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The National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) recently released a report, entitled "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: An American Agenda for Education Reform," [PDF file] which looks at the reasons for stagnant student performance across the United States in spite of ongoing education reform, and offers recommendations for change.

According to the report, while the U.S. has focused on reducing class size and increasing funding for schools, neither is correlated with high student performance. The same is true of other suggested reforms, including school charters, entrepreneurs pursuing disruptive innovations, and firing teachers whose students perform poorly on standardized tests. Countries that outperform the U.S., the report finds, have been pursuing distinctly different strategies.

The report's key recommendations to American states include the following:

• Expand the work begun on the Common Core State Standards by expanding it to the rest of the core curriculum, and creating curriculum frameworks that specify what topics are to be taught in the core subjects, grade by grade.
• Develop a world-class teaching force by greatly raising standards for entry to teacher education programs, moving teacher training from low-status higher education institutions to research universities.
• Move away from local control of school finance and toward state adoption of responsibility for financing schools, providing more resources to students who are harder to educate than to other students.
• Abandon the old industrial model of school and district management and move toward modern methods of managing professionals--successful countries trust their teachers, listen to them when making policy, and put them in charge of improving practice.
• Spend education budgets differently--other countries get much more for their money by spending less on fancy school buildings, glossy textbooks, intramural sports and district administration, and more on their teachers and their most disadvantaged students.
• Make sure all elements of the education system are coherent and aligned--the top-performing countries have systems that make it look as though the parts and pieces of their policy systems and practices were designed to work smoothly together.

"In the late 1970s, Japan was eating the lunch of some of America's greatest corporations," NCEE president and CEO Marc Tucker said in a statement. "Those that survived figured out how they were doing it and did it even better. The most effective way to greatly improve student performance in the United States is to figure out how the countries with top student performance are doing it, build on their achievements and then, by building on our unique strengths, figure out how to do it even better."

For related coverage from Schools.com, see:

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• Report: 8 key trends impacting community colleges
• Study to examine links between teacher stress and student achievement
• HMH competition looks for ways to transform education