american education system problems essay

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Once upon a time, enthusiasts designed a formal education system to meet the economic demands of the industrial revolution. Fast forward to today and, with the current global economic climate, it seems apparent that the now established education system is unable to meet the needs of our hyper-connected society – a society that is in a constant state of evolution. Let’s examine 18 problems that prevent the US education system from regaining its former preeminence. Check out ExamSnap for all your exam needs.  

Parents are not involved enough. Of all the things out of the control of teachers, this one is perhaps the most frustrating. Time spent in the classroom is simply not enough for teachers to instruct every student, to teach them what they need to know. There must, inevitably, be some interaction outside school hours. Of course, students at a socio-economic disadvantage often struggle in school, particularly if parents lack higher levels of education. But students from middle and upper class families aren’t off the hook, either. The demands of careers and an over-dependence on schools put higher-class kids at risk too when it comes to the lack of parental involvement in academics.

• Schools are closing left and right. It’s been a rough year for public schools. Many have found themselves on the chopping block. Parents, students and communities as a whole feel targeted, even if school board members are quick to cite unbiased numbers. There is no concrete way to declare a winner in these cases, either. Sometimes, a school closing is simply inevitable but communities should first look for other solutions. Instead of shutting down underutilized public schools – icons of the community – districts should consider other neighborhood uses, such as a community center or adult education classes. Closing public schools should not be a short-sighted procedure. The decision should focus on the only investment that really matters: a quality public education for all our nation’s children.
• Our schools are overcrowded. The smaller the class, the better the individual student experience. A study by the National Center for Education Statistics found that 14 percent of U.S. schools exceed capacity. At a time where children need more attention than ever to succeed, overcrowded classrooms are making it even tougher to learn and tougher still for teachers to be effective.
• Technology comes with its downsides. I am an advocate for technology in the classroom. I think that ignoring the educational opportunities that technology has afforded us puts kids at a disadvantage. being said, screen culture overall has made the jobs of teachers much more difficult. Education has become synonymous with entertainment in many ways. Parents are quick to download educational games as soon as kids have the dexterity to operate a touch screen, and with the best of intentions. The quick-hit way that children are learning academics before and during their K-12 careers makes it even more difficult for teachers to keep up in the classroom setting, particularly since each student’s knowledge base and technological savvy varies.
• There is a lack of diversity in gifted education. The “talented and gifted” label is one bestowed upon the brightest and most advanced students. Beginning in early elementary grades, TAG programs separate student peers for the sake of individualized learning initiatives. Though the ideology is sound, the practice of it is often a monotone, unattractive look at contemporary American public schools. District schools need to find ways to better recognize different types of learning talent and look beyond the typical “gifted” student model. The national push to make talented and gifted programs better mirror the contemporary and ever-evolving student body is a step in the right direction. Real change happens on a smaller scale though – in individual districts, schools and TAG programs. That progress must start with understanding of the makeup of a particular student body and include innovative ways to include all students in TAG learning initiatives.
• School spending is stagnant, even in our improving economy. As the U.S. economy continues to improve, according to news headlines, one area is still feeling the squeeze from the recession years: K-12 public school spending. A report this month from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that 34 states are contributing less funding on a per student basis than they did prior to the recession years. Since states are responsible for 44 percent of total education funding in the U.S., these dismal numbers mean a continued crack down on school budgets despite an improving economy. If we cannot find the funding for our public schools, how can we expect things like the achievement gap to close or high school graduation rates to rise? It was understandable that budgets had to be slashed when the bottom dropped out of the economy. Now we are in a more stable place, though, it is time to get back to funding what matters most: the education of our K-12 students.
• We are still using the teacher training methods of yesterday. With respect to the students of the past, modern classrooms are full of sophisticated youngsters that show up with a detailed view of the world formed from more than home life experiences. Instant access to information from instant a child can press a touchscreen on a Smartphone and widespread socialization from as young as six weeks old in the form of childcare atmospheres – kids arrive at Kindergarten with less naivety than previous generations. Teachers don’t, in other words, get a clean slate. Instead, they get young minds cluttered with random information and ideas, all of which need fostering or remediating.
• There is a lack of teacher education innovation. It stands to reason that if students are changing, teachers must change too. More specifically, it is time to modify teacher education to reflect the demands of the modern K – 12 classrooms. There are policy and practice changes taking place all over the world – many driven by teachers – that address the cultural shifts in the classroom. Public education in America needs teachers who are better trained to meet the needs of specific student populations, understand the necessary role of distance learning, and are willing to speak up to facilitate classroom change. Without these teachers, effective reform to meet global demand is not possible.
• Some students are lost to the school-to-prison pipeline. Sadly, over half of black young men who attend urban high schools do not earn a diploma. Of these dropouts, too, nearly 60 percent will go to prison at some point. Perhaps there is no real connection between these two statistics, or the eerily similar ones associated with young Latino men. Are these young people bad apples, destined to fail academically and then to live a life of crime? If some of the theories of genetic predisposition are true, perhaps these young men never stood a chance at success and have simply accepted their lots in life. But what if those answers, all of them, are just cop-outs? What if scoffing at a connection between a strong education and a life lived on the straight and narrow is an easy way to bypass the real issues in K-12 learning? Students who are at risk of dropping out of high school or turning to crime need more than a good report card. They need alternative suggestions on living a life that rises above their current circumstances. For a young person to truly have a shot at an honest life, he or she has to believe in the value of an education and its impact on good citizenship. That belief system has to come from direct conversations about making smart choices with trusted adults and peers.
• There is a nationwide college-gender gap, and surprisingly, we are not focusing on it. If you have been following education hot button issues for any length of time, you’ve likely read about the nationwide push to better encourage girls in areas like science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). The thought is that by showing young women that these topics are just as appropriate for them as their male peers, more women will find lasting careers in these traditionally male-dominated fields. I’m all for more women in the STEM workplace but with all this focus in one area, are educators neglecting an even larger gender gap issue? I wonder how much of this trend is based on practicality and how much is based on a lingering social convention that women need to “prove” themselves when it comes to the workforce. Do women simply need a degree to land a job in any field? If so, the opposite is certainly not true for men – at least not yet. Will the young men in our classrooms today have a worse quality of life if they do not attend college – or will it be about the same?
