With all of the talk about reforming our schools and standards, we seem to be changing the law but just trading one set of regulations for another.  I, too, hope that the common core standards and current school reform leads us to better educating children.  However, I just read an interesting article that addresses the spirit of the law which seems to be missing from our educational system.  This article by Margaret Spellings of The Huffington Post makes the point that our nation has managed to lead the world in cutting edge discoveries in medicine, technology, and business yet still lags behind other countries educational systems.  Spellings proposes several paradigm shifts in her article.  If American public schools treated parents as clients, and parents were able to move students to the schools that best suited their child, then would the educational system improve?  If teachers were paid not by a scale, but by the amount of work they did and by how skilled they were, then would that improve education?  Ultimately, what if competition drove our school systems and the voice of the clients, would that improve American education?  If the private business sector has become great on these principals, then wouldn’t it work for American education?