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Does Higher Tech Require Higher Skills?

LAST month's column summarized research showing that, in the long run, test scores mean very little. Before it was cut for space, that item closed with a quote from Louis Gerstner, Jr., CEO of IBM, and Tommy Thompson, the new secretary of health and human services. Arguing in the 8 December 2000 edition of the New York Times that students will need to get higher math and science test scores to sustain the economy of the future (a most dubious claim), they said, "What is at stake is not today's economy, but tomorrow's." Gerstner and Thompson are only the latest members of what I have come to call the "education scare industry." This enterprise works hard to create anxiety over test scores and jobs. As John Smith III of Michigan State University showed in the winter 1999 issue of the American Educational Research Journal, there is quite a collection of such warnings. A Nation at Risk (1983); Educating Americans for the Twenty- First Century (1983); Investing in People (1989); America's Choice: High Skills or Low Wages (1990); and the SCANS report, What Work Requires of Schools (1991) are all firmly in the tradition of the education scare industry. We can now add to the collection former Sen. John Glenn's hysterically titled commission report, Before It's Too Late (2000). All these dire warnings have been sounded in the absence of any firm data. As I have pointed out repeatedly, it is often the case that the higher the tech, the lower the skill needed to use it. Common examples are today's cameras and computers compared to those of 30 - or even 10 - years ago. Smith points out that researchers and commentators have been split on the issue, some arguing that technology makes work more complex, some claiming it "de-skills" workers, and others taking the position that work tomorrow will look a lot like work yesterday. "Since many more positions for sales clerks are created than for system analysts, the demands for lower-skilled jobs outweigh those for higher skilled positions," Smith writes. In fact, according to the Occupational Outlook Handbook 2000 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2000), jobs in retail sales account for almost as many jobs as the top 10 "fastest-growing" occupations combined. Smith decided it might be nice to actually have some empirical evidence on the matter and, being in Michigan, naturally sought to find changes in the mathematics demands on workers who assemble automobiles. Smith tells us that putting a car together involves hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of businesses in a hierarchy. He also had to conceptualize what "mathematics in the workplace" really means. In school, mathematics takes place in "math class." On the job, it is distributed throughout the process and is often not immediately available to inspection: Mathematics reasoning in workplaces differs markedly from school mathematics. In fact, the algorithms taught in school are often not the computational methods of choice for either workers or students. In both school and work settings, people solve numerical problems using multiple strategies, including methods of their own invention, and often reason mentally without recourse to paper and pencil or calculation tools. At work, numerical computation emerges from measuring and/or reasoning about quantities. At school, however, students struggle with multiplicative concepts in part because schools focus on numbers and arithmetic, rather than on more fundamental issues of quantities and their relationships. Finally, visualization has been an important nonnumerical resource in solving geometric problems in workplaces. Smith's first draft of this research was written in 1997, so it makes no reference to the observations of teachers conducted by the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), but his comments seem quite in line with the conclusions drawn from the TIMSS videotape studies. The task of translating this kind of thinking into a scheme with which to code workplace behaviors for their mathematical demands seems daunting. …