Our next computer giveaway recipient rolled up in a beat-up sedan. It was a hot August day in 2020, and dozens of idling cars were in a line, wrapped around an apartment complex parking lot on the East Side of San Antonio. The drivers were waiting to receive a refurbished Hewlett-Packard desktop computer from the San Antonio Housing Authority (SAHA). A San Antonio councilwoman and I were busy loading the PCs in the back seats of the cars.
SAHA leadership realized that since their entire staff was working on laptops from home during the pandemic, their 120 or so idle desktop computers could be put to better use. So they gave them to the residents of their properties who earned less than twelve thousand dollars a year and had at least one high school or college student.
It was clear that the kid in the sedan was excited. I leaned into the open passenger-side window and said, “Hey, my man, thanks for coming by today. Make sure the car is in park, but don’t turn it off. And unlock the back door if you would, please.”
While we placed a monitor, keyboard, CPU, and a bag with cables and a mouse into his back seat, the kid said, “Sir, thank you for doing this. This’ll be the first computer we’ve ever had in our house.”
“What?! Seriously?!” I blurted out.
The kid didn’t respond. He sat quietly. My incredulity had clearly made him uncomfortable. I went through a mental checklist of the tasks that would be necessary to be successful in school but would be a pain in the ass without a computer.
“What grade are you in, brother?” I asked.
“I’m about to enter my freshman year in college, sir.”
“Congrats, man, that’s awesome. We’re proud of your accomplishment… Let me ask you this, though, how did you write your papers and stuff when you had assignments due for class?”
The kid pulled out his cell. “On my phone,” he said in a chipper matter-of-fact way.
“On your phone?” I said. “You write research papers on your phone?” I don’t even like to type long texts on my phone. I couldn’t imagine tapping out a five-page English paper with my thumbs.
“Sometimes I was able to use a computer at school. But most of the time I did it on this,” the kid said, holding up his old phone.
I couldn’t imagine being in that kid’s situation. My brother, sister, and I got our first computer in 1985 when I was eight. My uncle Steve had upgraded to a Commodore 128, so he gave us his old Commodore 64 desktop. Because of Uncle Steve’s donation, we were the first family in our neighborhood with a computer. We also had a modem to access the internet in the early ’90s.
I’ve always had access to a computer at home, and I’ve had a laptop since I was in college. I was never victim to the three challenges of the digital divide—availability of devices, access to infrastructure, and ability to use. If you have the right device and know how to use it, but you can’t access the internet or the cloud, then you’re screwed. If you have access to the internet and know how to use a device, but you don’t have the right device, you’re screwed too. You’re also screwed if you are like my dad and have both the right device and access but don’t know how to use them.
By 2030, there are expected to be more than 25 billion connected devices in the world for a projected global population of 8.5 billion people. You would think there would be enough devices to go around, but that’s far from the case. Schools and local communities are trying to address this device gap.
The Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) most recent statistics from 2019 suggest that 25 million Americans lack access to a broadband connection, but there is strong evidence that closer to 163 million Americans do not have access. And this is out of a total U.S. population of about 330 million.
When it comes to addressing the access gap, it’s harder to calculate the exact problem because we don’t have trustworthy public data on who doesn’t have broadband or high-speed internet access. High-speed internet access matters because, with applications and software requiring increasingly large amounts of data, you need to move that data from your device to its destination and back in nanoseconds. If you can’t move data quickly, then your device and the software and applications on that device are worthless.
So why should we care that potentially half the country lacks access to high-speed internet? Because studies suggest that access to broadband has a direct impact on jobs and GDP growth. The lowest broadband access and usage are in U.S. counties with the most unemployment.
This digital divide has compounded another problem. Our economy is losing out on trillions of dollars in economic output because our kids can’t keep up academically with kids in other countries. Economists have estimated that the U.S. economy could be almost 4 percent higher than currently projected over two decades if American students’ math and science skills were as good as the rest of the world’s. Just as worrying: disparities in academic achievement of U.S. students based on their ethnicity, race, family income, and school quality cost billions in unrealized economic gains because a less-educated workforce has difficulty accessing well-paying jobs. In the average school district, White students score up to two grades higher than Black students. On family income, the achievement gap between high-income and low-income children continues to widen. The gap is 30 to 40 percent larger among children born in 2001 than among those born twenty-five years earlier.
