I wrote last week about the hugely successful legislative agenda of Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels — and the possibility he might offer his leadership to all of America. In the video below, the Governor himself outlines the nation’s most far-reaching education reforms.
U.S./China Innovation Race
Intel CTO Justin Rattner
says many people underestimate America’s lead in post-graduate education. Intel has found, for example, that the skills of PhDs from Chinese universities that the company has hired do not yet match those of U.S. graduates, he says.
On the other hand, Rattner says, tougher immigration laws are weakening the U.S. advantage as a magnet for students from around the world. Many Silicon Valley companies were founded by foreign students after they got degrees from Stanford, the University of California at Berkeley, Caltech and other U.S. institutions.
“Now we tell them to go home, and don’t come back anytime soon,” Rattner says. Such a policy could have made it impossible for people like Andy Grove, Intel’s Hungarian-born former CEO, to have risen to the top of the U.S. tech scene. “Nowadays we would have packed him up and sent him home,” Rattner says.
Hayek’s the answer, as usual
Richard Epstein advocates the same type of radical decentralization of education that I proposed in my last Wall Street Journal article.
no one knows how to develop standards for education that match the precise ones in place for today’s industrial products. . . .
At root, educational success depends upon the distinctive interaction between a responsive student and a dedicated teacher. . . .
The more sensible approach, therefore, is to follow economist Friedrich Hayek’s lead: Push hard toward decentralization, so that different groups can take their crack at developing integrated K-12 educational programs that might work, precisely because they are fueled by competitive forces. Let’s remove the fetters that local governments impose on charter schools. Let’s expand the use of vouchers, without onerous government conditions. Let’s encourage the formation of bottom-up education programs that build off a strong home-schooled base.
