A case can be made that the productivity of the K-12 education system in the U.S. has been declining for decades. Government and student spending on K-12 education has increased by 70 percent over the last 30 years with very little improvement in outcomes (U.S. Department of Education, 2010b). In higher education, the costs of tuition and fees have increased an astonishing 274.7 percent between 1990 and 2009 (Christensen et al., 2011).