These inequities represent a disturbing human and economic cost and point to a larger truth about our economy: We have income inequality because we have education inequality.
Before the pandemic, less than half of American students could read or do math at grade level. COVID-19 made a tragic problem more so, at a point in time when the stakes couldn’t be higher. The U.S. is in a New Cold War with China for global leadership in advanced technology. The economy of the future is going to be defined by advanced technology, and the leader of this race is going to determine whether English and the dollar or Mandarin and the yuan are the language and currency of the global marketplace.
Technology is changing every aspect of our life and every industry. The technological change we are going to see in the next thirty years is going to make the last thirty years look insignificant. We must make sure the seventy-four million kids in our country are ready for this change by preparing them for jobs that don’t exist today, or they will be screwed.
Not only is a well-trained and educated society necessary for economic growth, but it is also vital to our safety and security. Education is a national security issue. We need a workforce that can design the next encryption algorithms to protect our military, government, and private sector. We need people who can build the rockets to get us to Mars. We need people who are going to design the algorithms for artificial intelligence, who will chart our future by unlocking the potential of AI’s powers, who will accelerate human achievement by transforming industries, governments, and workforces. We need a technologically advanced workforce that can excel in the next scientific breakthrough yet to be discovered. To build the workforce of tomorrow, we start with making sure every kid gets a superior education.
How do we enable our kids and fellow citizens to have the freedom to get an education that helps them move up the economic ladder and ensures America continues to have the strongest economy in the world? By implementing a lesson I learned the second time I almost died on a mountaintop.
During one of my CIA tours, I received a call late one Friday evening from my chief of station asking whether I knew how to ski. I told him I was a mediocre snowboarder, and he said that was good enough and told me that I would be attempting to bump a foreigner of significant intelligence value who was taking his family skiing.
At the ski slope, my strategy was to slide in alongside the target on a ski lift. But each time the target rode the lift, he had his wife and kids with him. Finally, I was at the top of the hill and saw the target below me, headed alone for the ski lift line.
I angled my board down the hill and took off like a bat out of hell. I was moving so fast, you would have thought I was shot out of a cannon. I could hear people’s exclamations as I whizzed by like a bullet. As I approached the base of the hill and prepared to stop, the fronts of my feet caught something, and I was launched into the air. I did a complete flip and two spins, landing face-first in the snow. I managed to lift my head and spy the target getting onto the ski lift all by himself.
I laid in the snow facedown, disappointed that I had lost my chance, and scanned myself for injuries. I overheard some kid ask his mom whether that man who just flew through the air was going to be all right. My surveillance team lead came over and helped me into a seated position. He leaned into my ear and whispered, “After the target completed his last run, he went into the lodge. He is now sipping cocoa in front of the fire.”
I stood up, wiped the excess snow off me, walked into the lodge—and executed a textbook bump.
What I learned that day is that the best solution to a difficult challenge is usually the simplest and the easiest.
Sure, there are hard things that should be done so we can prepare our kids for jobs that don’t exist today. Pragmatic actions that will benefit not only kids, but also the future trajectory of our country. States need to figure out how to make it more attractive for people to go into teaching, by significantly increasing salaries for good teachers. We need to encourage educational competition by increasing the number of successful charter schools. School boards and state governments should give school districts and individual traditional public schools the independence to operate the way charter schools do, instead of having a one-size-fits-all solution within districts. While I believe these approaches are straightforward, they have been the subject of complicated debates for years, if not decades.
