Education Reform

The US lags behind the rest of the civilized world in educational benchmarking results; recent tests indicate that the US is above 20th place out of 29 places in every tested academic field. Even before I read the report on our international ranking, I knew our schools were in trouble, and had worked out a few methods of correcting this problem. Some may argue that our lack of standing is due to poor salaries or low funding, yet this view is not easy to prove. Let us examine the key components that enhance education; teacher compensation, student engagement, and the logical flow of curriculum.

Education is possibly the most important investment that a nation can make; the continued advancement of a nation depends entirely on education. Though the US spends hundreds of billions of dollars on education a year, statistics show that this investment is coming to nil. Many of our high school graduates lack simple literary, geography, or mathematical skills. Despite this fact, the US graduates thousands of students a year that excel in these fields. In fact it is the discrepancy between the overachievers and the underachievers that underscores our educational system. Why do we have such a large gap between our students and why do minorities and first generation immigrants do more poorly on average in American schools versus their foreign school counterparts? Part of the answer to this question can be answered by stating cultural and political differences among nations and the process of culling the flock that is common practice in many foreign nations. Never would I suggest that the US should determine at middle school what profession each child should have and rather they should study for trade school or collage. This is practiced widely in other nations. Neither would I suggest that the Federal government mandate a curriculum to our schools; this violates the constitution. Yet while each state is responsible for its own education system, national benchmarking is necessary.

After seeing these results, “We have learned that teaching and assessing both content and 21st century skills are critical for student academic success and success in the workplace. The United States ranks below many other countries in providing a world-class education in mathematics and science. Along with scale scores, the 2006 PISA uses six proficiency levels to describe student performance in science literacy, with level 6 being the highest. The United States had greater percentages of students below and at level 1 (25%) than the OECD average percentages on the combined science literacy scale (19%). In the United States, only 6% of 8th-grade students reached the advanced benchmark for international mathematics standards compared with: 45% for Chinese Taipei, 40% for the Republic of Korea, 40% for Singapore, 31% for Japan, 10% for Hungary, 8% for England and 8% for the Russian Federation”(2), Minnesota and Massachusetts voted to adopt international standards for education.