The former Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan, spoke before the
Committee on Education and the Workforce (2000) and stated that “many of our students
languish at too low a level of skill to compete” in a globalized era. He further stated that
globalization poses a new challenge to our schools in which “our secondary school
system needs to serve the requirements of a changing economy in the same way that the
expansion of high schools with a broad curriculum served us so well in the first half of
the twentieth century.” Bill Gates, at the National Governors Association Summit (2005)
bluntly concluded that looking at “the millions of students that our high schools are not
preparing for higher education, America’s high schools are obsolete.” Schools must
transform their instructional paradigms to align with the changing needs of our global
digital world.