• We still do not know how to handle high school dropouts. It seems that every time the issue of high school dropouts is discussed, it all centers on money. U.S. Census Statistics tell us that 38 percent of high school dropouts fall below the poverty line, compared with 18 percent of total households in every demographic. Dropouts are also 40 percent more likely to rent their residences and spend $450 less per month on housing costs than the overall population. Only around 60 percent of dropouts own vehicles and they spend over $300 less on entertainment annually than average Americans. It’s clear that a high school diploma is in fact the ticket to higher earnings, at least on a collective level. The negative financial ramifications of dropping out of high school cannot be denied, but the way they are over-emphasized seems like a worn-out tactic to me. Instead of focusing on students as earners, we really need to value them as learners so that we can encourage them to finish their high school education.
• We have not achieved education equity. Equity in education has long been an ideal. It’s an ideal celebrated in a variety of contexts, too. Even the Founding Fathers celebrated education as an ideal – something to which every citizen ought to be entitled. Unfortunately, though, the practice of equity in education has been less than effective. Equity, in the end, is a difficult ideal to maintain and many strategies attempting to maintain it have fallen far short in the implementation. To achieve equity, school systems need to have an approach for analyzing findings about recommended shifts in learning approaches and objectives. These approaches should also help teachers and administrators understand not what they have to avoid but what it is that they can do to achieve optimal equity moving forward.
• Technology brings a whole new dimension to cheating. Academic dishonesty is nothing new. As long as there have been homework assignments and tests, there have been cheaters. The way that cheating looks has changed over time, though. Technology has made it easier than ever. Perhaps the most interesting caveat of modern-day cheating in U.S. classrooms is that students often do not think they have done anything wrong. Schools must develop anti-cheating policies that include technology and those policies must be updated consistently. Teachers must stay vigilant, too, when it comes to what their students are doing in classrooms and how technology could be playing a negative role in the learning process. Parents must also talk to their kids about the appropriate ways to find academic answers and alert them to unethical behaviors that may seem innocent in their own eyes.
• We still struggle with making teacher tenure benefit both students and teachers. One of the most contested points of teacher contracts is the issue of tenure. Hardline education reformers argue that tenure protects underperforming teachers, which ends up punishing the students. Teachers unions challenge (among other reasons) that with the ever-changing landscape of K-12 education, including evaluation systems, tenure is necessary to protect the jobs of excellent teachers who could otherwise be ousted unfairly. It can often be a sticking point – and one that can lead to costly time out of classrooms, as recently seen in large school systems like New York City and Chicago. Now, I’m not suggesting that teachers just “give up” but I would support adjusting the expectations for tenure. It seems an appropriate step in the right direction for teachers in all types of schools. That energy then can be redirected towards realistic and helpful stipulations in teachers’ contracts that benefit the entire industry.
• More of our schools need to consider year-round schooling. Does it work? The traditional school year, with roughly three months of vacation days every summer, was first implemented when America was an agricultural society. The time off was not implemented to accommodate contemporary concerns, like children needing “down time” to decompress and “be kids.” The system was born out of economic necessity. In fact, the first schools that went against the summers-off version of the academic calendar were in urban areas that did not revolve around the agricultural calendar, like Chicago and New York, as early as the mid-1800s. It was much later, however, that the idea as a whole gained momentum. Overall, year-round schooling seems to show a slight advantage academically to students enrolled, but the numbers of students are not high enough to really get a good read on it at this point. What does seem clear, however, is that at-risk students do far better without a long summer break, and other students are not harmed by the year-round schedule.
• We are still wrestling the achievement gap. Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Education released student performance data in its National Assessment for Educational Progress report. The data is compiled every two years and it assesses reading and math achievements for fourth and eighth graders. This particular report also outlines differences between students based on racial and socioeconomic demographics. The data points to the places in the U.S. that still struggle with inequality in student opportunity and performance, otherwise known as the achievement gap. The achievement gap will likely always exist in some capacity, in much the same way that the U.S. high school dropout rate will likely never make it down to zero. This doesn’t mean it is a lost cause, of course. Every student who succeeds, from any demographic, is another victory in K-12 education and it benefits society as a whole. Better recognition by every educator, parent and citizen of the true problem that exists is a start; actionable programs are the next step.
• We need to consider how school security measures affect students. In theory, parents and educators would do anything to keep students safe, whether those students are pre-Kindergartners or wrapping up a college career. Nothing is too outlandish or over-the-top when it comes to protecting our kids and young adults. Metal detectors, security cameras, more police presence in school hallways, gated campuses – they all work toward the end goal of sheltering students and their educators, protecting some of the most vulnerable of our citizens. Emotions aside, though, how much does school security really increase actual safety? Do school security efforts actually hinder the learning experience? It sounds good to taut the virtues of tighter policies on school campuses but is it all just empty rhetoric? Given the fact that state spending per student is lower than at the start of the recession, how much should schools shell out on security costs? Perhaps the best investment we can make to safeguard our students and educators is in personal vigilance. Perhaps less reliance on so-called safety measures would lead to higher alertness.
• We need to make assistive technology more available for students with disabilities. A key to improving the educational experience for students with disabilities is better accommodations in schools and continued improvements in assistive technology. Assistive technology in K-12 classrooms, by definition, is designed to “improve the functional capabilities of a child with a disability.” While the word “technology” automatically conjures up images of cutting-edge electronics, some assistive technology is possible with just simple accommodations. Whether high-tech or simple in design, assistive technology has the ability to transform the learning experiences for the children who benefit. Assistive technology is important for providing a sound education for K-12 students with disabilities but benefits the greater good of the country, too. Nearly one-fourth of a specific student population is not being properly served and with so many technological advances, that is a number I believe can drop. Assistive technology in simple and complex platforms has the ability to lift the entire educational experience and provide a better life foundation for K-12 students with disabilities.

