Thomas L. Friedman has a great op-ed piece in the New York Times today called “Swimming Without A Suit.” He uses Warren Buffet’s famous quip, “only when the tide goes out do you find out who is not wearing a bathing suit,” to describe how our current financial crisis exposed not only America’s economic weaknesses, but our educational ones as well.

The article is definitely worth a read. Most interesting is Friedman’s description of McKinsey’s study entitled “The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools” which found that:

“If America had closed the international achievement gap between 1983 and 1998 and had raised its performance to the level of such nations as Finland and South Korea, United States G.D.P. in 2008 would have been between $1.3 trillion and $2.3 trillion higher. If we had closed the racial achievement gap and black and Latino student performance had caught up with that of white students by 1998, G.D.P. in 2008 would have been between $310 billion and $525 billion higher. If the gap between low-income students and the rest had been narrowed, G.D.P. in 2008 would have been $400 billion to $670 billion higher.”

Sounds like a call to action to me. (Even though the basic right of every American child to a high-quality public education should be call enough!) There are a couple of places I want to go with this.

First: Check out the “Will We Really” website sponsored by The Forum for Education & Democracy (thanks to David Cohen for mentioning it in his comments to an earlier post). The site is actually a campaign to ensure that President Obama’s hopeful “Yes We Can” platform actually translates into substantive reform for our nation’s public schools. Their four core principles:  Every child deserves a 21st Century education; every community deserves an equal chance; every child deserves a well-supported teacher; every child deserves high quality health care. Hard to argue there.

Second: Friedman’s article made me think of a recent article in Time by Walter Isaacson about how to raise standards in America’s schools. It’s a pretty persuasive piece arguing in favor of national standards (click here for my take on the national standards debate). In it, Isaacson explains how the No Child Left Behind Act requires each state to bring its students to “universal proficiency” in reading and math, but allows each state to define for itself what “universal proficiency” means. The result: Many states lowered their standards (read: raced to the bottom) to make their students look better than average. So Mississippi, for example, proudly announced that 89% of its fourth graders were proficient or better in reading, while according to the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test, only 18% were actually proficient. To take Friedman’s swimming analogy a little further here (I couldn’t resist), unless we adopt national standards (even if we just start with less contentious subjects like math and science before tackling value-laden English and history), we’ll have a situation akin to Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of The Emperor’s New Clothes. States like Mississippi with high achievement rates but low standards will be flaunting invisible new swimsuits that don’t really exist!

takepart in showing your commitment to America’s public schools by signing the “Yes We Will” petition.

(Photo: Ed Yourdon’s flickr photostream/Creative Commons)