Reform is too little

National | The American educational system is beyond reform; it's time to start thinking about replacing it | Cal Thomas

Jay Leno knows how uninformed people are. He regularly interviews them on the street about basic things like, "Who would become president if Clinton were forced out of office?"

"Bob Dole?" said one of his subjects on a show last week.

Ratifying the findings of a comedian is the latest in a long list of academic studies that finds American public-school students at or near the bottom in critical areas such as math, science, and general knowledge. The survey of 500,000 kids from 21 nations not only found public-school children in the United States rated miserably in science and math, but even the best and brightest of American high-school seniors doing worse than most of their international peers in pre-calculus, calculus, and physics. No Asian country participated in the 12th-grade survey, which is probably good because the United States would likely have scored even lower given the high performance of Asian students.