Look at the countries excelling by international standards.

Question: Are there any foreign models of school reform the U.S. should look to?

Joel Klein: Well there are people who face different challenges and have different things going for them certainly. And I’ve looked at work. Right now we’re doing some work on meaningful careers and technical education as a part of the kind of analysis that I think we need to do, so that not everybody is on a four year academic college track. Some people want a career in technical.

And so if you look in Northern Europe, in the Scandinavian countries, Denmark in particular has done some work on that. If you look at Korea, Finland, those are countries that are doing quite well on global tests, among other reasons, is because they attract very high quality teachers, as the research says.

Michael Barber who I mentioned is doing this work for Tony Blair, who’s now at McKinsey [& Company] has just come out with his book, and also a global analysis of the four or five things that really matter throughout the globe.

And looking for commonalities, it’s the same process of knowledge management that you talked about at the school system that we’re not trying to talk about nationally. But you can also do it globally. And we’ll create platforms where we learn from each other in that respect.

Recorded on: March 30, 2008