I believe that the most urgent problem facing IT and, in truth, the future of US competitiveness is the state of our educational system. Like healthcare, this is one of those issues that we can all agree on the issue, but it's the solutions that get us tangled.
I don't know what the answers are, but I do believe that the students that we are turning out are woefully ill prepared to participate in the global market that we now live in. Something must be done and done fast.
I came across an article in Fast Company from September of last year that discusses a range of corporate-public partnerships in education. It's entitled, "Microsoft's Class Action" and as the title suggests, focuses on Microsoft's deep involvement in one such partnership with the Philadelphia school system.
I am not a big Microsoft fan necessarily, but the article is nothing if not thought provoking. My wife and I were just discussing the fact that our schools seem ill equipped to teach our children even the basics of dealing with the world that she and I inhabit every day. I don't know that this is the answer, but frankly, anything is better than what we have today. I hope to circle back to this article as time permits and see how I might help our local schools apply some of these same ideas. It's a bigger problem than anything I can tackle by myself, I know that. But I believe that it is something that all of us in IT need to be very aware of and that we must begin to look at what actions we can take to help drive change before it's too late.
