There were those who saw this coming.

In 1990, the Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce--a creation of the National Center for Education and the Economy(NCEE)--released a report titled America's Choice: High Skills or Low wages.

It's message: "In a globalized world, there would be no place for the low-skilled to hide. We had to educate everyone to the standards that the world's highest performers set."

Over the next few years, almost all of the recommendations were turned into legislation at the national and/or state levels. It was clear that standards-based education had taken a foothold.

It was widely assumed that India and China might become the world's workshop, but that "...the West would remain the brains of that workshop and would reap all the rewards that go with being the world's center for research, development, innovation, design, finance and marketing."

It was now clear that neither India nor China was onboard with that vision of the future. Our competitor nations were now offering high skills at low wages, a possibility which had not even been dreamed of in 1990.

And so, NCEE formed the NEW Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, whose report, Tough Choices or Tough Times was published in 2007.

The new commission realized immediately that nothing less than the American standard of living was at risk. With other nations ready to do both low- and high-skill work at low wages compared to ours, how would it be possible to continue America's high-wage standard of living?

They forecast that, unless dramatic changes were made in our educational system--not tinkering around the edges by getting rid of "bad" teachers or adding a few minutes to the school day--our standard of living would begin to decline.

And so it has. We hear daily on the news that the next generation is likely to have a lower standard of living than their parents. We were warned years ago, and went on to something more interesting.

There is, however, still time to turn things around, provided we can break the country away from its "politics as spectator sport" fascination. If we demand that our representatives concentrate on recognizing and solving our problems instead of focusing only on winning the next election, and as citizens we recognize that what needs to be done will not be easy, maybe we still have a chance.

Let's start with the one thing of ultimate importance, according to the commission. To paraphrase Bill Clinton: "It's the engineers, stupid!"