WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama launched a competition Friday to improve US educational standards, a key part of his campaign promise to make the country's school system the best in the world.

The program, dubbed the "Race to the Top," will encourage US states to compete for 4.35 billion dollars in federal grants with the goal of encouraging them to improve school systems.

Obama said he was "issuing a challenge" to education professionals, state and local officials, even parents and students throughout the country to meet "a few key benchmarks for reform" to obtain the grants.

"If you set and enforce rigorous and challenging standards and assessments; if you put outstanding teachers at the front of the classroom; if you turn around failing schools -- your state can win a Race to the Top grant."

The White House has said the program is central to Obama's efforts to reform the US educational system and push it back up in international rankings, which was a key theme of his 2008 presidential campaign.

"In a world where countries that out-educate us today will out-compete us tomorrow, the future belongs to the nation that best educates it people," he said. "But we also know that today, our education system is falling short."

A 2008 report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) ranked the United States 13th for the percentage of its population who have completed upper secondary education, behind countries like South Korea, Slovenia and Canada.

US students also lag behind their counterparts in industrialized nations in science and math, according to a 2006 OECD ranking, which found that 15-year-olds in the United States scored lower than the OECD average in both subjects.

Calling the program "one of the largest investments in education reform in American history," Obama said the grants "will not only help students out-compete workers around the world, but let them fulfill their God-given potential."