Keynote Transcript


2001 Founders' Award For Distinguished Business Leadership

Craig Barrett
November 6, 2001

MR. RUST: Good evening. I'm Edward Rust, chairman and CEO of the State Farm Insurance Companies and former chair of the National Alliance of Business. Let me once again welcome you to this very special annual event and ask you to thank the D.C.Boys Choir for their outstanding performance.

Tonight we present the Henry Ford Business Leadership Award, named for the founder Henry Ford II, that recognizes a corporate chief executive who has demonstrated leadership and commitment in fostering education and workforce excellence.

The business community's commitment to and its influence in improving achievement of individuals is symbolized by Dr. Craig Barrett, president and CEO of Intel.

Not only has Craig Barrett propelled Intel into a universally recognized leader in the technology field, he has also personally dedicated his time, his energy, and his resources to improving education through his direct involvement at the community, state, national, and even global level across the globe.

You just had a chance to view some of Dr. Barrett's and Intel's contributions, and you will hear more about them shortly.

We are fortunate tonight to also have one of our country's heroes with us in Senator John Glenn. John is here tonight to help present this award to Dr. Barrett. In addition to being the nation's first astronaut, Senator Glenn has played a most unique role in promoting man and science education. Senator Glenn chairs the National Commission on Mathematics and Science Teaching for the 21st Century, on which Dr. Barrett serves. These two gentlemen clearly share a deep passion for improving the math and science education of all children.

Senator Glenn and Craig, may I ask you to join us up here for this appropriate recognition?

SENATOR GLENN: Thank you very, very much. It is a real pleasure for Annie and me to be here and participate in this great occasion this evening here.

Intel, the largest chip producer in the world and the creator of the microprocessor, has placed intelligent appliances, desktop computers and toys at our fingertips, and also is the nation's leader corporate advocate for improved math, science, and technology education.

These contributions, led by Dr. Craig Barrett, demonstrate that well-focused, strategic and results-oriented corporate investments improve teaching, learning and the ability of all students to compete in an increasingly technical world.

Craig knows first-hand the higher levels of skills and knowledge required for the future, and he constantly states that his company's ability to reinvent itself continually is the product of its workforce, ingenuity and creativity. For this reason, Intel and other corporations are working together with educators and policymakers to raise the bar for student and school performances.

Intel's growing investment in education and communities across the country is evidenced in its increased annual giving, which grew from $30 million in 1995 to more than $120 million today. Mind you, that is not cumulative, that is per year.

I think when we were working on the Math and Science Commission Craig said one year they topped out at $160 million, one company. That is just great.

But financial support is not the only means by which Intel is supporting education throughout the world. The Intel Teach To The Future program will train more than 400,000 classroom teachers in 20 different countries to integrate technology into their classrooms. And the Intel Computer Clubhouse Network of after-school invention workshops, as they are called, in underserved communities around the world provide a safe and creative learning environment for young people to develop skills, and maybe even more importantly, to develop their confidence to go on and do other things.

Probably the most recognizable Intel program is the Intel Science Talent Search, which provides awards and scholarships to the most promising future scientists in the U.S. and is regarded as a junior Nobel Prize. Annie and I had the honor to attend that ceremony where they awarded some of those prizes just a few months back. It was very inspiring.

I wish we had the time this evening to go through all the titles of the projects. And I was completely out of it. Of course, Craig understood some of those titles. Some of them were really, really great, and some of them is what Intel is doing in sponsoring these Nobel laureates of the future, which is really what they are, is just outstanding.

Intel invests significantly in higher education through program and curriculum support and research and development in student support programs, especially those aimed at supporting women and under-represented minorities in technical areas. Intel has entered ground-breaking partnerships with over 40 community and technical colleges to create a national network of training centers focused on essential workforceskills.

In the policy arena, Craig is an effective and powerful spokesman for the business community's efforts to improve education. He has advised the President and has testified before Congress.

