Fixing the US Education System

In Thursday’s WSJ, Michael Bloomberg comments on a new report by the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) that the US educational system is “flabby, inefficient and outdated”.  Key points from his OpEd piece include:

• Only 18 out of 100 high-school freshmen will graduate on time, enroll directly in college and earn a two-year degree in three years or a four-year degree in six.
• Other countries are investing in their education systems will increasingly compete for America’s higher paying jobs
• America is not getting a sufficient return on investment in the enormous sums of money that we spend on education
• America recruits “a disproportionate share of teachers from among the bottom third of their college classes”.
• It has also “built too many bureaucracies that lack clear lines of accountability, which means that mediocrity and failure are tolerated, and excellence goes unrewarded”.

According to Bloomberg, fixing the education systems will require:

…a performance-based culture of accountability that is oriented around children, not bureaucracies. It will require us to offer higher teacher salaries to attract more of the best and brightest, and to offer financial rewards to the most successful teachers. It will require us to set and uphold high standards, encourage innovation and competition, and end social promotion — the harmful practice of advancing students to the next grade despite their poor academic performance. And it will require us to invest in early childhood development and distribute funding more equitably.

Fixing our education system will also require some tough choices on the part of America’s politicians.  If we are going to make a real and lasting changes and remain competitive in the global stage, politicians, administrators and business people need to stand up and press for change.