Ten Priorities for Education Policy

As their detractors note, U.S. schools fare poorly in international rankings, while educators struggle with Kafkaesque displays of bureaucracy and managerial ineptitude. But at the same time, 70 percent of American parents give their children’s schools an A or a B, and education officials from nations whose students outperform our own avidly seek to emulate our success at cultivating independent thinkers.

The challenge is to improve what needs improvement while taking care not to undermine the strengths of our decentralized system, including its responsiveness to parents and the ample leeway it gives educators to innovate.