But here’s one strategy that is easy and shouldn’t attract controversy: introduce coding into the standard curriculum of every middle school in the United States of America. It’s an easy and simple way to ensure our kids are ready for jobs that don’t exist today. Coding is the language of the twenty-first-century economy. If our students can’t speak it, they will be left behind. Coding teaches kids problem-solving skills, computer literacy, and at the very least, gives them a better understanding of how technology is shaping our world.
In 2017, I learned that Texas universities had graduated only 3,500 students with a degree in computer science, while that same year in Texas alone, there were more than 38,000 open computing jobs (where the average salary was roughly $93,000).
Within this dearth of future employees with necessary computing skills, there is another problem—a lack of women with those skills. Of those 3,500 students who graduated from Texas schools with a computer science degree, only 19 percent were female. Girls Who Code, the international nonprofit working to close the gender gap in technology, found that women will likely only hold one in five computing jobs in the U.S. by 2025. An increase of women in the computing workforce from 20 to 39 percent of that population would generate $299 billion in additional cumulative earnings for those women over a decade. This shortage of women in computing is not only a fundamental economic challenge for the U.S. economy, but it also hampers our long-term global competitiveness in advanced technology.
In an effort to do our part to tackle this problem, my team and I worked with a nonprofit called Bootstrap and the University of Texas Center for STEM Education to train middle school teachers how to integrate computer science into their mathematics class.
Because of this initiative, five thousand students at twenty schools in Texas 23 were exposed to coding, potentially changing their lives. Educational technology integrator Sheryl Sokoler has said, “The earlier we introduce coding to children, the more comfortable they will become with computers and technology, and the more successful they will become when presented with more challenging learning opportunities.”
I know this to be true because I experienced it myself.
At Texas A&M, I majored in computer science, but really got interested in technology when I earned an internship at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) as a sophomore in high school. Created in 1947 in San Antonio, SwRI is one of the oldest and largest independent, nonprofit applied research and development organizations in the United States. SwRI gave me and nineteen other San Antonio area high school sophomores the chance to participate in a National Science Foundation–funded initiative called the Young Engineers and Scientists (YES) program. I can’t remember why I was selected, because up to this point in my life, my only real technological talent was the ability to type seventy-five words a minute, but nonetheless I was in the program.
I worked with Dr. Jill Marshall, who received her undergraduate degree from Stanford University and her Ph.D. in physics from the University of Texas. She managed the sensor design and calibration section of SwRI. I didn’t appreciate at the time how revolutionary it was in the early ’90s for a female engineer to lead a major technological initiative.
Part of the program was to complete an individual research project, and I chose to do mine in robotics. My experience working with Dr. Marshall made me consider a computer science major in college. She exposed me to the possibilities of robotics, while making me understand the disruption this field could cause. The experience helped me understand that humanity can build and control machines that will improve society.
I was lucky to have been exposed to Dr. Marshall and her work at SwRI, and my high school had an amazing computer science teacher, Cathy Sauls. However, as of 2019, only 45 percent of high schools across the U.S. teach computer science. The percentage of middle schools is likely even smaller. While every state should create a state plan for K–12 computer science, let’s begin this process with introducing coding in middle school. If a member of Congress can do it within a semester with the help of a couple of innovative companies and the University of Texas, then any state should be able to pull this off.
While not all schools have computer science instruction, many are starting to partner with local tech professionals to increase extracurricular activities available to students. Programs like CyberPatriots, where a guy like Frank Hall of West San Antonio can coach eight teams of students at three high schools in techniques for defending against cyberattacks. A cybersecurity professional by day, Frank devotes almost every afternoon of the workweek to training boys and girls on fighting real-world threats to America’s cyber infrastructure. The teams participate in national CyberPatriots competitions (and capture-the-flag contests), with the idea of inspiring them toward careers in cybersecurity or STEM disciplines critical to our nation’s future. Every student Frank has coached has gone on to study cybersecurity or computer science in college.
Schools can’t train our kids for the future alone. It’s going to take professionals in the community like Frank to pitch in when a school lacks capacity. Ultimately, parents still have the biggest role in solving this national security challenge. From an early age, parents need to read to their kids. Even reading to infants leads to improved language skills and cognitive development, like problem solving. A home full of books, studies show, benefits children’s educational achievement and job success.
