Failure is Good

The international test scores are out today, and as always US kids rank fairly low in performance, high in confidence. Yong Zhao comments that Numbers Can Lie: What TIMSS and PISA Truly Tell Us, if Anything?

So far all international test scores measure the extent to which an education system effectively transmits prescribed content.
In this regard, the U.S. education system is a failure and has been one for a long time.
But the successful transmission of prescribed content contributes little to economies that require creative and entrepreneurial individual talents and in fact can damage the creative and entrepreneurial spirit. Thus high test scores of a nation can come at the cost of entrepreneurial and creative capacity.
While the U.S. has failed to produce homogenous, compliant, and standardized employees, it has preserved a certain level of creativity and entrepreneurship. In other words, while the U.S. is still pursuing an employee-oriented education model, it is much less successful in stifling creativity and suppressing entrepreneurship.

We failed...hooray! Let's design schools that don't even try to do what we're failing at!
Or then again, maybe not. (Actually, we do need to transmit a fair amount of prescribed content; as Salman Khan puts it in One World Schoolhouse, this should take about 20% of the school day.)