Some of these reasons are well-known and long-standing issues. However, others—such as the emergence of a screen culture—are new and even somewhat unexpected challenges. However, the nature of each issue does not matter. All of them are standing in the way of our becoming globally competitive.

Can you think of any reasons the U.S. educational systems are failing?

Click here to read all our posts concerning the Achievement Gap.

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What Students Are Saying About How to Improve American Education

An international exam shows that American 15-year-olds are stagnant in reading and math. Teenagers told us what’s working and what’s not in the American education system.

By The Learning Network

Earlier this month, the Program for International Student Assessment announced that the performance of American teenagers in reading and math has been stagnant since 2000 . Other recent studies revealed that two-thirds of American children were not proficient readers , and that the achievement gap in reading between high and low performers is widening.

We asked students to weigh in on these findings and to tell us their suggestions for how they would improve the American education system.

Our prompt received nearly 300 comments. This was clearly a subject that many teenagers were passionate about. They offered a variety of suggestions on how they felt schools could be improved to better teach and prepare students for life after graduation.

While we usually highlight three of our most popular writing prompts in our Current Events Conversation , this week we are only rounding up comments for this one prompt so we can honor the many students who wrote in.

Please note: Student comments have been lightly edited for length, but otherwise appear as they were originally submitted.

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The 15 Biggest Failures of the American Public Education System

Decades ago, the American formal education system was designed to meet the changing needs of the industrial revolution. What was once a time of growth has changed over the years and, with the current economic climate, that system is no longer able to meet modern needs. But what are the biggest failures of the American public education system, and how can they be remedied?

In this article, we’ll explore fifteen of the biggest failures affecting the American public education system today. We’ll also explore five of the biggest emerging trends in American education.

The Top 15 Failures in American Public Education

Policymakers are constantly fighting to make changes to the American public education system, and not all of them are beneficial. Over the years, there has been a great deal of back-and-forth that has left the public education system in shambles. Some of these problems are easy to identify and have been long-standing issues while others are new, brought about by advances in technology, changes in policy, and general change that happens with time.

Every story has two sides, and for every policy or program put into place, there are going to be proponents and critics. Below you’ll find an overview of some of the biggest issues facing the American public system as well as arguments from people on both sides of the issue.

This video examines the question of why public education is failing parents and students.

Here are the top 15 failures affecting the American public education system:

1. Deficits in government funding for schools.

Funding is always an issue for schools and is, in fact, one of the biggest issues facing the American public education system today. For more than 90% of K-12 schools, funding comes from state and local governments, largely generated by sales and income taxes. Research shows, however, that funding has not increased with need – many states are still issuing funding that is lower than it was before the Great Recession. Lower funding means fewer teachers, fewer programs, and diminished resources.

2. Decline in school safety.

There has been a string of high-profile mass shootings in American schools, resulting not only in dozens of deaths but many debates about school safety. In one poll , over 50% of teenagers said they were worried about the possibility of gun violence in school. Teachers all across the country are faced with the problem of figuring out how to prevent attacks and protect the lives of students and personnel. Some suggest special straining for teachers and concealed weapons might make schools safer while critics argue that more guns in schools could lead to more accidents and injuries.

3. Challenges with technology in education.

Today’s students have grown up using technology and have come to expect it in the classroom, but there are arguments about how large a role technology should play in education. Supporters suggest that technology creates the potential for more active student engagement and provides instant access to up-to-date resources while critics say it could be a distraction. While technology in the classroom certainly has its benefits, certain aspects of technology are challenging. For example, smartphones and easy access to technology have made it easier for students to cheat and can negatively impact learning.

This video discusses the worsening school funding crisis.

4. Controversy over charter schools and voucher programs.

Another hot topic in education today is school choice. Charter schools and school vouchers allow parents to choose options other than traditional public schools for their children. Charter schools are funded by a combination of private and public funds and operate outside the public school system. School vouchers allow parents to use public funds to send their child to a school of choice, including private schools. Critics of these schools suggest that charter schools and voucher programs siphon funds away from public schools that are already struggling financially.

5. Problems with the common core curriculum.

The Common Core State Standards were developed to specify exactly what students should know before graduating high school. It was developed in 2009 to promote educational equity across the country, holding all students to the same standardized testing requirements. Some see the problem as a federal intrusion into the state control of education and others say that it doesn’t allow for teacher innovation and flexibility with the learning process. Most states adopted the standards when they were introduced but more than a dozen have since repealed or revised them.

6. Decreased teacher salaries.

Teacher salaries are by no means impressive and, in most states, they have decreased steadily over the past few years. In fact, research shows that the average salary for public elementary and secondary school teachers dropped by nearly 5% between the 2009/10 school year and now. States like Oklahoma and Colorado experienced a 17% and 16% decrease – these states also saw massive teacher walkouts in 2018. There are, of course, some states where teacher salaries increased, and some teachers received a growth in benefits that may or may not be enough to balance out wages that are low overall.

7. Emphasis on standardized testing.

Along with Common Core, there has been an increased focus on standardized testing, especially during the No Child Left Behind years. Schools and teachers are judged based on student test scores which, many argue, is not a fair or accurate measure of efficacy. Many critics argue that standardized testing is one of the biggest problems in American education, suggesting that the pressure to produce high test scores leads to a teach-to-the-test approach and reduced focus on non-tested subjects like art.