As co-chair of the Business Coalition for Excellence in Education, the ad hoc group of 80 leading corporations and business associations managed by NEB, Craig has played a significant role in pushing for effective accountability, provisions, and support for improving teacher quality and the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

I have personally witnessed Craig's passion for improving math and science education as we worked together on the Commission on Math and Science Teaching in the 21st Century. He was one of our very most active members and contributed greatly to the report that was put out. His commitment to improving the educational processes and outcomes for all students is unwavered. It's just great for us to be here tonight and to be able to participate.

Let me add another thing before I get to that. Within his company, the Corporation's commitment to the development of its own workers is valued at $200 million annually. More than 45,000 classes in 3,000 subjects were offered at the Virtual Intel University last year.

Globally, Intel has been providing education opportunities at all levels, building educational Web sites in China, promoting innovative applications of technology in Indian schools, and supporting math and science teaching innovations in Israel.

Craig once said to me, and I quote, "The value-added role industry can play in education is to do what we do every day, focus on getting the results needed in the shortest time frame possible."

Ladies and gentleman, getting results is what our honorary Craig Barrett has done. He's changed the debates in this country on math and science education while investing in education for all people throughout the world.

So it's a pleasure for us to be here tonight, and please join us all in recognizing Dr. Craig Barrett as the 2001 recipient of the Henry Ford Business Leader of the Year for demonstrated leadership and commitment in fostering education.

Craig, we're honored to be here, and congratulations.

DR. BARRETT: I think my mother warned me once about following a talented group of youngsters, a couple of CEOs that I greatly admire, an astronaut turned public servant turned astronaut turned public servant who is interested in education. I'm absolutely helpless to follow in the footsteps of those four groups or individuals.

I do want to accept this honor tonight on behalf of some 85,000 Intel employees. They are really the ones who, around the world, get involved in education. As we like to say within the corporation, education is our only extracurricular activity. We don't do golf tournaments. We don't do anything but education. We have a deep-rooted feeling that education is the most critical aspect of the environment that we see today.

I do have the benefit each year to travel to about 30 different countries on business for Intel, and I get to talk to government leaders, business leaders, education leaders around the world. And you hear a quite common theme today. Everyone recognizes the importance of education for their economic destiny, their economic future. They recognize it's no longer low wage rates, natural resources, or anything else that will determine the economic destiny of the country. It's in fact the knowledge embedded in their work force, knowledge that their children gain through the educational process.

And it's quite heartening to travel around the world and to see the efforts not only in the established economies but the emerging economies, whether those economies be Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, to see the importance that governments, companies, educational institutions place on raising children with a very, very strong sense of science and technology and engineering in the future.

Despite what's happened in the NASDAQ recently or the Dow, what's happened to the communications and computer industries, I think most of us recognize that really the golden age, the age of strong advancement of communications and computers put together on the Internet to link not just hundreds of millions but billions of people around that world, to use that medium for commerce, for communication, for information access and entertainment is going to be the wave of the future.

The countries, the companies, the individuals who benefit from that will be those who have a strongly grounded technical background. It is the most important thing we can do for our youngsters. And to be here tonight with the National Alliance of Business, to be able to stand here in front of a group of people who feel, I think, as passionately as we do, the most important thing we can do is to provide all the youngsters, regardless of background, to provide all the youngsters with an absolutely solid opportunity for educational aspects. That's what we're all about, and that's what we're trying to do.

The thing that sometimes disappoints me a little bit is, as I do travel around the world, I sometimes see more emphasis on results, more emphasis on what it takes to improve the situation than I see here in the United States.

And you don't have to look very far in the United States to see the elements of the problem. If you look at what's happening, starting really at the top, look at what's happening in our graduate schools. Physical sciences, more than half the graduate students are foreign nationals. It's not because they are taking places of U.S. students who are interested. It's because there are no U.S. students who are interested in going after those advanced degrees.

We still have the absolute best university system for educating graduate students in the world. That's why so many foreign students come here. But our own students aren't interested in the schooling. If you go down a notch to bachelor's degree levels and you look at perhaps the best indicator of the technology direction that we are all headed in, and that's computer science, computer engineering electrical engineering, we graduate 20 percent fewer of those engineers today than we did a decade ago. And if we really believe that those disciplines are the foundation for the economy of the future and we are graduating fewer of those people today, it has to be a sign that there is something wrong with this system.

