education nation. the united states wants a world leader in public education and it s now failing our children. of the world s 34 developed economies, american students ranked 24th in math, 17th in science, 10th in literacy. the public knows this all too well. in the wall street journal poll, an astounding 77%, more than 3/4 of the question give our schools a c, d, or an f grade. the man with a daunting challenge is here with me now. education secretary arnie duncan. for for participating in the conversations for education nation. as the key leader, you are showing us the way. let s talk about the rankings. finland, south korea singapore have 100% ratings of getting the top third students to choose to be teachers. we have something like 21% of the top third graduates going into primary education.
i didn t he was pushing hard enough on the education reform issues that jay and i have been writing about for so many years. after he was sworn in, he and arne duncan moved very quickly to implement a tremendously great innovation called reach to the top. it s generated more reform than we ve seen in years ch none of this is covered in the movie, by the way. this is all stuff that s happened, good things that have happened in the reform area since the movie was shot. so people who tend to leave the movie crying, which a lot of folks do, should remember there are very exciting things going on in the education reform movement right now. but, of course, jay, it s so incremental when you see the size of the problem and the comparisons we ve been citing with other countries, with finland, south korea and singapore. we are so far behind in all of
going back to the examples of finland and south korea and singapore, in those countries, teaching is a higher rated profession than being a doctor or lawyer. teachers are not always paid the highest. they are paid more comparatively than teachers, but it s not just money, but they are tracked from the beginning. their education and the colleges that train teachers here have lower standards than in other countries. how do we if there is no silver bullet, how do we get around the fact that america is not competitive with the rest of the world. you hit the jail on the head when you said half of the teachers were retiring in to 10 years that. presents huge opportunities. we have to really the country behind this. there is no more important work in our society than teaching. great teachers are the unsung heroes. we have to shine a spotlight and learn from them. we have to give them more resources and incentivize them
right now we have a third of our kids not graduateing for high school. we have basically a new generation that even if they are qualified to go to college, they are having a really harder and harder time getting the financials to go to college. that s the betrayal. i want to share with viewers quote from your book. you write if america s public education system were a product, it would have been recalled. if it were a politician, it would have been impeached. if it were a horse it would have been shot. nothing is faster than the failure to properly educate our children. we were talking to the secretary about the fact that south korea and singapore and finland have 100% of their teachers come from the top third of their college graduates. we have terrible numbers.