In the United States, children are going back to school, and we travelled south from Washington DC to Jeb Stuart High School, in Virginia, to see the new students arrive for orientation day.

They are ninth-graders, (14 and 15-years-old) and their diverse backgrounds are an indication of the changing face of the US.

Not so long ago, this school would have been predominantly white.

Today only a quarter of children are classified as white, while more than one-third are Hispanic.

Many students do not speak English at home and some were illiterate when they arrived in the US. Many come from disadvantaged households.

But, as far as I could tell, the school does a good job of bringing this diverse group of students together whilst maintaining academic standards. 

Eric Welch is teaching his students about the wider world

White and Asian students do disproportionately well, but about three-quarters of all the children at Jeb Stuart High go on to some form of higher education.

Eric Welch is an engaging and enthusiastic teacher of social sciences.

His classroom walls are festooned with posters from this year's election campaign. 

He is trying to teach his students how the US's political system works, but he is also trying to teach them to understand each other. 

He says his students are learning to interact "with people from all different backgrounds, religions, languages ... and if America is going to lead the world in the future, we're building a cadre of students here that will know how to deal with the world".

Campaigners concerns

One thing I have learnt in a country as large and varied as the US is that generalisations are dangerous. 

In this regard, education is no exception. Many schools are doing an excellent job.

But it would be fair to say that there is widespread concern about the quality of education in schools and a nagging feeling that the US may be falling behind other countries. 

Adam Thibault is the spokesperson for "Ed in 08", a campaign group trying to bring education issues to the top of the 2008 election campaign.

Ed in 08 says that 70 per cent of eighth graders (13 or 14-year-olds) are not proficient in reading and will never catch up, and that each year, more than one million American students drop out of high schools.

There's a shortage of good maths and science teachers.

All this, Ed in 08 argues, means that "the American Dream is in danger" and the country is losing its "competitive edge", as jobs and opportunities go elsewhere.

It sounds dramatic, although Adam Thibault concedes that it is not so much a case of American schools getting worse,  as that they are standing still, whilst those in many other countries improve.

He argues that the US needs more common standards in its education, (which is a diplomatic way of saying individual states should have less autonomy), to try and reduce the widespread discrepancies in the quality of education between, say, Massachusetts and Mississippi.

He also wants teachers salaries to go up, and he wants good teachers to be rewarded more than their less successful colleagues.

Higher education

Whatever the state of US schools, there seems to be no such crisis of confidence in higher education.

Certainly not on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute for Technology, or MIT, just outside Boston, which we visited on a drizzly day in early August. MIT is perhaps the best university in the world for science; it's produced an amazing 72 Nobel laureates, and in fields such as electronics, computing, physics, chemistry and biology it has led the world. So, I wanted to know the secret of success for MIT and of US higher education in general. After all, depending on which survey you read, the US has either 24 or 34 of the best 50 universities in the world. For a start, MIT seems to have a lot of money. It's in the middle of a billion dollar expansion programme. The new Stata centre, containing labs and study space, is architecturally daring. And just next to it, construction work has started on a cancer research building. Professor Philip Khoury is a distinguished historian at MIT. MIT remains one of the world's best universities And, yes, he agrees that if we had to "point to one thing the United States does better, its higher education". MIT gets a lot of money from the government and from industry, but like so many US universities, it also gets enormous sums from its old students, or alumni. Professor Khoury argues that this money is more "flexible"; unlike government or industry grants, it comes with few strings attached, so the university can use it how it likes. The world's best students still want to come to MIT (about 40 per cent of its graduate students are foreigners), and other top US universities. But Professor Khoury is not complacent. Catching up Like many American academics, he complains that in the wake of the September 11th attacks it has been very difficult for some foreign students to obtain visas to study in the US. He believes that the universities in the rest of the world are catching up with their US counterparts. He says "as the American model of higher education proliferates and is adopted by more and more countries" in China and India, and across Europe, then more bright students will stay at home, or look at alternatives to the US for higher education.  On a hot summer's day, I took a walk around Washington’s famous Air and Space Museum, part of the Smithsonian. From the first aircraft, built by the Wright brothers, to space technology, it's a colourful reminder of America’s amazing scientific achievements in the 20th century.  The museum was full of school-children, absorbed by the wonders of how our world works. But if the US is to stay on top in the 21st century, it needs to fire the enthusiasm of a whole new generation.

Al Jazeera