A Nation Still At Risk....

I am going through emails I didn't have time to read during the hectic days at the end of the school year (more on that in another post), when I came upon this quote from an article in the New York Times:

NYTimes
April 25, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
"
A Nation at a Loss

By EDWARD B. FISKE

"To put it bluntly, American students may not know as much as their counterparts around the Pacific Rim, but our society allows them to make better use of what they do know. The question now is whether this historic advantage will suffice at a time when knowledge of math, science and technology is becoming increasingly critical. Maybe we need both the enabling environment and more rigor in these areas."

"Most troubling now are the numbers on educational attainment. One reason that the American economy was so dominant throughout the 20th century is that we provided more education to more citizens than other industrialized countries. “A Nation at Risk” noted with pride that American schools “now graduate 75 percent of our young people from high school.”

"That figure has now dropped to less than 70 percent, and the United States, which used to lead the world in sending high school graduates on to higher education, has declined to fifth in the proportion of young adults who participate in higher education and is 16th out of 27 industrialized countries in the proportion who complete college, according to the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education."

This should be on the agenda of every superintendent, governor, and presidential candidate. How do we get this across, that it is our problem-solving and thinking, our creativity, that makes us so strong as a nation? I think part of what I will look to do this summer is start my own educational coup, with questions that need answers, and hopefully people reading this will want to contribute.