A hundred years from now, we will still be arguing about monetary policy. There will be forever conservatives and liberals and the confusion about the meaning of those terms will be just as enduring.  The one economic policy that we can all agree on – simply because it is so obvious – is to invest whatever it takes to make American K-12 education the best in the world.

Some numbers, quoted by Thomas friedman in today’s New York Times, April 22, 2009, “Swimming Without a Suit” say it all:

#The 2006 Program for International Student Assessment ranked American 15-year olds 25th out of 30 in math; 24 out of 30 in science:

#Friedma’s quoting from The Economic Impact of the Achievemant gap in American Schools, a report by MCKinsey, a consulting firm. “If we had raised the 1983 achievement gap between 1983 (When A Nation at Risk came out)  to the level of Finland and South Korea the GDP in 2008 would have been between 1.3 trillion and 2.3 trillion higher.

To the Editor: 

    Re: “No Picnic for Me Either, by David Brooks (column, March 13)

   Mr. Brooks is exactly right: great teachers build strong relationships with their students on whom they impose high standards.

   Mr. Brooks is also correct in saying that we need to know who these teachers are, and which schools devlop high achievement in their students. Yes, we need data. We need to know, not to guess or hope.

  However, Mr. Brooks ‘s faith in the standardized tests by which we gather data strikes me as naive. I taught English for years and have been an educator since 1957 and have yet to discover a better method of assessing my students’ progress in learning how to write than reading their compositions closely, with a red pencil, usually at least twice. If I could have substituted a standardized test for that process, I could have gone to bed a lot earlier each night.

   Could it be that our faith in standardized testing is based on the fact that it costs much less than assessing real work?

   One reading of Mr. Brooks’s column tells me more about his excellence as a writer than a thousand standardized tests.

Stephen Davenport

Oakland, Calif., March 13, 2009

Those who assert we should get our economy fixed first and then we can turn to fixing education don’t get it.  Shovel ready projects are important and they have the allure of quick pay-back. Likewise, fixing the financial system,  but what will these initiatives serve if we do not make the long-term, rewards-later investment in developing the intellectual muscle to do the work on which the economy depends?  We can no longer afford to accept a culture in which a kid one day out of law school makes more money that the person who taught him how to read -anymore than we can accept a culture in which the mediocre teacher gets re-hired every year. Without the political will to force change, and the financial sacrifcice to invest the money now, there will be no sustainable economic recovery. 

Another quote from David Leonhardt’s article – write your representatives and senators and tell them to read it: “Education helps a society leverage every other investment it makes—. It appears to be the best single bet that a society can make.”