Value-Added Assessment and Systemic Reform: A Response to the Challenge of Human Capital Development

Mr. Hershberg believes that the highly competitive global economy of the 21st century requires dramatic improvements in America's schools. While he sees merit in the basic intent of No Child Left Behind, he suggests that a shift to value-added assessment, if it is used as the foundation of a comprehensive school reform model, will be the key to raising the achievement of all students. Our nation, which has prevailed in conflict after conflict over several centuries, now faces a stark and sudden choice: adapt or perish. I'm not referring to the war against terrorism but to a war of skills--one that America is at a risk of losing to India, China, and other emerging economies. And we're not at risk of losing it on factory floors or lab benches. It's happening every day, all across the country, in our public schools. Unless we transform those schools and do it now . it will soon be too late. --Louis Gerstner, former chairman, IBM; chairman, The Teaching Commission TERRORISM and the war in Iraq are high on the list of the nation's concerns, but the greatest danger facing America is, as Louis Gerstner recognized, the challenge of human capital development. Our nation's public schools, the foundation for this effort, are still failing far too many of our children despite an investment of some $500 billion annually. Sadly, we've known about this threat for quite some time. In 1983 A Nation at Risk suggested that, if the mediocrity of our schools had been imposed by an unfriendly foreign power, we might well have viewed it as "an act of war. " We understood then that companies all over the world could buy foolproof machinery that compensated for deficient worker skills and that billions of people were willing to use that machinery for a fraction of the wages American workers wanted. But recent trends make clear that globalization is about far more than displacing our nation's blue-collar workers. Every job in America is at risk. As author and New York Timescolumnist Thomas Friedman argues in The World Is Flat, 30 years ago you'd rather be a B student in Boston than a genius in Bangalore or Beijing because the economic opportunities were all in America. Today, he explains, that is no longer true. Intellectual work can be digitized, disaggregated, delivered, distributed, produced, and shipped from anywhere on the planet to anywhere else. (1) Friedman identifies 10 developments--or "flatteners" --that have helped to level the playing field of the global economy. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 signaled the triumph of capitalism. The development of Microsoft Windows and the introduction of the Netscape browser helped fuel the high-tech bubble. Most of us looked at the dot.com collapse as a disaster, but it was actually a great boon to globalization because billions of dollars were spent on fiber optic telecommunications cable to connect the continents. When the initial investors went bust, other companies bought these transmission networks for pennies on the dollar, which made it possible to offer those networks to users worldwide at minimal cost. New software created compatibility among diverse computer applications. Companies could now send jobs (outsourcing) or whole factories (off-shoring) overseas; have employees in different locations collaborate online though shared operating systems, such as Linux (open sourcing); allow other companies such as UPS to take over whole sections of their operations (insourcing); or create global supply chains so that when a product is sold in the U.S., another is immediately made in China (supply-chaining). Powerful new search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, enabled people around the world to mine unlimited data sources, and new wireless technologies and Voice Over Internet Protocols are now accelerating these developments. The 21st century has seen three billion new people enter the world economy, the majority from China, India, and the former Soviet Union, all societies with rich educational heritages. …