Paid for by NDN.
A Series of Modest Proposals to Build 21st Century Skills
by Dr. Robert J. Shapiro and Simon Rosenberg
July 25, 2007
Read the Introduction to A Series of Modest Proposals
Read the first paper in the series: A Laptop in Every Backpack
Read the second paper in the series: Tapping the Resources of America's Community Colleges
To ensure that all Americans can benefit from globalization, NDN believes that America must adopt a new economic strategy that would modernize our health care and energy policies; invest in our workers, students, and infrastructure; and foster and accelerate innovation across the economy. This strategy should also strive to fix our immigration system, ensure universal and affordable broadband access, and offer workers card check by adopting the Employee Free Choice Act.
But the core of this new economic strategy must be a new national commitment to giving our workers and children the skills and capacities required to succeed in the globalized economy of the 21st century. With this in mind, the NDN Globalization Initiative is releasing a series of papers that offer new and innovative ideas on steps we can take to help our children and workers right now, today. Called A Series of Modest Proposals to Build 21st Century Skills, the first two papers focus on providing all Americans, young and old, real opportunities to become truly literate with computers, the internet and basic information technologies. The third paper will look at how we can encourage companies to invest more in training and skill development for all their workers.
In May, Alec Ross of One Economy and Simon Rosenberg, NDN President, released the first paper in this series, A Laptop in Every Backpack, which proposed providing a laptop to every sixth grader by 2010. These laptops would be wirelessly connected to the Internet, and children should be able to take them home. Local school districts would design their own programs, but federal funding and simple, federal standards must be in place. We believe it will cost at first $2 billion a year to provide every 6th grader a laptop, about what we spend in Iraq every week.
In July, we released our second paper, Tapping the Resources of America’s Community Colleges: A Modest Proposal to Provide Universal Access to Computer Training. Here, we propose a groundbreaking plan to ensure that all American workers have real opportunities to build the skills necessary to operate one of the most important technologies of our time, computers. Young Americans are increasingly adept at working with computers, but many workers still lack those skills. We propose providing federal grants to America’s community colleges to keep their computer labs opened three nights every week and staffed by instructors, who would provide free instruction to anyone who visited the lab during these additional hours. We estimate that Congress could provide every worker in America access to IT training for about $125 million a year, less than what the U.S. spends in Iraq in one hour.
Taken together, these two papers would represent a new national commitment to providing our students and adult workers the skills required to navigate the emerging global communications network, which is so critical to learning, communications, commerce, and life success in the 21st century. Our proposals are affordable, practical, and easy to implement, and will allow many more Americans to succeed in our globalized economy.
To comment on this project or to pitch us on some additional ideas, visit NDN’s blog at http://www.ndnblog.org or contact us at info@ndn.org. We would love to hear from you.
Robert Shapiro, Director of NDN’s Globalization Initiative
Simon Rosenberg, President, NDN
