That article (from the Economist) is reasonable enough until it jumps from discussing colleges to recommending more early childhood education, for which there is more than ample proof that it works, and then leaps to recommending, baldly and without any proof, dismantling teachers’ unions and diverting money to charter schools–neither of which have been shown to be useful in improving education. Charter schools, in fact, have mostly been failures, especially when they are for-profit or ideologically based. The article goes on to, essentially, advocate making elementary education a free market–again, an approach that has never succeeded, no matter how much it appeals to economists. School choice and vouchers are bandaids, and they blandly ignore the fact that in that scenario, “good” schools succeed and “bad” schools fail–at the cost of good education for the kids in the bad schools. We wouldn’t conduct a medical experiment for cancer which gave medicine to one group and left the other group to die; you give the best medicine you have to the control group, and conduct your trial of a new drug on the other. I’m tired of non-educators prescribing “reform” when they have no understanding of the problems that are really facing teachers.