The U.S. Technology Skills Gap: What Every Technology Executive Must Know to Save America's Future, + Website

PART TWO

And the Hits Just Keep on Coming

As a child, the Aesop fable The Boy Who Cried Wolf was one of my favorite stories. You remember the tale. It was about a shepherd boy who repeatedly tricked his neighbors into believing that a wolf was attacking his flock, so when a wolf really did attack his flock, they didn't believe his cry for help anymore. While the moral of the story that persistent liars will not be rewarded does not concern the focus of this book, the call of repeated attacks does, with one key difference: the warnings in this book are real, not imagined.

I started to write this book after reading one such call in 2007, an industry report that questioned America's future competitiveness. Over the next five years I discovered 61 other reports, many with ominous titles referencing storms, cliffs, and hurricanes and written by many smart people. The report conclusions, however, seemed to be written by the same person: a singular voice was saying loud and clear to anyone who cared to listen that over the past half century, America has become complacent and is rapidly losing its position as the world's leader in technology innovation and business competitiveness.

Many of the reports blamed our nation's slow but steady decline on the K–12 public education system in the United States. This education system, the critics said, was more suited to the nineteenth century than the twenty-first. My research also introduced me led me to 18 domestic and international math and ...