Giving Compass' Take:

• Gretchen Morgan shows discusses Switzerland’s educational system and why it can be an example for the U.S.

• What are the top issues that U.S. officials need to address regarding early education? What is the role of donors in improving education systems? 

• Here are 6 lessons from a former U.S. Secretary of Education. 

Many people have studied and written about Switzerland’s youth apprenticeship system, and there are good reasons to do so. The Swiss economy has been called the most innovative in the world. Switzerland’s students significantly outperform U.S. students in scholastic achievement. Its youth unemployment rate is lower than ours. And Switzerland has lower levels of income inequality than the United States.

Another reason to envy Switzerland’s system: apprenticeships are not a minor add-on existing on the margins of the Swiss education system. Instead, youth apprenticeship is an integral, fundamental feature of that system—and one with far-reaching, positive effects on Swiss society. In my roles at the Colorado Department of Education and CareerWise Colorado, I had the pleasure of being part of a team that designed and launched the Colorado approximation of the Swiss youth apprenticeship system. As part of that effort, I had the opportunity to study the apprenticeship system up close, while meeting with a wide range of apprentices, employers, apprentice teachers, and parents. Overwhelmingly, young people and their parents described the process of making decisions about what to do at the end of compulsory education (roughly equivalent to 10th grade in the U.S.) as one that they undertook with care, plenty of good information, and relatively little worry about whether they were making the single best choice for their future.

Read the full article about education lessons for the U.S. by Gretchen Morgan at Manhattan Institute.