From The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment To Equity Will Determine Our Future, a forthcoming 2010 book by Stanford professor and Obama education adviser Linda Darling-Hammond:
A recent OECD report found that for every year the average schooling level of the population is raised, there is a corresponding increase of 3.7% in long-term economic growth.
From a November 4, 2008 article on Huffingtonpost.com:
Stanford University’s Linda Darling Hammond and New Leaders for New Schools’ Jon Schnur, two of Barack Obama’s main education advisors, wanted me to share their view on the importance of Obama’s education plan for America’s economic future. Here it is.
…At a time when three-quarters of the fastest growing occupations require postsecondary education, our college participation rates have declined from first in the world to fifteenth. Our high school graduation rates – stuck at 70 percent – have dropped from first in the world to the bottom half of industrialized nations. Our students rank 35th out of the top 40 countries in math and 31st in science achievement. If these trends continue, by 2012 America will have 7 million un- or under-filled jobs in science and technology, “green” industries, and elsewhere due to a lack of skilled workers with post-secondary education.
From a February 2, 2010 editorial in the New York Times:
It’s great that the [Obama] administration is trying to undertake reforms, but if we want to make sure all children learn, we will need to overhaul the curriculum itself. Our current educational approach — and the testing that is driving it — is completely at odds with what scientists understand about how children develop during the elementary school years and has led to a curriculum that is strangling children and teachers alike.
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In a January 29, 2010 blog entry, Mark Perry writes:
According to a report released yesterday by the BLS:
“At age 22, women were more likely than men to be enrolled in college and were more likely to have received a bachelor’s degree. Twenty-nine percent of women were attending college during the October when they were age 22, compared with 25.2% of men. Moreover, 12.8% of women had earned a bachelor’s degree, compared with 6.9% of men.”
Now, if you will excuse me, I must resume reading Eat, Pray, Love… 
From a January 26, 2010 blog entry on PsychologyToday.com:
Rates of depression and anxiety among young people in America have been increasing steadily for the past fifty to seventy years. Today five to eight times as many high school and college students meet the criteria for diagnosis of major depression and/or an anxiety disorder as was true half a century or more ago. This increased psychopathology is not the result of changed diagnostic criteria; it holds even when the measures and criteria are constant.
…How Coercive Schooling Deprives Young People of Personal Control, Directs Them Toward Extrinsic Goals, and Promotes Anxiety and Depression
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From the cover story of the January 2010 issue of Wired magazine:
Thus the new industrial organizational model. It’s built around small pieces, loosely joined. Companies are small, virtual, and informal. Most participants are not employees. They form and re-form on the fly, driven by ability and need rather than affiliation and obligation. It doesn’t matter who the best people work for; if the project is interesting enough, the best people will find it.
…Although it’s shrinking, America’s manufacturing economy is still the world’s largest. But China’s growing production sector is predicted to take the number one spot in 2015, according to IHS Global Insight, an economic-forecasting firm. Not all US manufacturing is shrinking, however — just the large part. A Pease Group survey of small manufacturers (less than $25 million in annual sales) shows that most expect to grow this year, many by double digits. Indeed, analysts expect almost all new manufacturing jobs in the US will come from small companies.
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From a January 28, 2010 entry on the Economix blog of the NY Times:
The big ocean of blue represents the portion of the unemployed who have lost their jobs, with the lighter blue section showing those whose jobs are gone permanently.
There are multiple ways to explain why permanent job-losers represent a higher share of the unemployed this time around. Maybe, as others have suggested, many of the jobs gained in the boom years were built on phantom wealth. Or maybe the culprit is a corollary of Moore’s Law, the idea of exponential advances in technology over time. That might suggest that innovation and automation displace more and more workers by the time each recession rolls around.
Whatever the underlying cause, the result is disconcerting: compared with previous recessions, many more of the employment gains in this recovery will have to come from new jobs.
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The grant program is sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation and other organizations.
There is a page on the program’s web site where you can leave a comment about my proposal:
http://dmlcompetition.net/pligg/story.php?title=571
Good fun…
From an August 2007 article in Inc. magazine:
Businesses with fewer than 20 employees account for 90 percent of all U.S. firms and are responsible for more than 97 percent of all new jobs, according to a new report by the Small Business Administration.
PayPal just opened up its platform to third-party developers. Who needs to create design specs when you can variously download, cut-and-paste… 
From CampusTechnology.com:
“Nearly 12 million post-secondary students in the United States take some or all of their classes online right now. But this number will skyrocket to more than 22 million in the next five years, according to data released recently by research firm Ambient Insight.
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Education pays