Jeb Bush: Higher standards, more testing necessary for education reform

Clearly suffering withdrawals from his suddenly silent Blackberry smart phone, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush told an audience of hundreds of educators, education service providers and policy makers that he was considering a change.

  If Blackberry doesn’t get his act together soon, Bush lamented, “I’m going to the iPhone, I guess… join all those folks who have learned how to do this in a much harder format.”

 The line drew a hearty laugh from the crowd at the 2011 National Summit on Education Reform in San Francisco, but it exemplified the Foundation for Excellence in Education chairman’s stone-serious message: If something isn’t working, changes must be made — and quickly.

  In his address, Bush called for more rigorous academic standards, guided by a common core set of standards focused on the most important academic competencies.

  “The U.S. has a bigger is better approach when it comes to standards,” Bush said. “So we end up diluting them… our curriculum is a mile wide but an inch deep. So at best, our students are jacks of all trades and masters of none.”  

 Bush said that assessing student achievement necessitates testing — and asked critics of standardized assessment to keep in mind that “testing is part of life.”

  Bush said the stakes couldn’t be higher:

  “You can say that our children are doing well,” he said. But without change, when graduates of the education system compete in the global marketplace, “their dreams will be shattered.”

  And to prevent that, Bush said, state leaders “should embrace the freedom to innovate and use every available resource to learn.”