To Compete, Start At The Bottom (Part 1)

You don't need X-ray vision to see this narrative. It isn't even particularly insightful or savvy:

"China's technological rise coincides with a campaign by American mogul Elon Musk to gut the Department of Education, as well as President Donald Trump's ambitions to brute-force AI development with billions of dollars of infrastructure, while censoring scientific research at American Universities. The whole thing is flipping the Western geopolitical narrative on its head — China as the fast, efficient innovator, and the US slipping into what many see as growing authoritarianism."?

What's happening around us, from a business perspective, is relatively simple. The American workforce, perhaps the world's most capable and flexible, is now feeling the effects of decades of a disjointed and uncoordinated education system.?

Whereas the nation led the world in patents, bringing scientific advancements to commercial reality, and adapting to the repeated exercise of creative destruction, we now hold a few businesses up as the example to follow and hamstring the search for and training of the brightest minds through social hierarchy that emphasizes the preservation of itself vs. the free exercise of talent from any and all parts of the socioeconomic spectrum.??

By not investing in our poorest residents' education or in the retraining of our hardest working Americans displaced by globalized and free trade agreements nor by taking a robust global leadership role in the alternative energy technologies we created or perfected for deployment, we have surrendered leadership and, perhaps, the greatest allure the brightest minds in the world had to come here.?

We are past the crossroads.?

Whether through a concerted effort led by the federal government or a network of efforts at the state and local levels, it is beyond time to reverse course. We can no longer luxuriate in the glory of past accomplishments. Nor can we celebrate another company's trillion-dollar valuation as a measure of national progress. We need to go back to the most foundational measures of success:

1. 4th and 8th grade reading, science, and math literacy as measured by NAEP against their highest measures for all three - plus a trend of improvement of our BOTTOM 25% against the industrialized nations' BOTTOM 25% (that's right, our worst should fare better than their worst).?

2. Number and type of STEM degrees and percentage of public funding going to programs supporting those degrees for the colleges, states, and communities serving the BOTTOM 25% of students.?

3. Number of students from the BOTTOM 25% of graduating high school classes going on to community college and trade schools.?

4. Number of Americans displaced and retrained after their jobs or industries have been disrupted by globalized and free trade and the median length of the displacement of the BOTTOM 25%.?

5. Statistics showing the employment and education of America's most vulnerable populations including, but not limited to, the handicapped, unretired elderly, and returning citizens.?

My measures are designed to uplift the segments of America that have been marginalized, overlooked, and exploited. This is how America surges and stays ahead. For decades we've served the best and brightest, that wellspring of talent is at or past its limit.?

To accelerate into the future with the momentum of the past. America will have to shed its excuses and biases. It will have to understand talent is not dependent on zip code or the wealth of a parent.?

To compete with nations that number in the billions or regions who are rapidly discovering their collective power, America will need to renew its commitment to itself in ways it has never demonstrated. Perhaps it will not happen today, but no amount of individual wealth for the most accomplished titans of industry will make up for the rapidly coming second place. And if the promise of a highly competitve America diminishes, so does its draw for the world's best and brightest.?

It's going to take more than a commitment to dismantling a bloated bureaucracy to solve this.

https://futurism.com/china-tech-strong-america