We’re facing an education crisis

Like most Americans, I spent August closely following our Olympic athletes as they competed against the world's best. As always, they made us proud.

But while millions of Americans pay close attention to how the United States fares in athletic competitions, we often lose sight of how we compare to other nations in other fields. This is particularly true when it comes to education.

While the United States fared well at the Olympics, we continue to fall behind other nations when it comes to academics. But unlike the Olympics, falling behind in this race holds some very serious implications for our economy and our quality of life.

In subject after subject, American kids are losing ground to their foreign counterparts. Out of 30 countries participating in a 2006 assessment, America's 15-year-olds ranked 25th in math and 21st in science. America's best students are no longer keeping pace, either. Our top students also rank 25th out of 30 countries in math.

Academic completion rates here in the United States are sinking too. While we once had the best high school graduation rate in the world, the United States has now slipped to 20th among industrialized nations. The trend is continuing into college. Just 10 years ago, the United States ranked first in the percentage of 25- to 34-year-olds with a bachelor's degree. But by 2005 we had dropped to seventh.

The American education system could learn something from this year's U.S. Olympic men's basketball team. In 2004 the men's Olympic team was embarrassed. These all-star basketball players didn't win the gold, they received the bronze medal.

For the 2008 Beijing games, the United States men's basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski decided he was not going to wait until two or three months before the Olympics started to prepare his team to compete with the world's best. He started preparing them three years ago. The third-place finish in 2004 was a wake-up call, just as the education statistics I recited above should be a wake up call to our nation. If we don't act now to fix our broken education system, the economic consequences will be devastating.

The technology and Internet boom that we have witnessed over the past 20 years has leveled the playing field in the global marketplace. The best jobs are going to the best educated, whether they live in the United States or China or India. So making sure our work force is the most highly educated needs to be an immediate national priority.

Our nation's largest companies recognize the magnitude of the problem. Last week, Craig Barrett, the chairman of Intel, said the U.S. education system is in crisis. During his travels abroad, he said, he has come to recognize that leaders of nations such as China, Russia and India believe their competitiveness "depends on the quality of their work force and the education of their young people." More importantly, these leaders are acting on that belief and taking concrete steps to improve their education systems.

Here in the United States, we have been slow to recognize the crisis in our classrooms and even slower to act. But with a presidential election just two months away, now is a good time for voters to stand up and demand accountability from the candidates. It is not enough to hear them say education is important, we need to hear more about their plans to improve it.

A good place for our next president to start is with academic standards. The main reason American students learn less than their counterparts is because they're actually being taught less. By the end of the eighth grade, what passes for the U.S. math curriculum is two years behind the math being studied by eighth-graders in other countries. This is inexcusable.

Americans aren't going to be able to compete in the job market if we can't compete in the classroom. So we need to develop rigorous standards that will ensure American kids are getting an education that at the very minimum is comparable to the lessons being learned by kids in other countries.

Over the next two months, we can expect to hear a lot of talk from the presidential candidates about their plans to keep America strong and grow our economy. But the candidate who can most thoughtfully and specifically articulate a plan to fix our schools is the candidate who we will know is the most serious about getting those things done.

J.C. Watts (JCWatts01@jcwatts.com), chairman of J.C. Watts Companies, a business consulting group, is former chairman of the Republican Conference of the U.S. House, where he served as an Oklahoma representative from 1995 to 2002. He writes a twice monthly column for the Review-Journal.