Massachusetts has one of the best public school systems in the country. It has been top in the country before, and was rated fourth last I checked. California, which has one of the largest economies in the world, is ranked in the bottom quintile.  I was lucky that my parents moved from California back to Massachusetts before I was born.  My wife and I made the same decision shortly after our son was born. Education, and public education are important to us.

The field of Computer Science seems to be getting dominated by people from China and India. This influx of brainpower to the United States is great for us. But why don’t we see more Engineers that come up out of the US educational system?

It is tough to be a smart kid in this country. While geek-chic has come in to vogue, and internet based social organization has become the norm, I wonder if things have really changed where it matters the most: at the elementary school level. Large class size, focus on the problem kids, shrinking budgets, and now the focus on standardized testing all makes it difficult to tailor the classroom experience to the kids that attend it. I was fortunate in that my elementary school there was a large enough population of smart kids that I still had a decent sized group of friends. I was a talker, and wanted to be involved in what was going on. This lead to a label of “Loquacious” and a lot of punishment assignments for talking during class. I did so poorly in the classroom that if I didn’t have the knack of doing well on standardized tests, I would have been labeled learning disabled. Things didn’t turnaround for me academically until Junior High School, when we were grouped by ability. I don’t think my experience is unusual.

India and China have a few things that lead to their current rise in technological prominence. A Huge population means that there are more students of all ability levels, including superstars. Low local wages provide the incentive to move overseas to where jobs pay better. Both countries have a strong tradition of education. India has the added benefit of a strong English tradition.

I’d like to reiterate that this isn’t a Xenophobic anti-h-1-b rant.  I’ve worked with too many amazing people from other countries to think that the influx is anything but helpful to the USA.  The question I want answered is what we can do to increase the number and quality of engineers produced by our education system.

The funnny thing is, the best students don’t make the best engineers.  I wonder how many superstar engineers were lost due to an inability to deal with school.  I know of at least two women who left the Calculus track in High School that were significantly better at Math than I was.  I was no superstar, but I did manage to get a 3 on the AP Caluculus A test.  Maybe it was too high pressure, maybe it was too boring, but both of those answers indicate something that could be modified by the teachers.  It was too many years ago for me to know what really happened.