AMERICAN EDUCATIONAL EXCELLENCE

Tech entrepreneur Sahin makes a case for the benefits of the contemporary American K-12 and university systems.

The author immigrated from Turkey to the United States as a teenage foreign-exchange student and completed a doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s School of Industrial Management; he went on to build companies in the tech sector and amass a large fortune. Drawing on his experiences, Sahin describes what he perceives as the many praiseworthy aspects of U.S. education. He asserts that it isn’t failing youth in the 21st century, as many believe, but uniquely capable of creating “well-rounded individuals,” and he credits the degree of decentralization and local control as a major reason for its robustness. Despite evident disparities in funding and outcomes in various American schools, he presents the nation’s primary and secondary educational systems as laboratories of innovation. Specifically, he sees competition between educational institutions—public, charter, and private—as a source of strength, and an extension of the market-based economics that shape American society. He also notes a spirit of volunteerism and initiative, suggesting that these cultivate leadership skills in students that other countries’ schools don’t teach. This element, he says, attracts students from around the world to the United States. Throughout this work, many readers may wish that the author had cited more statistics to support his positive assertions. That said, Sahin does concede that there is much room for improvement in U.S. schools; for example, he notes the ongoing crisis in special education funding, the declining enrollments that many schools face as a result of declining birth rates, and the increase in educational costs beyond the rate of inflation. Nevertheless, he argues that the American educational system has consistently demonstrated the ability to evolve in response to social changes, and he anticipates its continued resilience.

An upbeat treatise on the strengths of U.S. schools that would have benefited from more specifics.