8. Arguments about teacher tenure.

Tenure is designed to protect teachers from being fired for personal or political reasons – the school district must demonstrate just cause. In many states, tenure is granted to public school teachers who have consistently received satisfactory evaluations, though some states don’t award it at all. Supporters suggest that tenured teachers can advocate for students without having fears of reprisal while critics say that it makes it harder for school districts to dismiss ineffectual teachers. Some also suggest that tenure may encourage complacency, allowing teachers to put forth the minimal effort.

9. Bullying in schools.

Violence in schools is a rising issue and bullying is a key contributor. According to the National Center for Education Statistics , over 20% of students in grades 6 through 12 have been bullied either in school or on their way to/from school. This figure is actually down from 32% in 2007 but is still much too high. The challenge with these statistics is that many students who are bullied do NOT report it. Bullied students experience a wide range of physical, behavioral, and emotional problems that can impact not only their education but also their lives.

10. Growing problems with student poverty.

According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, more than 50% of the public-school population in the United States was made up of low-income students. This is a significant increase from 38% in 2001. This is a nationwide problem with 40% of public-school students qualifying for free or reduced-price lunches in 40 states. In 18 of those states, student poverty rates were over 50%. Studies have shown that low-income students tend to perform lower than affluent students and family income shows a strong correlation with student achievement measured by standardized tests.

11. Schools are overcrowded.

In the 2011/12 school year, the average class size in American public schools was about 21 students in elementary school and almost 27 students in secondary school. Anecdotal reports, however, suggest that classrooms today have closer to 30, and in some cases, 40 students. Teachers and other proponents of smaller class sizes suggest that class size influences the quality of instruction with smaller class sizes have improved student outcomes. Critics say that the cost of limiting class sizes is a limiting factor and that it may not be worth it. In Florida, class sizes were capped in 2002 but a 2010 study showed no significant impact on test scores for students in grades 4 through 8.

12. Student mental health challenges.

Mental health is a growing concern in the United States and one that even affects school students. A 2018 study showed that nearly two-thirds of college students experienced overwhelming anxiety and anxiety has been reported in younger students as well. Even schools that are trying to make a difference face challenges. For example, the recommended ratio of students to counselors is one counselor for every 1,000 to 1,500 students but the U.S. college campus average is 1,737 to 1. Awareness of mental health issues is increasing, but there is still a stigma that prevents many students from seeking care.

13. Parents are not involved enough.

Teachers in public schools can only do so much to support their students. When the students go home for the day, the state of their home life can impact their development both personally and academically. In cases where parents lack higher education, they may not be able to provide the assistance students need to learn and to complete homework. Students in low-income families face additional challenges at home, though even middle- and upper-class families aren’t off the hook. In many families, parents are too career-focused and have little time to spend supporting their child’s education.

14. Too many schools are being closed.

Schools all over the country are closing their doors in numbers that are quite alarming. This only leads to an increase in issues with large class sizes and poor access to resources. It is easy for parents, teachers, and communities that are affected by closures to feel targeted even when school board members provide unbiased data. In some cases, closures cannot be prevented but they can be delayed and communities should consider other solutions or alternative uses for the school such as a community center or adult education center.

15. Lack of teacher innovation and outdated teaching methods.

The teaching methods used decades ago simply do not work for the modern student. One of the biggest things holding back the American public education system is a lack of teacher innovation, partially created by the enforcement of standardized testing and the Common Core curriculum. Unfortunately, the problem really needs to be addressed at the federal level with changes to policies that will result in a change within the public education system. America needs teachers who are better trained to meet the needs of their students and who are willing to speak up and facilitate change. Teachers are on the front lines and, without them speaking up, change is not possible.

Problems abound in the American education system, but growth and change are possible. Keep reading to learn about the top emerging trends in the nation’s public education.

The Top 5 Emerging Trends in Education

Though the American public education system certainly has its issues, it is by no means a lost cause. The only thing anyone can do is change with the times and there are a number of emerging trends in education that could be a step toward resolving some of the issues above.

Here is an overview of the top 5 emerging trends in American education:

• Increase in maker learning initiatives.
• Moving away from a letter grade system.
• Changing classroom approaches like flipped learning.
• The institution of micro-credentials.
• Growing concern for social and emotional development.

Now, let’s take a quick look at each of these trends.

1. Increase in maker learning initiatives.

In many schools, teaching is the focus when education should really be focused on student learning. Maker education allows students to follow their own interests and to test their own solutions for problems in a do-it-yourself approach to education. Students learn in collaborative spaces where they identify problems, create inventions, make prototypes, and keep working until they have the final result that works. There is little hard evidence on the trend as of yet, but it is growing quickly.

2. Moving away from a letter grade system.

Student assessment is necessary to test the efficacy of teaching strategies and curriculum – it is also a good way to measure individual student growth and success. For many years, letter grades have been the primary method of student assessment but that is changing. Leaders in education currently feel that the traditional letter grade model is not a sufficient measure of the skills most highly valued in the modern workforce – skills like creativity and problem-solving.

In 2017, the Mastery Transcript Consortium was formed and includes over 150 private high schools. These schools have adopted a digital system that provides qualitative descriptions of student learning and samples of work instead of the grade-based transcript system. Public schools are quickly adopting the trend as well in a nationwide shift toward mastery-based or competency-based learning.

3. Changing classroom approaches like flipped learning.

The traditional model of teaching places the teacher in front of the class giving a lecture, followed by students working at home on assignments to enhance their understanding of the subject. Flipped learning involves students watching videos or relevant coursework prior to class, and using class time to expand on the material through group discussions or collaborative projects. Flipped learning allows students to control their learning pace and encourages students to learn from each other, exploring subjects more deeply than they otherwise might.

4. The institution of micro-credentials.

This trend in higher education is a departure from traditional college degrees that require years of study over a multi-year span. Micro-credentials, rather, are also known as digital badges or nano degrees that demonstrate knowledge or skill in a given area and are earned through short, targeted educational offerings. About 20% of higher education institutions offer some kind of alternative credentialing system, often partnering with third-party learning providers.

