Education in America: ‘We are top 10 in nothing’ | Arne Duncan | Big Think

I believe that a strong military is our nation's best defense. Our nation's best offense is a world-class, is a great, great educational system. I think this for so many different reasons. The only way I know how to end cycles of poverty is by giving children who happen to be born in poverty, which is never their fault, a chance to get a great education.

If we want to have upward mobility, if we want to have a growing middle class, the only way I know how to do that is through education. Quite honestly, these days I'm starting to worry about our democracy. I see our democracy fraying at the edges. If we're gonna have a civically engaged citizenry, we're gonna have an active, participatory democracy, the only way I know how to do that is through education.

So, just as we have a military, this led at the national level, I think it's important at the national level we'd be clear about how important education is. Where we are now today, quite candidly, isn't good enough. If you look at early childhood, we ranked 30th in terms of access to pre-K. It's a dismal record. If you look at math and reading and science scores at the high school level, we're somewhere usually between 15th and 30th internationally. If you look at college completion rates, we're about 16th.

To sum all that up, we're top ten in nothing. We live now in a flat world, in a globally competitive economy. Good jobs, high wage, high skill jobs are gonna go to the nation that does the best job of educating their citizens. I desperately want those jobs to be here in America. I'd rather them be here than in China or, you know, India or Singapore or wherever else, South Korea, wherever else I might talk about.

For us to do that, we as a nation have to embrace the opportunity. I would say the imperative of having a great, great education system. We should be very tight on what I call goals. As a nation, we should have a goal to lead the world in access to high-quality pre-K. We were very proud during the Obama administration to get high school graduation rates to 84 percent. I desperately wish the current administration set a goal for themselves of raising that from maybe four percent to ninety percent.

So, I think we should be as a nation very clear, and I would say tight on goals, but we should be very loose and give lots of flexibility, lots of room to innovate at the local level on the best strategies to achieve those goals. What works best in Harlem here in New York might be very different than what works in Montana, might be very different than what works in California. But we're all striving toward those goals.

Again, let me reiterate, for me, those goals aren't R or D or left or right. Those are nation-building goals. Those are paths to the middle class and upward mobility. So, being tight on goals but very loose on the strategies, let's have lots of, again, honest debate. No one has all the right answers or the best way to achieve those goals. Let's scale what works and let's stop doing what doesn't work.

So, that's from a policy perspective, that's how I view it. At the individual child, the individual student-led level, for me, this is always about what we call personalizing instruction. The goal of great teachers today is not to teach to the mean, to the average, of a class of 25 or 30 students. It's to help every single child flourish. Every single individual child has different strengths and weaknesses. How we help them fly where they can fly, how we help them get additional help when they need help, that's what great teachers are doing every single day today.

While there are amazing bright spots, there's stuff that's so inspiring that I use to travel the country and was lucky enough to see, every day we have to get better faster. We have to do it with a real sense of urgency.