Let’s look at your investment in education.  If you graduated from high school, you spent about twelve years in a structured, organized, and a managed school program.  Excluding homework and travel to-from your school your in class time may have consumed 2,100 to 2,200 days or about 10,800 to 11,000 hours of your life.  If you have a four-year university or college degree, you may have spent another 36 to 45 months in school.  Add to your school time hours of your life spent in other training and education programs for specialized work related certifications, licenses, and professional recognitions and four  things become evident.

1. Education and training have already taken many hours of your life. Investing your time in education may lead to your continued successes.
2. The investment in your education, considering time and money, is significant as you consider finances during your span of life.
3. The infrastructure delivering educational programs, services, products, and a range of opportunities are huge, complex, and financially very significant in the economy of most every nation and society. Education and training are large and profitable businesses.
4. Education is hugely important and everywhere we find advanced and complex systems designed to deliver teaching-learning programs within a bureaucratic structure we call a system of education.  The bureaucracy of education stretches into all levels of education and even into learning and teaching programs beyond institutions considered schools.

EDUCATIONAL SYSTEMS ARE @ RISK
With this complex system touching us all there is risk. The following comments may be more specific to the United States of America but they may be applicable in all settings with comprehensive programs supporting education.

A Nation at Risk: The Imperative For Educational Reform is the title of the 1983 report  of considered a landmark in modern American educational history. The report contributed to the ever-growing, and still present, sense that American schools are failing.  It touched off a wave of local, state, and federal reform efforts to make things better.  Now in 2013, we may still consider risks in education significant and we may agree improvement is necessary.  The news is positive because our continuous improvement initiatives continue.

Education Next is a report issued by the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University.  In 2003 an Education Next report from the KORET TASK FORCE on K-12 education explored the significant amount of activity to further build quality as process and result in schools but they identified three risks why educational successes were lacking:

1. The resistance to change from the organized interests of the K-12 public education system, at the center of which were the two big teachers’ unions as well as school administrators, colleges of education, state bureaucracies, school boards, and many others, was underestimated.
2. The underestimated tenacity of the “thoughtworld” of the nation’s colleges of education, which see themselves as owners of the nation’s schools and the minds of educators.  These educational institutions, these colleges, took the position they were free to impose their ideas on future teachers and administrators regardless of evidence about their effectiveness.
3. There was, and still may be, an underestimated large number of Americans, particularly in middle-class suburbs, believing their schools are basically sound and academically successful.  This misapprehension may arise from a lack standards-based information, honest information and data, from objective outside sources concerning the true performance levels of schools.