Devoted to branding and building and protecting brands

The words are chilling: We are no longer a nation at risk.  We are a nation in decline.

Tom Friedman's column today sums up the McKinsey study on K-12 education in America and what he sees ain't pretty.  I must ask: as our high-school students prepare themselves for $10 an hour jobs, and look forward to competing globally with their peers in Portugal and the Slovak Republic, will their contemporaries in Holland, Canada and Australia build the next great companies and brands?  The good news: President Obama  appears to get it.  Now, to instigate the kind of cultural and political metamorphosis it's going to take to return America's K-12 education to the standards of the 1950s and '60s.  It's no coincidence that these standards and the rise of prosperity for which we've been envied and idolized were concurrent.