I just returned from a national forum on educational reform conducted by the Institute for a Competitive Workforce and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The forum focused on workforce preparedness: are our kids coming out of school prepared to go to work in jobs where they are most needed and what reforms are needed in our schools to get them there?

The conference was fascinating. It brought together some of the leading reform advocates from think tanks and foundations around the country. Interestingly, both sides of the political aisle seemed in harmony about the need to continue systemic reform and every indication is that the Obama administration is going to be inclined to a continuation and a refinement of the policies underway.

Not surprisingly No Child Left Behind was a major topic of discussion. Here the focus was primarily on urban school districts where the legislation seems to have a dramatic and positive effect. There was also a good deal of discussion on how some states try to subvert the process by making tests too easy, thus giving the impression that they are doing a good job teaching.

There is a new initiative to create national standards called the Common Core State Standards Initiative. I’m proud to say that New Jersey is one of the 46 states that have signed on to this proposal. Only Alaska, Missouri, South Carolina and Texas are lagging in coming on board.

However, I am very troubled by the determination of these new standards.

Over and over we read that the United States is falling behind in math and science. But are math and science the best measures of how well a society is doing? I think not. Though I did my graduate work in advanced applied mathematics, I know a lot of people who are very successful even though they can barely add.

We are told there are not enough people being trained to work in labs. We read that in our universities a disproportionately large percentage of the math and science students come from foreign countries. We are warned they are stealing our jobs at home, taking our technology abroad and soon we’re going to be a backwater nation.

To me this smacks of xenophobia. It is natural that foreign students gravitate to the sciences as language skill is less important in those pursuits. Also, a very large proportion of these students end up staying in the U.S. and fill the lab tech jobs we keep hearing about. Immigrants have always filled jobs in the U.S.; this has made us the country we are. As for taking technology home, the wealthier the country, the more valuable trading partner it is.

Many times during the forum the success of Singapore was highlighted. Singapore consistently scores at the highest end of the spectrum in math and science. Singapore is also the cleanest, greenest, most modern city in the world.

However, Singapore is a city, and not an especially big one. But it has the revenue of a county. In other words, the equivalent of all federal, state and local taxes together, with property taxes and sales taxes included, all go into its budget. Singapore has a lot of money to spend. I moved to New Jersey from Singapore, and I can attest to this first hand.

Yet Singaporeans are not sought-after managers. Their workers are incredibly skilled and able to do to perfection that which they have been taught to do. Whether working on an assembly line, in a lab running experiments or making accounting journal entries, they are super. Don’t put a problem before them that they have never seen, however, because you will be disappointed with the results.

This brings me to my big fear. The U.S. education system has been structured to teach people how to think. Unlike most of the world, we have not traditionally been taught by rote to simply memorize facts to regurgitate them on a test.

However, as we move toward national standards, this could become a very real possibility. We may get real good at turning out lab techs, but not musicians and writers and entrepreneurs.