School, Inc.

The Price Of Excellence

In The Price of Excellence, the first episode of School Inc. , the late Andrew Coulson, senior fellow of education policy at Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom, examines the great inventions of the industrial revolution in the 17 th century, when productivity rose dramatically and the innovations behind it spread like wildfire, but not so in education. In those early years, education was controlled by parents, but when Horace Mann championed efforts to put education into the hands of state-appointed experts and state-trained teachers, universal public education in America was born. School Inc. flashes forward to East Los Angeles and a modern story of what happened when Jaime Escalante, a gifted teacher at Garfield High, and the educational excellence he created in the classroom, became the basis of the Hollywood movie, Stand and Deliver . Finally, Coulson travels to Seoul, South Korea where college bound students eagerly enroll in afterschool tutoring programs called "Hogwons." Students and administrators explain how well it works and one professor discloses his annual salary is more than a million dollars.