Groups Offer Ways to Improve U.S. Education

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"The global race is going to continue, and it's going to intensify in the coming years," said CCSSO Executive Director Gene Wilhoit "We are unwilling to be on the losing end of this race,"

Making textbooks and assessments more focused and better aligned would also help, the report suggests. Textbooks often present a "laundry list" of topics, which has led to the criticism that Americans are learning curricula that are "a mile wide and an inch deep." Mitchell Chester, education commissioner of Massachusetts, said the goal of international benchmarking is to help the United States know not only how it measures up to other countries but also what the highachieving countries are doing that can be put to use in U.S. classrooms.. To that end, he says, federal lawmakers must allocate more funds to states that want to adopt these reforms. "We're not going to have all states march in lockstep, but there is a much greater sense of urgency than ever seen before" to adopt these reforms, says Mike Cohen, executive director of the school reform group Achieve Inc.

In 1995, the rate of Americans going to college was among the highest in the world. [...] 13 other countries boast higher college graduation rates than the United States.

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Groups Offer Ways to Improve U.S. Education

By now, many people are familiar with America's poor academic performance on the international stage. Forty years ago, the United States had the highest high school completion rate in the w...

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