5. Growing concern for social and emotional development.

Traditional education is focused on academics but there is a movement toward nurturing the whole study called social-emotional learning (SEL). This movement is based on the growing consensus that schools have a responsibility to protect and develop students’ social and emotional development in addition to their cognitive skills. SEL focuses on helping students manage their emotions, show empathy, set goals, identify their strengths and make responsible decisions. Research on SEL shows a reduction in anti-social behavior and an improvement in academic achievement and long-term health.

The United States is a giant country with a huge population, making it difficult to standardize education or make improvements across the board. Though there are many problems with the American public education system, there are also many people (including legislators) who are dedicated to making positive changes that could benefit the future students of this country.

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The Failure of American Public Education

Government is wholly unsuited to teach america’s students..

Many American critics believe that the major problem with public education today is a lack of focus on results. Students aren’t expected to meet high standards, the argument goes, and the process of education takes precedence over analyzing education results in policy-making circles.

This is a valid argument (as far as it goes). Indeed, it can be taken one important step further. We not only fail to hold individual students accountable for poor performance, we have also failed to hold the entire government-controlled school system accountable for its performance since at least World War II. Public education is itself a failure. Why shouldn’t individual students follow its example?

The history of reform efforts in American public education is replete with half-hearted measures, with almost comical misdiagnoses of education problems, with blame-shifting, and with humbug. Everyone is an expert (most have, of course, suffered through the very system they want to reform). At any one time during the course of school reform, an illusion of debate often obscures a surprising consensus on the heralded “magic bullet” of the decade—be it school centralization or progressive education or preschool education or computerizing the classroom—that will solve America’s education problems. These magic bullets always misfire. But instead of changing their weapon, policy-makers simply put another round in the chamber, foolishly believing that the newest fad will succeed despite the failures of its predecessors.

Some critics believe that public education reforms fail because they are compromised or sabotaged by the education lobbies—teacher associations, administrators, and the legislators in their pockets. There is certainly some truth to that explanation, as we shall see. But in many cases, attributing the failure of reform to subversion merely exonerates that reform. Most reform ideas are either irrelevant or destructive of education. They would fail whether organized political interests opposed them or not.

Many conservatives believe that American public education is in poor shape today because of cultural and social trends, most beginning in the 1960s, which destroyed classroom discipline, the moral basis for education, and a national consensus on what students should learn. Again, there is some truth in this proposition, but ultimately it fails to explain why American students do not possess the communication and computational skills they need today to succeed in college or in the working world.

Furthermore, many free-market thinkers believe that applying market competition to the public schools will solve many of America’s educational problems. I’m sympathetic to this argument, but it ignores the role of government policies other than student assignment to schools, which inhibit school success. When government policy continues to impose rigid personnel rules, bureaucracy, regulations, and a mandate to use education to engineer social or political outcomes, a school cannot successfully impart the needed skills, knowledge, and perspective to its students—whether these students choose to be there or not.

Lastly, the rhetoric of school reform often ignores the crucial role of individual decisions (by students, by parents, by business owners, by educators) in determining educational outcomes. You can lead a horse to water, the old adage goes, but you can’t make him drink. It’s a folksy way of imparting an important individualist truth. Providing students opportunities at school does not guarantee success if students watch television rather than do their homework—and parents let them. By assuming that any set of reform ideas can magically create a well-educated citizenry, we oversell the role of policy-making. Education requires initiative, a trait notoriously difficult to create or impose.

A Century of Reform

Public education and public-education reform share a common history. There is no past paradise when all students excelled. There is no perfect prototype for public education hidden in history, to be uncovered today and bestowed on a thankful nation. Rather, American public education is best thought of, historically, as mediocre. It was a serviceable system for preparing students for an agrarian or assembly-line world in which only an elite pursued higher education.

Public education in America really began in earnest after the Civil War, when government-funded and -controlled schools supplanted the earlier system of private education. According to the U.S. Department of Education, some 57 percent of the 12 million school-aged Americans in 1870 were enrolled in public elementary or secondary schools, though only about 60 percent of those enrolled attended school on any given day and the average school year was 132 days. By the turn of the century, the percentage of school-aged children attending public schools had risen to 72 percent, with almost 70 percent of enrollees attending on any one of the 150 days in the school year. Most public education still occurred in the early grades—only two percent of the student population were in ninth grade or higher.

By 1989 almost 90 percent of school-aged children attended public schools. Almost all attended class daily (with some important local or regional exceptions) and the average school year had grown to 180 days—still too short, say many modern critics, but a 40 percent increase since Reconstruction. Most students stay in school at least throughout the high-school grades, while a record number are pursuing higher education.

American policy-makers and educators began to create in earnest our centralized, monopolistic public education system at the turn of the century. For example, over a relatively brief period from 1890 to 1910, public schools increased their share of the high-school population from two-thirds to about 90 percent—a proportion of public to private schools which has persisted until the present day. There were a number of factors motivating this change. During the last few decades of the nineteenth century, public education had grown steadily as a primarily locally controlled phenomenon, often emulating or taking over ownership from private schools. Education was still basically focused on learning skills, such as reading or arithmetic, and schools often reflected their communities in very obvious ways.

But by the start of the twentieth century, a number of different groups began to believe that a comprehensive, centrally controlled (at least on the city or state level), and bureaucratic public education system was crucial to America’s future. The Progressive movement, for example, sought to replace haphazard government decision-making (such as that provided by political machines or community schools) with a more standardized, “predictable” approach. At the time, they viewed such change as necessary to eliminate corruption and graft. Similarly, the child welfare movement began to press for changes in family life—for replacing child labor and family neglect with public education.

