States can handle school reform

States can handle school reform
By George F. Will

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“Since 1995 the average mathematics score for fourth-graders jumped 11 points. At this rate we catch up with Singapore in a little over 80 years ... assuming they don’t improve.”

— Norman R. Augustine, retired CEO, Lockheed Martin

WASHINGTON — What America needs, says one American parent, is more parents who resemble South Korean parents. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, 46, a father of a third-grader and a first-grader, recalls the answer Barack Obama got when he asked South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, “What is the biggest education challenge you have?” Lee answered: “Parents are too demanding.” They want their children to start learning English in first rather than second grade. Only 25 percent of U.S. elementary schools offer any foreign-language instruction.

Too many U.S. parents, Duncan says, have “cognitive dissonance” concerning primary and secondary schools: They think their children’s schools are fine, and that schools that are not fine are irredeemable. This, Duncan says, is a re- cipe for “stasis” and “insidious paralysis.” He attempts to impart motion by puncturing complacency and picturing the payoff from excellence.

He notes that 75 percent of young Americans would be unable to enlist in the military for reasons physical (usually obesity), moral (criminal records) or academic (no high school diploma). A quarter of all ninth-graders will not graduate in four years. Another study suggests that a modest improvement (from a current average of around 500 to 525) over 20 years in an international student assessment of 15-year-olds in the OECD nations — improvement in reading, math and science literacy — would mean a $115 trillion increase in these nations’ aggregate GDP. Of that, $41 trillion would accrue to America. McKinsey calculated that if U.S. students matched those in Finland, America’s economy would have been 9 percent to 16 percent larger in 2008 — between $1.3 trillion and $2.3 trillion.

Familiar recipes for improvement are dubious. “Many high-performing education systems, especially in Asia,” Duncan says, “have substantially larger classes than the United States.”

In South Korea, secondary-school classes average about 36 students, in Japan 33, in America 25.

Duncan knows that Americans are uneasy about any national education standards that might emanate from a Washington they distrust, but he insists that it is irrational to have 50 different goal posts. Perhaps, but 50 different approaches might yield a few that are truly superior. The Education Department sits at the foot of Capitol Hill, where many new legislators consider “federal education policy” a constitutional oxymoron. They have a point.

They might, however, decide that the changes Duncan proposes — on balance, greater state flexibility in meeting national goals — make him the Obama administration’s redeeming feature.