By Richard Conniff, MSN MoneyThe United States leads the world in school spending but lags far behind when it comes to results. Only one American eighth-grader in four reads proficiently, and students at every level underperform students from other industrial nations in math.
In many big cities, more than half the students entering high school will not graduate. Nationwide, the high school dropout rate is close to a third -- at a time when most jobs require not just a high school diploma but at least two years of college. Even a diploma is no guarantee of a basic education: In one recent survey, employers rated high school graduates only poor to fair on basic writing, reading and math skills.
If the goal is to give kids the tools to succeed, then our educational system gets a D+. And yet, year after year, complacent school boards, administrators, teachers, unions, textbook publishers and other interest groups just keep on doing the same things that didn't work last year.
How do we start to change all this? What follows are a few ways we can bring our schools up to grade. 
Video: Start kids early
Pay more than lip service to new ideas. Right now, says Gina Burkhardt, CEO of nonprofit Learning Point Associates, the U.S. Department of Education spends just 0.1% of its budget on research and development. "How do you develop new tools in education when there's no money to make that happen?" she asks.
Even when we do manage to come up with a new idea, it often gets ignored. Textbooks eat up a large part of the educational budget, and they tend not to change even when research turns up promising new results about how kids learn. A New York company, Wireless Generation, recently set out to shake things up with Free-reading.net, a free open-source reading curriculum for teachers. CEO Larry Berger says the business plan is that schools will use the money saved on textbooks to buy assessment and intervention tools based on research into developmental psychology. If you wait till third grade to discover that a kid has reading problems, says Berger, it can take 300 hours of teacher time to correct. But use assessment tools to catch the same problem when the child is just 5, and a teacher can fix it with 15-minute bursts of extra attention -- and spare the kid and the school system the stratospheric costs of special education. Chart: US students falling behind
Make preschool universal (but voluntary). Proponents say kids need it because, done right, it can boost grade-school performance in reading, writing, spelling, math reasoning and problem solving. The schools need it because it starts kids on the right track, so they don't need to repeat a grade or get stuck in costly (and demoralizing) special-education programs. And middle-class families need it because they can no longer afford to have a parent stay home taking care of
the kids.
A high-quality, universal prekindergarten program would be expensive. But according to a Columbia University study, schools would recoup about half the investment over a decade through greater efficiency and reduced remedial-education costs. (That's not counting the long-term benefits: lower rates of teen pregnancy and delinquency, higher likelihood that students will graduate from high school and attend college, and greater lifetime earning power.)
Bring the best teachers to the neediest schools. Teachers who go through the extra training to achieve national board certification get better results from students, particularly underachievers. One current proposal would pay the training fees for certification, plus a $10,000 annual salary supplement, for top teachers who commit to spend five years at a high-need school.
Pay up for extra help. To get struggling schools back on track, the federal government needs to live up to funding promises made as part of the No Child Left Behind law, critics say. They charge that the shortfall so far amounts to $70 billion in funds that should have gone to provide more tutors, specialists in reading and mathematics, and smaller classes. One proposal would also train a cadre of teachers as "turnaround specialists" for troubled schools.
Challenge at-risk high school students. Roughly 1 million high school kids drop out annually, with blacks and Hispanics prominent among the losers. And the loss is substantial: Compared with graduates, dropouts can expect to earn $9,200 less every year. Dropouts can also end up costing taxpayers on several fronts: health care, food stamps, housing and imprisonment.
But studies say these students mostly leave school because they're bored. Alternative settings and a more challenging curriculum can make the difference. A Portland, Ore., program called Gateway to College uses a challenging community college program to get kids back into the educational system.
Focus on "new economy" skills. Six states and a long list of major corporations have signed on to the Partnership for 21st Century Skills -- an effort that, in addition to the usual core subjects, focuses on developing critical thinking, decision-making, creativity, innovation and information and technology skills. Universities have also begun to emphasize social and managerial skills to get engineering students ready for the global marketplace.
With job growth increasingly concentrated in technological fields, U.S. universities also need to attract more such students in the first place. In one recent survey, only 18% of U.S. graduates took their college degrees in science or engineering (including related categories like manufacturing and construction).
That compares with 30% to 32% of graduates in Germany, France and the United Kingdom.
Make college financial aid clear, timely and transparent. Right now federal programs to help pay for a college education are too complicated for many parents to figure out. And the financial-aid package arrives too late, in April of senior year, for families to make good decisions based on it. Some families have long since given up on college for their kids, because they don't know how much financial help is out there.
Michael Dannenberg says we should focus instead on the first day of ninth grade. "There needs to be a guarantee of financial aid upfront, early in the high school career, so students will take the proper courses," says Dannenberg, an education policy expert at the New America Foundation.
Getting kids into a rigorous college-prep curriculum is the single best guarantee that they will go on to college -- and succeed there. In one program, the Kalamazoo Promise, anonymous donors guarantee tuition at a state or community college for residents who graduate from that Michigan community's public high school and maintain passing grades in college. Now in its second year, the Promise has already produced a 15% boost in the high school graduation rate -- the first increase in 17 years -- with minorities, particularly African-American males, notably among the beneficiaries.
Push colleges to increase socioeconomic diversity. As a condition of receiving federal funds or nonprofit status, colleges should reveal the percentage of students receiving Pell Grants, meaning that they come from low-income families. At Harvard, which has a $35 billion endowment, only 8% of students qualify. By recruiting for socioeconomic diversity, Smith College has boosted Pell recipients to 26% of its student body. If colleges had to reveal those numbers, social pressure might make them less inclined to shower their benefits on a privileged elite -- and more focused on drawing talented kids from less-educated families up into the middle class.
Rethink admissions policies. Dannenberg argues that schools also favor upper-income kids with "legacy" admissions and binding early-decision applications. "Legacy" applicants usually have a parent who attended the same institution, so favoring them reinforces the status quo. Video: Deck 'stacked against them'
Likewise, binding early-decision admissions pose "a structural impediment" to the poor, says Dannenberg. "There's a reason early-decision kids are overwhelmingly upper-income and white. Early-decision prevents comparison shopping based on the financial-aid package."
Put endowments to work. Federal law requires private foundations to spend at least 5% of their assets annually -- in effect, making them justify their tax-exempt status by providing some public benefit. On average, they actually spend about 7%. Universities face no such requirement, and the ones with endowments of $1 billion or more have an average annual outlay of just 4%. Boosting that even slightly could attract middle-class students to top schools they now consider prohibitively expensive.
None of these changes is likely to come easy. But if we stick with the failed schooling methods of the past, the entire nation risks getting left behind.
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Published Jan. 14, 2008