Simultaneously, American business leaders began to see a decentralized, “patchwork” education system as a liability in international competition. U.S. manufacturers, especially, saw the rise of Germany as a significant economic threat and sought to imitate that country’s new system of state-run trade schools. In 1905, the National Association of Manufacturers editorialized that “the nation that wins success in competition with other nations must train its youths in the arts of production and distribution.” German education, it concluded, was “at once the admiration and fear of all countries.” American business, together with the growing labor movement, pressed Congress to dramatically expand federal spending on education, especially for vocational instruction. Also, business and education leaders began to apply new principles of industrial organization to education, such as top-down organization and a “factory-floor” model in which administrators, teachers, and students all had a place in producing a standardized “final product.” These leaders created professional bureau cracies to devise and implement policy.

Finally, perhaps the most important boosters of America’s new public education system were what we might today call “cultural conservatives.” The turn of the century, after all, was a time of tremendous immigration. As more and more immigrants arrived in America, bringing with them a plethora of languages, cultural traditions, and religious beliefs, American political leaders foresaw the potential dangers of Balkanization. The public education system, once designed primarily to impart skills and knowledge, took on a far more political and social role. It was to provide a common culture and a means of inculcating new Americans with democratic values. Public schools, in other words, were to be a high-pressure “melting pot” to help America avoid the dismal fate of other multi-national politics. American political leaders were all too familiar with the Balkan Wars of the early 1900s, and were intent on avoiding a similar fate.

The Expanding Role of Public Education

By now, you should be experiencing a heavy dose of déjà vu. These themes and concerns have continued to dominate American public education until the present day. “Do-gooders” throughout the twentieth century have sought to expand the role of public education in all aspects of what was once family life, such as instilling moral values, providing health and nutrition, fighting delinquency and crime, and protecting children from physical and psychological abuse. Today, they are the primary advocates of Head Start and other supplements to school that intervene in virtually every aspect of a student’s life.

Business groups, especially national organizations and corporate magnates, have frequently played a high-profile role in educational affairs during this century, constantly warning of the economic threats posed by international competitors (as in the Sputnik scare of the 1950s or the “competitiveness” debate today) and supporting a professional, centralized approach to public education (in stark contrast to what the same business leaders believed was appropriate in economic policy).

Finally, a host of groups across the political spectrum have looked to public schools as a key means of accomplishing what they consider to be important political or social objectives, such as racial integration, social tolerance, democratic participation, or environmental awareness.

The history of public education reform is a story in which these groups—sometimes in concert and sometimes in opposition to professional educators with their own designs—jockey for position to make their indelible mark on the school policies of the day. Reform efforts have reappeared regularly; in the 1940s, the watchword was “life adjustment education.” Educators, worried about a growing dropout rate and the seemingly frantic pace of post-War technological innovations, sought to help students adjust to a changing world. One example of a class introduced in public schools during this period was entitled “Basic Urges, Wants, and Needs and Making Friends and Keeping Them.” That’s the 1940s, not the 1960s.

This “promising” development fell victim to the education scare that began when the Soviet Union put its Sputnik satellite into space in 1957. The focus shifted back toward learning basic subjects, though in new and sometimes misguided ways. A flurry of activity followed the Sputnik scare, exemplified by such innovations as new math, open classrooms, programmed instruction, and ungraded schools (which are now making a comeback). During the 1960s, these ideas began to filter throughout the American public education system (all the more susceptible to fads and trends because of its increasingly centralized nature). Some of these notions worked in particular schools, while failing dismally in others—another common result of school reforms generally. In the 1970s, some new ideas were added to this increasingly unwieldy mix, such as the behavioralism craze, whole-language reading instruction, mastery learning, and the spread of standardized testing of both students and teachers.

Finally, during the 1980s the school reform bandwagon got a new set of tires and a fresh coat of paint. Following the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983, governors instituted all sorts of teacher training and testing programs, curriculum changes, and higher performance standards for students. At the same time, states dramatically increased spending on all facets of public education. And President Ronald Reagan, promising to eliminate the U.S. Education Department during his campaign, actually helped administer a significant outflow of new federal money for public education, mostly directed toward specific programs for needy or minority students.

What Was Gained?

Despite the widespread public impression, felt every five years or so since World War II, that something “new” was happening in public school reform, education statistics tell a different story. They demonstrate very little change in student performance (and most measurable changes were downward). Here’s a brief report card on four decades of public education reform:

Many so-called education experts believe that class size—the ratio of students to teacher—must be reduced to improve learning. We’ve already tried it. From 1955 to 1991, the average pupil-teacher ratio in U.S. public schools dropped by 40 percent.

These experts also proclaim that lack of funding hamstrings reform, and that the 1980s were a particularly bad time for school finances. Wrong again. Annual expenditures per pupil in U.S. public schools exploded by about 350 percent in real dollars from 1950 ($1,189) to 1991 ($5,237). In only two years during this 40-year period did spending fall: 1980 and 1981. Spending grew by about a third in real terms from 1981 to 1991.

The average salary of public school teachers rose 45 percent in real terms from 1960 (the first year data are available) to 1991. This increase masks a more variable trend. Real salaries rose until 1974, when they began to level off and even decline. The average salary reached a trough of $27,436 in 1982, after which it rose to an all-time high of $33,015 in 1991. Instructional staff in public schools generally saw their earnings increase faster than the average full-time employee—from 1950 to 1989 the ratio of instructional-staff salary to the average full-time salary in the U.S. increased by 22 percent (although it sank from 1972 to 1980). Student performance has hardly kept pace with the dramatic increases in resources devoted to public education. While the percentage of students aged 17 at the beginning of the school year who graduated from high school rose 30 percent from 1950 to 1964, it has leveled off since then. In fact, the 1991 percentage is lower than the 1969 peak of 77.1 percent.

Evidence from the National Assessment of Educational Progress and other performance measures shows how poorly served America’s public school students really are. Just five percent of 17-year-old high school students in 1988 could read well enough to understand and use information found in technical materials, literary essays, historical documents, and college-level texts. This percentage has been falling since 1971.

