Educational performance has become a crucial element in the United States' capacity to prosper in a new global economy of fierce competition. In addition to the traditional question of how the educational system contributes to students' intellectual growth, a new question is being asked: How does the educational system contribute to national economic competitiveness? Two national competitiveness strategies are open. One is to compete on the basis of low wages, a path the United States is presently pursuing. The other strategy is to compete on the basis of higher wages, that is, the capacity to produce efficiently innovative high quality goods and services that can be sold with high enough margins to support higher incomes and profits. A key to the success of this strategy lies in a nation's ability to create and maintain a high-quality work force, the source of adaptability in a marketplace changing at an accelerated pace. The nation's leadership has not committed itself to giving education and training the required investment priority. Reasons given for not investing in education include the following: enough is already spent; education is a labor-intensive service; education is traditionally a state and local problem; more research is needed on how to improve educational performance; and administrators, teachers, and school boards resist change. Three possible sources for investment in education and training are taxes, borrowing, and shifting funds from the military budget to human resource investment. (YLB)