I heard author Thomas Friedman speak at the World Affairs Forum a few years ago, and he shared what he exhorts his own children:  “do your homework, because there are kids in India and China who are hungry for your job.”   This came to mind when I saw his column“Teaching for America” in the New York Times on November 20th.  In this recent column, Friedman describes U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s national teacher campaign to recruit new talent to the teaching profession, so we will be more like Finland and Denmark, both of which insist that teachers come from the top one-third of their graduating class.  According to Duncan, one quarter of U.S. high school students drop out or fail to graduate on time, and “other folks have passed us by, and we’re paying a huge price for that economically.”

I have had the chance to witness the impact of our inconsistent education system in my work as a consultant, and as an adjunct for a number of well known New York City institutions, where I teach business finance.   I’ve had a number of exceptional students over the years, but I also have a significant number each year who either never learned how to set up a basic algebra problem, or have long since forgotten.   The same is true of writing skills:  I have had a few really gifted students over the years, but many more whose writing is a disappointment.

The same day I read the Friedman column, I heard a disturbing report by “On the Media” about the recruitment practices of Kaplan Educational Services, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Washington Post.   And I also spent some time working my way through Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera’s outstanding book “All the Devils are Here, the Hidden History of the Financial Crisis,” which sheds new insight on how “greedy traders, misguided regulators, sleazy subprime companies, cowardly legislators and clueless home buyers” collectively deserve the blame for the current financial crisis.

All of which leads me to ask whether the U.S. would be in better economic shape right now if we had displayed the same ingenuity and tenacity to effectively educate our children the last 20 years as we had in gaming the system.  And to thank Thomas Friedman for continuing to keep a spotlight on the link between the effectiveness of our educational system and our competitiveness as a nation.