AMERICAN EDUCATION

The Wilson Quarterly,
Bad Rap on the Schools
by Jay Mathews 


Our best public schools are first-rate, producing more intense, involved, and creative A- plus students than our most prestigious colleges have room for. That is why less-known institutions such as Claremont McKenna, Rhodes, and Hampshire are drawing many freshmen just as smart as the ones at Princeton. The top 70 percent of U.S. public high schools are better than they have ever been, thanks to a growing movement to offer Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses.
In a 2005 report, the Duke researchers concluded that the United States produced 137,437 engineers with at least a bachelor’s degree in the most recent year, while India produced 112,000 and China 351,537. "That’s more U.S. degrees per million residents than in either other nation," Bracey said in The Washington Post. Yet he found the discredited numbers still presented as fact by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, Secretary of Commerce Carlos M. Gutierrez, and Senator John W. Warner (R.-Va.).