'Schools improve when leaders stop rationalizing mediocrity'

"If the superintendents of failing school districts were as adept at fixing schools as they are at making excuses for their poor performance, America would have the best education system in the world," Eric Hanushek and Paul Peterson write today.

Hanushek is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. Peterson is professor of government at Harvard. They say that if U.S. students could reach the performance level of students in Canada, that feat alone "would increase our workers' incomes by an average of 20 percent. That growth would be a tremendous aid in balancing the federal budget without raising taxes or cutting spending."