"I hope that school doesn't ruin my children's education."

obs for the less educated are going away. The knowledge economy has officially kicked in, and we’re woefully behind the curve. Clerical workers are being replaced by cloud-based software programs; store clerks are being replaced by self checkout systems; and most dramatic, manufacturers are creating assembly lines that are 100 percent robotic. Cisco’s Superbowl ad, showing “assembly lines that fix themselves” is fair warning that when possible, companies will hire a robot that doesn’t need salary, a union, healthcare or a pension before they’ll hire a human being.

The result is that we’re heading for a ‘one-percent’ workforce. A workforce not of rich people, but of an educated elite that cannot be replaced as easily by technology. Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich predicted this conundrum in his prophetic 1991 book, The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for the 21st Century. He said, “Each nation’s primary assets will be its citizens’ skills and insights. Each nation’s primary political task will be to cope with the centrifugal forces of the global economy, which tear at the ties binding citizens together–bestowing ever greater wealth on the most skilled and insightful, while consigning the less skilled to a declining standard of living.” Closing the income gap will be impossible if we don’t close the skill gap, but the burden for closing that gap should not be placed on the shoulders of teachers alone.