Skills of the American workforce

The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce has issued a 170-page report calling for educational reform to confront the growing challenge from globalization (see Business Week article here). It doesn't appear to include the recommendations of Dan Pink's A Whole New Mind, which emphasizes right-brain (creative) skills as a way to leapfrog Asian progress in technical/analytical skills. It also doesn't appear to call for the teaching of entrepreneurial skills and explicit material about economics. These are mistakes. The report does call for competition and choice as ways to improve American education, ideas that are as commonsensical as they are political intractable.