Average Scholastic Aptitude Test scores fell 41 points between 1972 and 1991. Apologists for public education argue that such factors as the percentage of minority students taking the SAT can explain this drop. Not true. Scores for whites have dropped. And the number of kids scoring over 600 on the verbal part of the SAT has fallen by 37 percent since 1972, so the overall decline can’t be blamed merely on mediocre students “watering down” the results.

Only six percent of 11th graders in 1986 could solve multi-step math problems and use basic algebra. Sixty percent did not know why The Federalist was written, 75 percent didn’t know when Lincoln was president, and one in five knew what Reconstruction was.

Another measure of the failure of public education is that almost all institutions of higher education now provide remedial instruction to some of their students. The Southern Regional Education Board surveyed its members in 1986 and found that 60 percent said at least a third of their students needed remedial help. Surveying this evidence of failure among college-bound students, former Reagan administration official Chester E. Finn, Jr., wrote that “surely college ought to transport one’s intellect well beyond factual knowledge and cultural literacy. But it’s hard to add a second story to a house that lacks a solid foundation.” 

Why American Public Education Fails

There are several characteristics of government institutions which, common to virtually all American public schools, inhibit the successful operation of schools. These include:

Rigid personnel rules and regulations. Those schools with little to no interference from outside supervisors or regulators on hiring and firing decisions tend to be the most effective schools as measured by student performance. John Chubb of the Brookings Institution and Terry Moe of Stanford University provided a good explanation for this in their 1990 book Politics, Markets and America’s Schools:

Among the reasons why direct external control may interfere with the development of an effective school, perhaps the most important is the potentially debilitating influence of external control over personnel. If principals have little or no control over who teaches in their schools, they are likely to be saddled with a number of teachers, perhaps even many teachers, whom they regard as bad fits. In an organization that works best through shared decision-making and delegated authority, a staff that is in conflict with the leader and with itself is a serious problem . . . such conflict may be a school’s greatest organizational problem. Personnel policies that promote such conflict may be a school’s greatest burden.

Tenure is not the only barrier to successful school organization. School organizations that call for greater differentiation among teachers and pay some teachers more than others on the basis of performance or drawing power rather than seniority clash with government-mandated salary schedules. Positions and salary levels are decided by the state without any relationship to a particular school’s situation. To foster successful reorganization of schools and more effective and efficient use of teachers, school systems or even individual schools must be able to employ their teaching staff as they see fit and pay them accordingly. If a school has a hard time finding a good science teacher (not a hypothetical situation in many districts) it should be able to set the salary for that position at a level which will attract qualified persons.

Uniform salary schedules were originally enacted to address racial and social inequities among teachers, not as a “better way” of organizing the teaching force. These inequities have largely been addressed and can be prevented by other means. But like so many governmental policies, uniform salary schedules have outlived their usefulness. Reorganization might involve paying teachers of one subject more than teachers of another subject, or paying a good teacher with ten years’ experience more than a mediocre teacher with 15 years’ experience. As education researcher Denis Doyle of the Hudson Institute wrote: “There is no mystery as to how to find and retain qualified teachers of mathematics or the sciences. Pay them what the market demands, provide them with benefits that are competitive, and create a work environment in which they can derive genuine professional satisfaction. Pay differentials are the answer.”

And yet mediocre teachers, who dominate teacher unions and the education lobbyists in Washington and the state capitals, continue to resist this basic change.

A civil service system. A related set of problems for American public education stems from the early twentieth-century view that public services can and should be delivered by a regimented, compartmentalized civil service. All indications are that the teaching profession will best be organized in the future as firms providing specific services to schools, rather than as a unionized set of government employees with tenure and little performance-based accountability. They should, in other words, come to resemble law firms. In teaching firms, more senior partners would enjoy tremendous name recognition and respect, attracting clients for the firms while imparting their proven teaching strategies to junior partners and associates. Can you imagine such a system evolving within today’s public education system?

Monopoly. It’s not an attack on teachers to suggest that they, like all other workers, respond to incentives. When a school enjoys monopoly control over its students, the incentive to produce successful students is lacking. When student performance doesn’t correlate with reward on the school level, individual teachers see no need to go the extra mile to help students when the teacher next door receives the same rewards for merely babysitting. And without the pressures of competition in education, parents are bothersome nuisances rather than clients who might potentially go elsewhere if not satisfied.

Centralized decision-making. When decisions on such issues as the makeup of the history curriculum or the daily school schedule are mandated from above, school leaders lose initiative and school policies become disconnected with the students and teachers they supposedly exist to serve. At a time when American industry is abandoning the factory model and top-down management as hopelessly irrelevant to modern enterprises, so too must schools seek better lines of communication and a more effective way to make decisions about everyday problems.

Tinkering around the edges of the public school system might reduce the impact of one or two of these government characteristics, but they’ll never be eliminated without substantially limiting government interference in education.

There is much disagreement about whether these characteristics have become more pronounced over the last few decades. But the trend lines aren’t the point. In a world in which the returns on education dropped off fairly rapidly in the upper grades and college—in other words, when a junior-high school education was enough to obtain gainful employment and function in society—America could basically afford to have an inefficient, bureaucratized, and ineffective system of public education. When students fell through the cracks, they had a fairly soft landing. Today, however, technological innovation and a host of other factors have dramatically increased the returns on education. All students must be able to compute, communicate, and think to make their way in an increasingly complex and confusing world. 

The Triumph of Politics

What has clearly been on the rise in recent decades is the use of America’s public schools for the purpose of engineering some social outcome deemed desirable by political leaders. This is an unavoidable, and perhaps insurmountable, failing of government-run education.

