottom. They are racing us to the top. What
China's leaders really want is that the next generation of underwear
and airplane wings not just be ‘made in China’ but also be ‘designed
in China.’ And that is where things are heading. So in 30 years
we will have gone from ‘sold in China’ to ‘made in China’ to ‘designed
in China’ to ‘dreamed up in China’ -- or from China as collaborator
with the worldwide manufacturers on nothing to China as a low-cost,
high-quality, hyperefficient collaborator with worldwide manufacturers
on everything. Ditto India. Said Craig Barrett, the C.E.O.
of Intel, ‘You don't bring three billion people into the world economy
overnight without huge consequences, especially from three societies’
-- like India, China and Russia – ‘with rich educational heritages.’
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“We need to get going immediately. It takes 15 years to train a
good engineer, because, ladies and gentlemen, this really is rocket
science. So parents, throw away the Game Boy, turn off the television
and get your kids to work. There is no sugar-coating this: in a
flat world, every individual is going to have to run a little faster
if he or she wants to advance his or her standard of living. When
I was growing up, my parents used to say to me, “Tom, finish your
dinner – people in China are starving.’ But after sailing to the
edges of the flat world for a year, I am now telling my own daughter,
‘Girls, finish your homework – people in China and India are starving
for your jobs.’ I repeat, this is not a test. This is the beginning
of a crisis that won't remain quiet for long. And as the Stanford
economist Paul Romer so rightly says, ‘A crisis is a terrible
thing to waste.’”
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