If you look across the board at the number of engineers, we graduate 5 percent of the college graduates in the U.S. today graduate with engineering degrees. If you go Russia, Germany, it's 33 percent. If you go to China, it's 50 percent of the college graduates have engineering degrees. That has to be a sign that there is a problem.

If that doesn't bother you, just look at the quality of our K-12 graduates. Fourth-graders, compared to our international counterparts in industrialized or newly industrialized countries, are basically on par with math and science; by 8th grade, falling serious behind; by 12th grade, they are in fact at the bottom of the heap. That is on the basis of the 20 or 25 countries, we place about in the lower 10 percent.

There is really no wonder, if you look at the college interest in engineering,math and science, by the time a student gets out of high school, they are basically turned off to these topics. If you take it down another notch further, if you're in an inner-city school and you take a math or science course, the odds are probably less than 50 percent you'll get a teacher that is accredited or trained for the math or science subject that they're teaching. Imagine having 2 or 3 years in a row and take the percentage each year of 50 percent. There's a small probability that they will have three teachers in a row who are really qualified to teach the subject that they are teaching. So is it any wonder that we have a lack of minority students or students with poor backgrounds that are math and science capable by the time they graduate from high school?

But that's why we're here. That's why we're interested in improving this. I come to this problem with a very simple standpoint. Like many people in the business community, I was trained as an engineer. Sputnik, John, brought me to where I am today. The National Science Foundation put a lot money in the universities. It was an exciting topic at that point in time to study.

But the real issue is, how do we get young children interested in math and science? How do we get them competent teachers in that area? And as an engineer, I look at this as another problem to solve. You have to define what the problem is. You have to define the methods at which you measure the magnitude of the problem. You have to put a plan of action in place to solve it. You have to monitor those methods. You have feedback and you take the results and go back and modify the plan.

A fellow by the name of Shuert (phonetic) in the mid-thirties, who was the predecessor of Deming (phonetic) and the whole quality management system, postulated that there was a plan-do-check-act cycle, that everyone ought to follow that; and unless you had that cyclic cycle plan, that really needs to find the problem, do something about it, check the results, act on the results and get back to the plan cycle, you never get anywhere.

Fortunately, there are a number of organizations today. Ed Rust has been involved in these. John Glenn has been involved in these. Keith Bailey has been involved in these. Many of you in the audience have been involved in these. I think we're just starting the planning cycle, though. We have a long way to go.

And the planning cycle is really addressing the problem of how do you monitor success as you move forward. You create standards. You assess the response to those standards. You have accountability. You have teaching quality issues. How do you do the plan-do-check-act cycle? We're just starting that stage, and it is going to be many, many years before we really accomplish this task.

I want to speak out to my business counterparts in the audience today, it is going to be a long road, a difficult one, and we're going to have to probably do something much different than we have done in the past. You've heard a little bit about some of the Intel programs we had in the past. We had trained already 200,000 teachers around the world on how to integrate technology in the classroom. We'll train another 200,000 next year alone, and probably will continue the program after that. We run science fairs for young kids to show that they don't have to be the All-American quarterback to get recognition from their peers; they can excel in math or science and get recognition from the press, parents, their peers. Those are very, very small pieces of the puzzle.

It occurred to me shortly after the September 11th event that how inadequate we have been in getting this message across, getting this message that we have an extremely serious problem here in the United States, really a ticking time bomb, that if our educational system is broken and we are sitting around debating whether we should have tests, whether we should have assessments, and really ignoring the solution to that problem.

The thing that really brought it home is it took our national government precisely 5 days to allocate $15 billion to bail out the airline industry, while we've had incessant debate and inaction on the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. You know, it is quite amazing how we can sometimes preoccupy ourselves with peripheral discussion and ignore the topic at hand.

We have a current issue with airline security. We are again debating whether airline security guards should be government or private employees. Frankly, who cares? The issue is not who they work for. The issue is what they do and whether they have standards and whether they are accountable for those standards.

