Marc Tucker’s provocative new manifesto
Marc Tucker and his National Center on Education and the Economy made a big splash back in 2006 with the publication of “Tough Choices or Tough Times,” a provocative manifesto calling for a radical overhaul of public education in the U.S. Tucker’s central argument was that we are falling far behind other nations because we are stuck in old paradigms about how education should look.
Now, in an update of sorts, Tucker has released “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants,” a 47-page paper that lays out two major and fundamental steps he believes the U.S. must begin taking immediately. Characteristically forceful and provocative, Tucker lays it out in stark terms:
The nations we have described (Finland, Japan and Singapore, along with Ontario and Shanghai) are either already very high wage countries or want to be very high wage countries. They have all recognized that it will be impossible to justify high relative wages for skills that are no greater than those offered by other people in other parts of the world who are willing to work for less, because we are all competing with each other now. Only those who can offer the world’s highest skill levels and the world’s most creative ideas will be able to justify the world’s highest wages. These nations