if you look at florida, just compared to a math test scores. there s recent data showing that if you look internationally, florida is way behind the highest-performing school systems like taiwan, hong kong, finland, singapore. and it s also behind countries we don t think about. estonia, lithuania, latvia, and florida below all of those in math but they edge out croatia and bulgaria. something to be proud of. but if you look at that light, you ve got the president and arnie duncan being haled by both sides as being progressive and innovative on education. we re way short of where we need to be. you can t measure it against the things that arnie duncan and the president are hailed for are starting to make progress on a big challenge. they ve been out for two years. we can t blame america s state of educational melees on them. but, look, it does point to the
things around. the most interesting twist here is that former florida governor, jeb bush, is joining the president here today. does that mean no jeb in 2012? with us for prix and prospeech comments are john highland, national political columnist with new york magazine and msnbc contributor dave weigel. jeb bush, arm in arm with barack obama after saying some harsh things in the past when obama is taking shots at his brother. what do you make of that? it s interesting the education reform is one of those issues that to some extent is come to transcend the normal partisan divisions that keep people from being on stage together normally. so you see people joan kline, the former school chancellor here was a big fan of jeb bush s. jeb bush is a big fan of arnie duncan s. so on this issue, you can see
rail funds. that s the one thing that brought down charlie crist. it s rickien thy on the part of president to go to florida for anything. the school runs are tricky to do unless you have a ton of allies. arnie duncan built the turnarounds on chicago. the school he turned around, he lost in a discrimination suit by some of the teachers who were fired but they were replaced by less experienced white teachers. you need there s a lot of consensus in washington for this sort of thing. it s tricky implementing it across congress. it s maybe not a great record here of success, working republicans. so this is something you need bipartisan cover on. i want to bring you in, john, but let s throw up also i want to show data on florida schools. there s a bit of a paradox, i think, if you talk about the progress that florida has made in being touted and it is by wonks and policy observers as an example of some progress.
was the president there enough? even florida which they re touting as one of the leaders in education reform, if you look at the international comparisons, florida is well behind estonia, lithuania, latvia, you know, when you unpack this stuff, it seems like the outer limits of our ambition, even a progressive leader like obama and his education secretary, arnie duncan, aren t equal to the challenge. president obama certainly made education reform a priority. so has secretary duncan. we have a lot of catching up to do. it s not hyperbolic for us to say that america is not competing with some of the developing world when it comes to education, when it comes to producing the mathematicians, the scientists, the engineers. and in our urban schools as you know, if you saw davis guggenheim s movie in waiting for superman, we have dropout factories where kids are