Leaders and Laggards Report Puts Washington with the Latter

Last week's publication of "Leaders and Laggards," a collaborative report by the Center for American Progress, US Chamber of Commerce, and Frederick M. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute didn't get the play it should have. The authors are blunt:

Our school system needs far-reaching innovation. It is archaic and broken, a relic of a time when high school graduates could expect to live prosperous lives, when steel and auto factories formed the backbone of the American economy, and when laptop computers and the Internet were the preserve of science fiction writers. And while the challenges are many—inflexible regulations, excessive bureaucracy, a dearth of fresh thinking—the bottom line is that most education institutions simply lack the tools, incentives, and opportunities to reinvent themselves in profoundly more effective ways.

By “innovation” we do not mean blindly celebrating every nifty-sounding reform. If anything, we have had too much of such educational innovation over the years, as evidenced by the sequential embrace of fads and the hurried cycling from one new “best practice” to another that so often characterizes K-12 schooling. States and school systems, in other words, have too long confused the novel with the useful. Rather, we believe innovation to be the process of leveraging new tools, talent, and management strategies to craft solutions that were not possible or necessary in an earlier era.

They look at eight areas. Here's Washington's report card. We get a lousy D and rank 34th. Before you ask, South Carolina got a C.