The Wall Street Journal asked some of the nation's business leaders for their ideas and top priorities for improving schools. To wit:

David Rockefeller Jr. - Chairman of Rockefeller & Co.

"There should be a national program for teacher training."

 

Lawrence Rosenfeld - CEO of Concertra Corp.

"Even in affluent communities, public schools don't have enough money for great education." A suggestion: Collect extra "user fees" from parents with children in schools, which would still be far less than private-school tuition."

John Ong - Chairman of BF Goodrich Co.

Education systems in most states are evaluated by "input," such as what students are taught. Instead, "the system needs to be measured by output: What does a student know when he gets out, as measured by testing?" Standardized tests should be given in grades four, seven, nine and 12.

Albert Gamper Jr. - CEO of CIT Group Inc.

A longer school year, vouchers and a system that grades educators are among the solutions. We must also melt the fat out of the education bureaucracy: "American business has restructured in the past 10 years and has proven that a lot of jobs were unnecessary. The Army is doing it. The Navy is doing it. The government is doing it. Education is not doing it."

John Clendenin - Chairman of Bell South Corp.

"There is no other product in our great free-market system where we don't have some system of quality control. We have to agree upon standards, train to those standards and hold people's feet to the fire."