The educational system in the United States was revolutionary.  It played an important role in the country’s emergence as a world superpower.  But the system did not adapt to the changing needs of a growing nation in an increasingly global stage.  In the beginning, the educational system was much like a beautiful house with a strong foundation.  As a nation, we put tremendous effort to keep the house looking nice.  We repainted, redecorated, landscaped, and updated all the appliances.  Yet we neglected the foundation – classroom teachers.  Over the years the foundation weakened and cracked.  A cracked foundation resulted in cracks in the walls and ceiling, putting enormous pressure on the beams that supported the entire structure and kept the house together.  When people or organizations saw the cracks, they patched them and painted over them without ever addressing their cause.  Hundreds of men and women spent millions of dollars and countless hours making the house, the educational system, look wonderful, while the cracks in the foundation grew to a point that children began falling through them.

            The time has come where the nation must face the fact that the educational system in the United States no longer works.  The house is structurally unsound and although it has a lot of history and good memories, it must be torn down so that we can build a place that can meet the needs of our children.  Our education system was one of the first public education systems in the world.  As with any pioneering venture, we made mistakes and we need to learn from those mistakes.  Countries that established their educational systems after we did studied our system and learned from it.  As a result, many of those countries designed excellent and efficient systems to educate their children.  Their consistently higher test scores make this fact apparent.  Now we can benefit from the extensive research on these systems and design the greatest educational system in the world.

            Change is rarely easy.  Big changes are never easy.  Completely restructuring the education system will be the most difficult task facing our country in the 21^st century.  So much time and energy has been spent covering over the problems and minimizing the significance of the short comings that most people have no idea of the true state of education in this country.  The general public must be made aware of the true state of education and all the areas in which our system does not measure up to those of other countries.  This information could create a huge backlash from parents, teachers, state boards and lobbyists.  Parents will demand vouchers to send their children to private schools and everyone else will point fingers and call each other names.  As long as educational leaders stand firm through the initial firestorm, they will be able to move forward and create the system of education we need to deal with the challenges our children will face in a global society.

            The system will need a foundation of three inter-related support networks.  The first is a strong system of national standards to ensure all children have the chance to learn everything they need to know. Secondly, we must create a system for funding public education that addresses the needs of all students.  The third, and possibly most important, is a system to ensure that students are taught by the best trained and most effective teachers in the world.  Due to the scope of changes that must be made to establish a new system for education, each part will need to be implemented in stages to allow teachers and students to understand the new system.