WASHINGTON — Education governance in the United States is too disjointed and too diffuse to achieve the kind of massive redesign needed to get the nation’s academic results on par with those in other top-performing countries.
That was one of the key arguments advanced Tuesday at the Center for American Progress during a panel discussion, titled “What Can U.S. Learn from Other Countries?”
The proponent of the argument was Marc Tucker, president and CEO of The National Center on Education and the Economy.
Tucker said if countries with high-wage economies, such as the United States, cannot get their mass education systems to educate all students at a standard previously reserved for society’s elite, then the standard of living in those countries will decline, a process he said has already begun in the United States in light of the stagnation of real wages that has taken place in recent decades.
“We’re in a world now, a situation, in which effective governance structure — in particular something that looks like a ministry of education — is absolutely essential to the redesign and success of education systems in the new environment,” Tucker said. “The United States is uniquely badly positioned to do that. We are at an enormous disadvantage.”
Tucker argued for a stronger role for state departments of education, saying the state agencies are better suited than the federal government or local school boards to implement the massive changes needed to achieve better academic results. But under the status quo, he said, the United States is an international “outlier” because so many different educational agencies are involved in how schools operate.
