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worked together over months to build the most effective lessons they could, critiquing each version, adding new ideas, testing them out, until the whole group was satisfied that the lesson was as good as it could be.

ratio between prep time and teaching time in the Shanghai schools we visited.  In the U.S., she said, teachers typically have one hour to prepare for five classes.  In the Shanghai schools, they have four hours to prepare for two hours of teaching. This, she said, makes all the difference.  Teachers can use this time to collaborate with other teachers to craft great lessons, to talk with other teachers about particular students' learning needs and how they might work together to address them, or to do the research needed to get ready to do another improvement project. 

All teachers are expected to do it, and getting good at is it one of the criteria for moving up the career ladder

hat fascinated our team was the way teachers were expected to write short papers about the research they had done and to publish these research papers in a range of juried journals, some published by universities.

Of course they did not do well this way.  How could they do well in language and mathematics without a balanced curriculum, without a faculty that showed that they loved them, without music, art and PE?

his whole enormous system was on pretty much the same page for the same reasons, not because they had been told to do something in particular, but because the discussions they had been involved in had led them to the same conclusions about the goals and the most effective ways to achieve the

One was the clarity of the system's curriculum expectations.  There is a core curriculum that accounts for about 70 percent of the available time that is required for all students. The courses are spelled out and the system approves the textbooks that will be used. 

hat it had clearly been honed and then honed again to remove everything that was not essential and to give the connections in the logic of the instruction an air of inevitability that seemed, as he put it, simply elegant.

he common thread, he said, was the way teachers were treated, in every way, as professionals.

The Shanghai Municipal Education Commission clearly views its teachers, not university researchers, as the main drivers of improvements in student performance. 

teachers talked about the importance of constantly getting better, which meant improving their own skills and improving the curriculum and instruction and therefore improving student performance.  Like doctors, engineers and attorneys in the United States, they saw keeping up with the latest developments in their field and changing their practice in the light of those advancements as a core part of their responsibility.  That is why professional development and school improvement are thought of as synonymous by Shanghai officials. 

hey accepted the idea that they were not functioning autonomously in their classrooms, but accountable to their peers and colleagues for the quality of their own work and for their contribution to the common enterprise.   These are all hallmarks of a true profession. 

They also grew more powerful

20th century, just a dozen Western empires—-including the United States—controlled 58 percent of the world’s land surface and population, and a staggering 74 percent of the global economy.

tendency of Western societies to delete their own killer apps.

But there is a second, more insidious cause of the “great reconvergence,” which I do deplore—and that is the

Ask yourself: who’s got the work ethic now? The average South Korean works about 39 percent more hours per week than the average American. The school year in South Korea is 220 days long, compared with 180 days here. And you don’t have to spend too long at any major U.S. university to know which students really drive themselves: the Asians and Asian-Americans

Yet life expectancy in the U.S. has risen from 70 to 78 in the past 50 years, compared with leaps from 68 to 83 in Japan and from 43 to 73 in China.

On no fewer than 15 of 16 different issues relating to property rights and governance, the United States fares worse than Hong Kong. Indeed, the U.S. makes the global top 20 in only one area: investor protection

The future belongs not to them but to today’s teenagers

The latest data on “mathematical literacy” reveal that the gap between the world leaders—the students of Shanghai and Singapore—and their American counterparts is now as big as the gap between U.S. kids and teenagers in Albania and Tunisia.

Yet statistics from the World Intellectual Property Organization show that already more patents originate in Japan than in the U.S., that South Korea overtook Germany to take third place in 2005, and that China is poised to overtake Germany too

the United States’ average competitiveness score has fallen from 5.82 to 5.43, one of the steepest declines among developed economies. China’s score, meanwhile, has leapt up from 4.29 to 4.90.

Perhaps more disturbing is the decline of meaningful competition at home, as the social mobility of the postwar era has given way to an extraordinary social polarization. You don’t have to be an Occupy Wall Street leftist to believe that the American super-rich elite—the 1 percent that collects 20 percent of the income—has become dangerously divorced from the rest of society, especially from the underclass at the bottom of the income distribution.

Far more than in Europe, most Americans remain instinctively loyal to the killer applications of Western ascendancy, from competition all the way through to the work ethic. They know the country has the right software. They just can’t understand why it’s running so damn slowly.

What we need to do is to delete the viruses that have crept into our system: the anticompetitive quasi monopolies that blight everything from banking to public education; the politically correct pseudosciences and soft subjects that deflect good students away from hard science; the lobbyists who subvert the rule of law for the sake of the special interests they represent—to say nothing of our crazily dysfunctional system of health care, our overleveraged personal finances, and our newfound unemployment ethic

And finally we need to reboot our whole system.

If what we are risking is not decline but downright collapse, then the time frame may be even tighter than one election cycle

Western Civilization's Killer Apps

COMPETITION

THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION

THE RULE OF LAW

MODERN MEDICINE

THE CONSUMER SOCIETY

THE WORK ETHIC