Oprah Winfrey opened her new school today, January 9th, 2007, to cheers and some criticism. She spent 40 million of her own money and has provided a 50-acre site with every amenity so that the girls who are educated there will have their lives changed forever. She built this in response to Nelson Mandela's request that education was the most pressing need in South Africa. On CNN, she defended her actions:

"The education of our children is vital to the future of the United States. From the start, our Founding Fathers knew that ignorance and free government could not coexist. Our Nation has acted from the beginning on the sound principle that control over our schools should remain at the State and local level. Nothing could be more destructive of the Diversity of thought and opinion necessary for National progress than an excess of control by the central government."

The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, in a report released yesterday called, Tough Choices or Tough Times, recommends: 

Moving from America's tests to the kinds of examinations and assessments that will capature these and other qualities at the level of accomplishment required will entail a major overhaul of the American testing industry. If that is not done, then nothing else will matter, because the old saw that what gets measured is what gets taught is essentially true. A system that pursues that wrong goals more efficiently is not a system this nation needs.

This new report by the New Commisssion on the Skills of the American Workforce, sponsored by the National Center on Education and the Economy, and funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Lumina Foundation for Education, proposes a new system of education, not a collection of initiatives. It warns, "If legislatures pocket the gains from the savings we propose and fail to make the investments we recommend, then that will simply lead to lower performance all around. "Without the pain inflicted by the proposals we make for saving money, there will be no gain from the ways we propose to spend it." (from the executive summary: www.skillscommission.org).