by Laurel A Rockefeller

Created on: September 07, 2008

To compete in a global economy, we need young Americans who are highly educated. We need more engineers to design the next generation of vehicles that will run on renewable energy sources and scientists who will find new ways to provide for our growing energy needs-without using fossil fuels while delivering it all effectively and efficiently to our homes.

We also need skilled designers whose jobs are to transform old factories, to re-tool them so they can produce windmills, solar panels, hybrid vehicles, and each successive generation of green technologies. And we need day laborers in the plants to do the manufacturing.

But from start to finish, all of these "green jobs" require a level of sophistication such as never been seen before in the history of our nation. The world has changed. The bar has risen for literacy and technical expertise. Gone are the days were you could get by on fourth grade education. Today, you can barely get by if you have a merely BA or BS. In such a society, asking for high school graduation is hardly asking a lot!

A lot of people want to blame the teachers for a student's performance. I want to disagree with that, having a dear friend who is a teacher in the New York City school system. If a student is determined to not do the work and blow off class, there really is nothing the teacher can do beyond offer to help. The rest is really up to the student and her or his family.

But the school system CAN require students to stay in school until that student genuinely merits graduation. And the system CAN require the student pass certain minimum proficiencies in the basic subjects of reading in English (yes, I believe by graduation any student who has attended an American school 3 years or more SHOULD be able to read in English), math, and American and world history. Why history? Because the US government thinks it's important enough to put on the test for would-be naturalized citizens. Why not then require it across the board (if it's not already) for our high school students?

But these proficiency tests cannot be completely standardized-or our teachers like my friend spend their time teaching to the test instead of teaching their subjects and schools are pressured to make those scores fall so that everyone graduates at 18 and no older. Instead, there need to be sections of these state exams that are written by the school or instructor and written specifically with the individual classes in mind so the teacher has greater control over some of the questions and can include creative thinking questions, essays, etc according to what specifics happened in class that semester.

By doing this, schools can successfully enforce a mandatory age of 18 on students while keeping test scores up, keeping personal accountability up, and ensuring that more students have the opportunity to attend college and therefore can take on those green industry jobs we so desperately need for the future.

After all, WE AMERICANS first invented these green technologies-but by bad politics, we've refused to build the plants and have exported the jobs. We've not trained the work force to handle the technology.

I vote for more young people able to do the work, re-tool the factories, and BRING THE JOBS BACK to the United States where they belong! Let's have higher high school graduation rates and a booming green technology industry HERE. And let's all reduce our carbon footprint.

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