Education: If Schools Were like 'American Idol' ...

Last August, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said that our students have "stagnated educationally." The College Board recently put this into global perspective when it reported that we've dropped from 1st to 12th place in the percentage of people between the ages of 25 to 34 who have a college degree. America is now in danger of producing a new generation that will be less educated than their parents.

Clearly it's not for any lack of money. Over the past three decades, we've nearly doubled spending on K-12 education in real terms. So President Obama was absolutely right to declare the other day that "we can't spend our way out of this problem." Which begs the question: How can we spend so much with so little to show for it?

The Los Angeles Times just gave us an excellent example of this kind of transparency when it published a database of about 6,000 third- through fifth-grade teachers ranked by their effectiveness in raising student test scores. [See Education: Who's Teaching L.A.'S Kids?]. If you are a mom with a son or daughter in one of these classrooms, you know this information is vital. Unfortunately, it's the kind of information that seldom sees the light of day.

The reason is that the adults who are doing well by this system don't want it out there. The local teachers union, for example, blasted the Times for what it called "the height of journalistic irresponsibility" for bringing this material to the public.

We all know that good schools begin with good teachers. We also know there are many heroic teachers. Unfortunately, our system is set up to protect bad teachers rather than reward good teachers.

In the existing system, we have incentives for almost everything unrelated to performance (seniority, tenure, etc.) and zero incentive for adapting new technologies that could help learning inside and outside the classroom. On top of it all, we have chancellors, superintendents and principals who can't hire and fire based on performance.

According to one study by McKinsey, if we had closed the gap in educational performance between ourselves and nations such as Finland and Korea, our GDP would have been as much as 16% higher in 2008.

For more, see If Schools Were like American Idol ... by Rupert Murdoch, October 8, 2010 at FoxNews.com.