March 17, 2000

Internet technologies keep moving forward

There's more than a thread connecting two seemingly unrelated education stories this week.

The high-tech industry, desperate for talent to keep pushing Internet technologies forward, is asking for a large increase in the number of visas granted to foreign workers with special skills.

And in Florida, a state judge struck down the state's school voucher plan because he deemed it to be in conflict with a state constitutional duty to provide free education to all.

While the Internet and related business is growing more quickly than anyone could have imagined, the development of a high-technology industry did not exactly occur overnight. It has been 20 years since the first PC came to market, and yet the U.S. still isn't turning out enough science and engineering grads to staff an industry in which America has a huge lead on the rest of the world.

As a result, the tech industry wants the number of H-1B visas &emdash; granted only to foreign workers who have specialized skills &emdash; to be nearly doubled. Congress should act quickly in the short term to meet that need.

But in the longer term, programs like the one an arrogant judge tossed out in Florida may do more to resolve the problem. The overturned Florida law imposed performance tests on the state's public schools. If a school twice received failing grades, then the state would allow students to use their state per-pupil allotment toward tuition at another public school, a nonsectarian private school or a religious school. In essence, the law said, shape up or shut down.

So far just 53 students from two elementary schools have used the system. But this was too much for the educrats, so they sued.

It is a sad state of affairs that educrats, the ACLU and other assorted activist hangers-on devote enormous energy and financial resources to impeding the implementation of market-based incentives for schools to improve, even as schools fail to produce enough science and engineering students to keep America on the cutting edge of technology.