Charting a New Course for Schools

The United States no longer has the best educated workforce in the world. A new report, Tough Choices or Tough Times, suggests that a different kind of school system could get us there. Marc Tucker Developing countries, such as China, India, and Korea, have learned how to produce highly educated workers who offer worldclass skills at low wages. Those workers, who are now available to global employers over the Internet, directly compete with the U.S. workforce. Why, asks the New Commission on the Skills of the AmericanWorkforce, would global employers pay U.S. workers more than twice as much for the same skills? The Commission's new report, Tough Choices or Tough Times, considers this issue. It continues a discussion that began in 1990, when the first Commission released a report titled America's Choice: High Skills or Low Wages, which called attention to the steady loss of lowskill jobs to countries that could offer cheaper labor. The 1990 report proposed raising education standards in the United States so U.S. workers could migrate to better-paying work requiring higher-leve