In a recent article for The Atlantic, Marc Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, reflects on wages and education. Using examples like Japan, Finland, Hong Kong and Shanghai, Tucker claims that until the U.S. finds a way “to educate our future work force to the same standards…wages in the United States will continue to decline.”
Rather than looking at what these countries and megacities are doing to outperform the US in both education and economics, policymakers, business leaders, educators and advocates “are confidently barreling down a path of American exceptionalism, insisting that America is so different from these other nations that we are better off embracing unique, unproven solutions that our foreign competitors find bizarre.” Although solutions such as vouchers, grade-by-grade testing, charter schools and pay-for-performance appeal to many people, they are “nowhere to be found in the arsenal of strategies used by the top-performing nations.”
Thirty years ago, Tucker observes, American companies who survived the economic rise of Japan managed to do so by figuring out what the Japanese were doing to become increasingly competitive—and then did it better. Therefore, the most effective way to improve student performance vis-à-vis top performing countries is to figure out what these countries are doing, “and then, by capitalizing on our unique strengths, develop a strategy to do it even better.”
The problem with American education is not a lack of innovation. It is a lack of what the most successful countries have: coherent, well-designed state educational systems. “Playing to our strengths makes sense. Ignoring what works, simply because it was invented elsewhere, does not.”
To read Tucker’s full article, please visit http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/why-innovation-cant-fix-americas-classrooms/249524/
