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Almost every government, from Beijing to Ottawa, is nowadays forced to use immigration to fill job shortages, at the same time as it devotes expensive social programs to helping the jobless. This, to put it mildly, has been creating tensions.

34 per cent of corporations now regard “shortage of skilled labour” as their main business constraint

another 13 per cent regard their biggest problem as “shortage of un/semi-skilled labour.”

It is a truth universally acknowledged that education is the key to economic success. Everyone knows that the jobs of the future will require ever higher levels of skill. That’s why, in an appearance Friday with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, President Obama declared that “If we want more good news on the jobs front then we’ve got to make more investments in education.”

But what everyone knows is wrong.

technological progress is actually reducing the demand for highly educated workers.

Until a few decades ago, employment discrimination perversely strengthened our teaching force. Brilliant women became elementary school teachers, because better jobs weren’t open to them. It was profoundly unfair, but the discrimination did benefit America’s children. These days, brilliant women become surgeons and investment bankers — and 47 percent of America’s kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers come from the bottom one-third of their college classes (as measured by SAT scores). The figure is from a study by McKinsey & Company, “Closing the Talent Gap.”

Recent scholarship suggests that good teachers, even kindergarten teachers, increase their students’ earnings many years later. Eric A. Hanushek of Stanford University found that an excellent teacher (one a standard deviation better than average, or better than 84 percent of teachers) raises each student’s lifetime earnings by $20,000. If there are 20 students in the class, that is an extra $400,000 generated, compared with a teacher who is merely average.

Consider three other countries renowned for their educational performance: Singapore, South Korea and Finland. In each country, teachers are drawn from the top third of their cohort, are hugely respected and are paid well (although that’s less true in Finland). In South Korea and Singapore, teachers on average earn more than lawyers and engineers, the McKinsey study found.

Despite a country-wide boost in high school graduation rates over the past 20 years, the dropout rate in Alberta remains the third highest in the country at 10.4 per cent, ahead of Manitoba at 11.4 per cent and Quebec at 11.7 per cent.

Like Ontario and most provinces across the country, Alberta has also expanded their work experience programs to try and keep high school students interested in working in manufacturing or trades from dropping out. Recognizing that education isn’t one-size-fits all is definitely a step in the right direction towards getting students to value their education. However, thinking that requiring students by law will simply make everything fall into place when it comes to raising the high school graduation rate is simply foolish.

As spokeswoman for Alberta Education, Carolyn Stuparyk, told the Globe and Mail, a large part of the challenge in keeping Alberta students in school is combating the notion that taking a high paying physical labour job in a still relatively strong economy is more exciting than sitting in a classroom.

Both SFMade and its New York cousin, Made in N.Y.C., are increasingly able to share success stories of how manufacturing has developed new models for doing business in the 21st century. The monolithic single-industry model has evolved as manufacturers see the benefits of being smaller and paying attention to how patterns of consumption, ownership and use are shifting.

“For decades we have developed a culture of disposability — from consumer goods to medical instruments and machine tools. To fuel economic growth, marketers replaced longevity with planned obsolescence — and our mastery of technology has given birth to ever-accelerating unplanned obsolescence. I think there is increasing awareness that this is no longer sustainable on the scale we have developed.”

“It’s not some cute cottage industry,” she says, referring to the prevailing tendency to view “local” as something generally limited to cupcakes, jam or “My Mom Went to _____ And All I Got Was This T-Shirt.” The “number one thing we do,” Sofis continues, “is facilitate new connections.”

Here’s the game plan: raise starting pay, accelerate salary bumps to keep up with a young teacher’s rapid improvement in effectiveness, offer ways for teachers to take on additional responsibilities and thus make more money (like mentoring younger peers or taking on more students), and offer portable retirement benefits that allow people to build retirement wealth without signing on for a lifetime of teaching. Finance this all by allowing class sizes to rise modestly, maximizing smart uses of technology, and trimming the number of aides and specialists our schools employ.

job-creation plans

job retraining programs.

To me that's not good public policy because it's essentially paying for jobs