Education Minister El James and the new chairman of the Board of Education, Mark Byrne, will probably come in for some criticism for deciding to seek out an internationally recognised curriculum for Bermuda's students, but they should stick to their guns.

Bermuda has spent the best part of 30 years trying to establish its own curriculum and certification process, and the sad truth is that it has never truly succeeded.

Why not? Mr. Byrne put it best when he said: "Why would we write a curriculum for 13 school years for a population of 5,000?"

Just so. It is hard to know how many millions of dollars have been spent on Bermudianising the curriculum and getting it internationally accredited which could have been spent on raising teaching standards and better educating children, but the betting here is that it is a great many.

That's not to say that there is no room for Bermuda in the curriculum. Most modern curriculums demand a good deal of project work from students, especially in social studies, so history, geography, sciences and the like can all draw from the Island.

But much of the curriculum, especially in maths, foreign languages, chemistry and physics, do not require a "Bermudian component", so why reinvent the wheel?

Whatever curriculum is selected needs to be rigorous, and it also needs to meet a range of abilities and interests. But once it is selected, then principals and the Ministry can get down to what really matters – improving the quality of teaching in the schools.

Mr. James said progress has been made in this area since the Hopkins Report was published, but now there needs to be continuous improvement, and those teachers who are failing and have not responded to mentoring and so forth, have to be forced out.

In welcoming the appointment of US Education Secretary Arne Duncan, conservative columnist George Will quoted a scholar in Newsweek recently saying that "about 90 percent of the differences among schools in average proficiency can be explained by five factors—number of days absent from school, amount of television watched in the home, number of pages read for homework, quantity and quality of reading matter in the home and, much the most important, the presence of two parents in the home.

"Government cannot do much to make those variables vary, but Duncan correctly thinks that we actually know how to make schools effective anyway. The keys are time and talent."

Mr. Will goes on to argue that the school year in the US – and Bermuda – is an artificially short period originally designed for an agricultural economy when children were needed to help with the harvest.

"Today, many middle-class children read and travel during a three-month summer break; disadvantaged children regress, so a portion of the precious 180 days must be devoted to remediation," Mr. Will notes.

Lengthen the school year and school day, as Mr. Duncan did in Chicago, and results will improve.

On teachers, Mr. Will wrote: "He (Mr. Duncan) thinks finding talented teachers is more important than reducing pupil-teacher ratios – a third good sign – and he sees a silver lining on today's dark economic clouds: Bright young people who might have gone into investment banking can be lured into teaching by better pay and forgiveness of student loans.

"By making teaching more fun, his Chicago innovations helped increase the number of applicants from two for each teaching position to ten. ...

"From his office at the foot of Capitol Hill, Duncan hopes to use federal money as a lever to move local school systems toward creative improvisations. But in Chicago he had a hammer—the support of His Honour, Mayor Richard Daley. Duncan may be about to receive an education in the difficulty of defeating local inertia from afar."

In Bermuda, local inertia is far less formidable than it is in the US or Chicago. But Mr. James needs to get his hammer out.