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> Reforming America's Schools

Hedrick Smith has crisscrossed America and scoured the globe from China, Korea and Japan to Germany, searching for the most successful strategies for educating average young people to be competitive in the 21st Century global economy.

In two major PBS documentary mini-series, Challenge to America in 1994 and Surviving the Bottom Line in 1998, Smith has found and presented both educational failures and edffective models of educational reform, offering instructive and inspiring examples for communities that want to transform their own schools. He has found surprising examples of success in some of the world's toughest educational terrain, from Shanghai to Oakland, from Toyota City to Harlem, and from South Texas and the Fox River Valley of Wisconsin to Stuttgart, Germany.

In a series of special reports for the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Smith reports on how Austin, Texas embarked on bold reforms of his high school and community college science courses to help provide skilled workers for the modern world of the semiconduct chip fabs that settled in the Silicon Hills of Texas.

Surviving the Bottom Line: Learning to Survive
Smith goes seeking successful strategies for educating and preparing average young people for the economy of the future in such different locations as Shanghai, China, rurally, heavily Hispanic Southern Texas, inner city Oakland, California and the Midwest heartland city of Cincinnati. He finds surprising success stories in education.

Challenge to America: Education - The Heart of the Nation
School is where global competition begins, so Hedrick Smith takes us to second grade and high school in Germany, Japan, and America to see what kind of education best prepares youth for the 21st century.

Challenge to America: Winning Strategies
From the troubled streets of New York's East Harlem to California's Silicon Valley, Smith crosses the nation to bring us American success stories and effective pathways into the future. He looks into two major areas - effective educational reform and corporate change to meet global competition.

High Tech Jobs: School to Work
This series of three special broadcast segments for the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, shows how the semiconductor industry in Austin, Texas was forced to develop its own labor force for high tech chip fabs by working with Austin Community College and Austin high schools to develop special courses to promote knowledge and interest in high tech jobs.