"Over the past 25 years, high-profile school reform efforts have addressed false problems with flawed solutions. By imposing blanket reforms on varying local circumstances, policymakers have stifled educational ingenuity. To actually improve the education of America’s children, state and federal policymakers should formulate and implement policies that provide incentives for problem-solving in local settings.
To do this, they will first need to recognize that some of the “problems” our public schools are called upon to solve are problematic in themselves. These include claims that U.S. productivity lags behind that of other countries, that students’ achievement here is far eclipsed by their international peers’, that academic achievement translates into worker productivity, and that we have a shortage of workers with math and science skills."