Every child in every neighborhood should be able to go to an excellent school. That involves ensuring that states and local communities are empowered to do what’s best for their children because they are most likely to know how to get the best out of their kids. One-size-fits-all federal programs usually designed with the best intentions often limit educational innovation. A fourth grader in Texas should be able to do the same math problems as a fourth grader in California, but the way you teach that Texas student may be different from the way you teach the kid from California.
In 2015 I was proud to have helped a Republican Congress and a Democrat president sign into law the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). The ESSA built upon and improved one of George W. Bush’s signature legislative accomplishments—No Child Left Behind—by giving the states more power to evaluate the performance of schools and decide how to fix them. I learned in Congress that it is difficult to hold someone accountable for an action if that person didn’t have all the necessary authority to affect the outcome of events. Congress, in a very bipartisan way, gave states more authority to improve the education of our children; now they need to actually do it.
While we have to prepare our kids for jobs that don’t exist today, we must prepare our workforce for disruptions we haven’t seen since the Industrial Revolution. The question is not whether this disruption will happen or not. It’s coming. The question is how we help today’s workforce transition to “new collar” jobs.
We know artificial intelligence will transform the nature of work and affect every aspect of the economy. Grocery store cashiers are being replaced by automated systems. AI-powered virtual assistants are proliferating. Factories are using robots that use AI algorithms and can work alongside humans. Self-driving vehicles will replace truck and ride-share drivers. Machines will interpret X-rays and keep the books at businesses. Automated phone services will replace more receptionists. AI in the workplace will only continue to grow.
These are just some of the reasons that, in 2020, the House passed landmark legislation developed by Rep. Robin Kelly (D-Illinois) and me to pursue a national AI strategy. Robin and I worked with expert stakeholders and the Bipartisan Policy Center with the aim of putting our nation on the path to retain an edge in AI and secure the next seventy years of American-led international prosperity and security.
One of the four pillars of the legislation was Workforce Development, because the proliferation of AI in the workplace doesn’t mean a robot revolution will take over. But an AI-driven economy will create the need for a workforce capable of using AI as the tool that it is. Failure to recognize the need to adapt will severely hurt American competitiveness and create unnecessary economic hardship and pain for the average American worker.
Technology will continuously change, which requires lifelong learning and workforce training that will help people develop the skills to adapt as their jobs do. The reality is that in many fields taking advantage of new technologies, employers are begging for workers. In 2019, I served as co-chair of the Aspen Cybersecurity Group, a convening of thirty-eight of the nation’s highest-level experts to execute nonpartisan solutions to cybersecurity challenges. We learned that by 2021 there were going to be half a million unfilled cybersecurity positions across government and industry. To expand the pool of candidates to fill these vacancies, we proposed companies expand recruitment beyond applicants with four-year degrees; use non-gender-biased job descriptions that would explain the position without using gender-specific words and phrases; and make career paths clear, understandable, and accessible to employees and job seekers.
Despite these efforts, the U.S. struggles to produce enough high-skilled workers needed to ensure the U.S. economy stays the most important economy in the world. To retain our economy’s vaulted status, we are going to have to raise our gaze when it comes to our expectations for the American workforce. As a country we are going to have to take a play out of my mother’s playbook that led to me crying the hardest I had ever cried. I was in the fourth grade, and I was sobbing uncontrollably on the bus from school to home. I was minutes away from confessing to my mother that I had done something I had never done before—I got a B on my report card.
In our household, grades below excellent (all As) were not welcome. If I brought home a report card where I dropped from a 98 to a 96, my mom would be on my ass about why I hadn’t gone up to 100 instead. She was always loving, but when it came to performance at school—She. Did. Not. Play. Exceptional was the only outcome accepted. My mother’s high expectations are why I have such exacting standards now, including for myself, and our country shouldn’t settle for anything less than exceptional when it comes to training the workforce of tomorrow.