Children go to school for 14 years in the preK-12 primary education program currently favored in America. They spend five hours per day in classes, five days per week, 32 weeks per year. The overall commitment is 800 hours per year in class, with 200-400 hours per year more in outside work. Over the 14 years between age 4 and 18 each American spends more than 10,000 hours in class and thousands more doing homework.

America has 54 million students engaged in preK-12 (primary and secondary) education. Average cost per student is $7,200 per year in the public schools and somewhat less in private schools. This translates into $350 billion per year in expenses for the system. Taxes, tuition and federal grants provide the revenue needed to pay these costs.

Given that everyone in the country has to make this commitment, doesn't it make sense to invest in the program that will be delivered? Sure we have state purchased books in the core curricula and there are standardized lesson plans and high stakes testing, but overall the delivery is unsure, inconsistent and uncertain. Nationwide the results are poor and we are losing ground to international competitors. If this was an industrial process it would have been identified as statistically chaotic and would have been corrected or abandoned decades ago.

So far the only plan I have heard is to pay the teachers more. Once again if this was an industrial process, I doubt that paying the workers more would be the solution. Someone would begin examining the process and looking in a systematic way to improve it. That's what high stakes testing was about. It added a quality control check point to the system. Such controls and metrics are necessary but not sufficient to improve the processes. As manufacturers learned in the 80's you can't inspect quality into a product.