Thomas Friedman today comments on a new study McKinsey study "The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools."

Using an economic model created for this study, McKinsey showed how much those gaps are costing us. Suppose, it noted, “that in the 15 years after the 1983 report ‘A Nation at Risk’ sounded the alarm about the ‘rising tide of mediocrity’ in American education,” the U.S. had lifted lagging student achievement to higher benchmarks of performance? What would have happened?

The answer, says McKinsey: If America had closed the international achievement gap between 1983 and 1998 and had raised its performance to the level of such nations as Finland and South Korea, United States G.D.P. in 2008 would have been between $1.3 trillion and $2.3 trillion higher. If we had closed the racial achievement gap and black and Latino student performance had caught up with that of white students by 1998, G.D.P. in 2008 would have been between $310 billion and $525 billion higher. If the gap between low-income students and the rest had been narrowed, G.D.P. in 2008 would have been $400 billion to $670 billion higher.

I was part of the steering committee that reviewed the study and Friedman does a very good job here.  Some of the other key economic findings are:

Put differently, the persistence of these educational achievement gaps imposes on the United States the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession. The recurring annual economic cost of the international achievement gap is substantially larger than the deep recession the United States is currently experiencing.  The annual output cost of the racial, income, and regional or systems achievement gap is larger than the US recession of 1981–82.
...

By underutilizing such a large proportion of the country’s human potential, the US economy is less rich in skills than it could be. The result is that American workers are, on average, less able to develop, master, and adapt to new productivity-enhancing technologies and methods than they could otherwise have been. Also, these achievement gaps have a clustering effect akin to economic dead zones, where communities with low-achieving local schools produce clusters of Americans largely unable to participate in the greater American economy due to a concentration of low skills, high unemployment, or high incarceration rates.

The report does sound a note of optimism:

While the price of the status quo in educational outcomes is remarkably high, the promise implicit in these findings is compelling. In particular, the wide variation in performance among schools and school systems serving similar students suggests that the opportunity and output gaps related to today’s achievement gap can be substantially closed. Many teachers and schools across the country are proving that race and poverty are not destiny; many more are demonstrating that middle-class children can be educated to world-class levels of performance. America’s history of bringing disadvantaged groups into the economic mainstream over time, and the progress of other nations in education, suggest that large steps forward are possible.

As Friedman notes as well:

President Obama recognizes that we urgently need to invest the money and energy to take those schools and best practices that are working from islands of excellence to a new national norm. But we need to do it with the sense of urgency and follow-through that the economic and moral stakes demand.