The education problem is, we have an education problem. There are certain boundary conditions we have to work under. But everyone who has ever solved a problem knows you have to define the problem, you have to have methods by measuring your performance to success, you have to have feedback loops and you have to get on with it. You can't debate it incessantly.

We're going to have some form of standards. We're going to have standards. We're going to be able to assess those standards and publish the results. We're going to hold people accountable. We're going to do quality training in light of the standards and assessments we want in place. And we need to just get on with that activity and not debate it.

Every year that we debate these topics, we lose another graduating class. And as we lose another graduating class, we're really condemning those children to a lower level of professionalism in their careers. We need to recognize that, and either educate those children consistent with what the future will demand of them ?? and the future will demand that they be technically competent, be able to understand the technology that they are using, understand the technology and complexity of the society that they operate in ?? or they are going to be subjected to low-paying service jobs.

The United States enjoys a wonderful, wonderful standard of living. That is based on the value-add that our workforce puts into the economy. That will only continue as long as our workforce is better educated than the rest of the world. And right now we are doing exactly the opposite to what we should be doing. Our young children are not coming out of the 12th grade comparable to their international counterparts.

So what I need to draw from this audience is your efforts to speak out on the big-policy issue as well as work, as you have been, on the details of problem-solving. You've heard the issues that Intel has been involved with problem-solving. We can talk about Ed Rust and State Farm, we could talk about Lou Gershner and IBM, we could talk about Tom Engibous at TI, or any number of CEOs. They are all deeply involved in the details.

Collectively, we have not made our voice heard, though, on the public policy level of how important this problem is that we're trying to solve. We need to step forward and get the education act passed. We need to step forward and get the first pass of the tech talent bill passed to close this graduation gap that we have, to close this gap of graduating enough engineers to feed our own economy so that we don't have to go annually to Washington, D.C., or come here, and say, "We need more H-1B visas because we don't graduate enough technically trained people to fill our own jobs."

Frankly, most of us are involved in international competition, and our jobs go to the best technical talent around the world, wherever it is. We've been fortunate enough in the last 10 years, while we haven't been graduating enough U.S. citizens in the engineering and technical area, to be able to import talent, people who have graduated from U.S. universities or graduated from foreign universities and are willing to come to the United States.

But I can tell you from personal experience traveling around the world that, increasingly, Taiwan engineers want to live and work in Taiwan; Indian engineers want to live and work in India; Chinese engineers want to live and work in Shanghai or Asia. They are not going to come to the United States to feed our industries. The jobs are going to go to them.

The only choice we have is to have an educated workforce, a U.S.-educated workforce, that meets our needs and is qualified to be the best in the world at what they do. It has to start at the K-12 level. We have to do the things that the National Coalition for Engineering Excellence want to achieve, that the Business Coalition has been doing, that everyone in this audience has been doing. But we have to make our voices heard more in the public, raise this issue to the level of the crisis which it is, and then to continue to push, push, push.

The fact that John Glenn is here gives me a perfect ending to this discussion, and that is, you've all seen, I'm sure, the "Apollo 13" movie where the Apollo capsule is on its way back, it has got a power shortage, the air circulation system is not working, and they have to jerry-rig it. And as all the technicians are sitting around debating amongst themselves about what they can do and what they can't do, the flight commander, or whoever that person is called, John, basically steps up and says, "Hey, guys get on with it. Failure is not an option."

We have exactly the same charter before us. Failure is not an option with regard to the education of our young people.

I'm looking forward to working with all of you on this topic. I want to recognize all of you who have put in your long hours and effort, as well as the rest of the organizations that are not here tonight. We have a lot of work in front of us, but I think collectively we can move it forward. We just have to make sure that we don't put our heads down in our local businesses and just treat it as a business-as-usual problem. We have to step forward and put ourselves in the public policy spotlight, make our voices heard, collectively. And I think if we do that, failure is not an option.

Thank you.

Presented By:

  • KEITH E. BAILEY, Chairman and CEO
    National Alliance of Business

  • EDWARD B. RUST, Chairman and CEO
    State Farm Insurance Companies

  • THE HONORABLE JOHN GLENN
    Former United States Senator from Ohio

* Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.