Fixing America's schools.

I read with great distress the May cover story, "Fixing America's Future," especially the chart on page 28, "How American Students Stack Up To Their International Peers." The chart is irrelevant. The U.S. is basically the only industrialized country that doesn't have an elite group of centralized national bureaucrats running the country's education system and forcing many elementary and secondary students on educational tracks that define the rest of their lives--France and Japan being the worst examples.

In the U.S., if you drop out of secondary school at 16, you can get a GED at 23, a two-year college degree at 30 and a four-year degree at 38. We're the only country in the world where you can do that. In other industrialized countries, secondary education may at times be better, but who cares, so long as the "education elite" are afforded opportunities.

You are not alone in not getting it. But why not focus on what is great about the U.S.: It is the closest form of a "results meritocracy" this world has ever seen. Some in the U.S. who have a great deal of formal education--professors, for example--find it outrageous that a secondary school dropout who owns four gas stations often makes many times more than they do. We Americans will always find a way to become more productive, through whatever training is required--and that can occur many years after we leave secondary school.

Ron Giuntini

Executive Director

OEM Product-Services Institute

Lewisburg, Pa.