Both liberal do-gooders and conservative culture warriors look to public education to achieve public goods. In the 1950s and 1960s, a national focus on the problem of racial segregation helped steer education policy away from questions of excellence to questions of equity and access. In the 1970s, activists bent on such diverse causes as environmentalism, humanism, spiritualism, and even socialism began to target the school curriculum. They produced all sorts of programs, handbooks, textbooks, and other materials, and used political influence to have these adopted as part of the school day in many jurisdictions. Meanwhile, America’s developmental psychologists and early childhood experts, deep in their environmentalist (in the sense of non-genetic) phase, got the attention of educators and political leaders. They argued that formal education should be supplemented with special counseling and self-esteem programs, that formal education should be extended into the preschool years, and that the federal government should be involved in funding these early-intervention and compensatory education programs. Policy-makers believed them. So we now have Chapter 1, Head Start, in-school counselors, and other “innovations,” the usefulness of which is now in great doubt.

When every call for fundamental change in American education is rebutted not by arguments about student achievement but by arguments focusing on race, class, social mixing, and other social concerns, it is difficult to imagine real progress. When teachers spend much of their day filling out forms, teaching quasi-academic subjects mandated from above, and boosting student self-esteem (as contrasted with serf-respect, which is earned rather than worked up), learning is difficult if not impossible.

While government is wholly unsuited to teach America’s students because of all the characteristics listed above, private schools offer an example of what American education could be. After trending downward for decades, private school enrollment increased during the 1980s. This year, private schools accounted for about 12 percent of America’s students. The fastest-growing segment of the private school market is the non-religious school, but Catholic and other parochial schools continue to supply excellent education opportunities to poor children and minorities both in inner-cities and in rural areas. Studies show that private schools produce better students than public schools do, even when you take into account the selectivity of some private schools.

It’s true, as some public-education boosters charge, that even private school students have shown some declines in achievement over the past half-century—but that proves only that other influences in society besides schooling can have a significant impact on student performance. Private schools provide a better education than public schools even though American families generally do not sufficiently value education and students often lack initiative and concentration.

By any reasonable measure, America’s monopolistic, bureaucratic, over-regulated system of public schools is woefully unprepared to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. Political, business, and education leaders continue to talk about “reforming” the current public education system. They should, instead, be discussing how to replace it.

John Hood is a former president of the John Locke Foundation, a state policy think tank in North Carolina, and author of The Heroic Enterprise: Business and the Common Good (Free Press).

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What Changes to the U.S. Education System Are Needed to Support Long-Term Success for All Americans?

With the pandemic deepening inequities that threaten students’ prospects, the vice president of the Corporation’s National Program provides a vision for transforming our education system from one characterized by uneven and unjust results to one that puts all students on a path to bright futures 

At no point in our nation’s history have we asked so much of our education system as we do today. We ask that our primary and secondary schools prepare all students, regardless of background, for a lifetime of learning. We ask that teachers guide every child toward deeper understanding while simultaneously attending to their social-emotional development. And we ask that our institutions of higher learning serve students with a far broader range of life circumstances than ever before.

We ask these things of education because the future we aspire to requires it. The nature of work and civic participation is evolving at an unprecedented rate. Advances in automation, artificial intelligence, and social media are driving rapid changes in how we interact with each other and what skills hold value. In the world our children will inherit, their ability to adapt, think critically, and work effectively with others will be essential for both their own success and the well-being of society.

At Carnegie Corporation of New York, we focus on supporting people who are in a position to meet this challenge. That includes the full spectrum of educators, administrators, family members, and others who shape young people’s learning experiences as they progress toward and into adulthood. Our mission is to empower all students with the tools, systems, knowledge, and mindsets to prepare them to fully participate in the global economy and in a robust democracy.

All of our work is geared toward transforming student learning. The knowledge, skills, and dispositions required for success today call for a vastly different set of learning experiences than may have sufficed in the past. Students must play a more active role in their own learning, and that learning must encompass more than subject-matter knowledge. Preparing all children for success requires greater attention to inclusiveness in the classroom, differentiation in teaching and learning, and universal high expectations.

This transformation needs to happen in higher education as well. A high school education is no longer enough to ensure financial security. We need more high-quality postsecondary options, better guidance for students as they transition beyond high school, and sufficient supports to enable all students to complete their postsecondary programs. Preparing students for lifelong success requires stronger connections between K–12, higher education, and work.

The need for such transformation has become all the more urgent in the face of COVID-19. As with past economic crises, the downturn resulting from the pandemic is likely to accelerate the erosion of opportunities for low-skilled workers with only a high school education. Investments in innovative learning models and student supports are critical to preventing further inequities in learning outcomes. 

An Urgent Call for Advancing Equity 

The 2020–21 school year may prove to be the most consequential in American history. With unfathomable speed, COVID-19 has forced more change in how schools operate than in the previous half century.

What is most concerning in all of this is the impact on the most underserved and historically marginalized in our society: low-income children and students of color. Even before the current crisis, the future prospects of a young person today looked very different depending on the color of her skin and the zip code in which she grew up, but the pandemic exposed and exacerbated long-standing racial and economic inequities. And the same families who are faring worst in terms of disrupted schooling are bearing the brunt of the economic downturn and disproportionately getting sick, being hospitalized, and dying.

Our mission is to empower all students with the tools, systems, knowledge, and mindsets to prepare them to fully participate in the global economy and in a robust democracy.

Every organization that is committed to educational improvement needs to ask itself what it can do differently to further advance the cause of educational equity during this continuing crisis so that we can make lasting improvements. As we know from past experience, if the goal of equity is not kept front and center, those who are already behind through no fault of their own will benefit the least. If ever there were a time to heed this caution, it is now.

We hope that our nation will approach education with a new sense of purpose and a shared commitment to ensuring that our schools truly work for every child. Whether or not that happens will depend on our resolve and our actions in the coming months. We have the proof points and know-how to transform learning, bolster instruction, and meet the needs of our most disadvantaged students. What has changed is the urgency for doing so at scale.

Our starting place must be a vision of equal opportunity, and from there we must create the conditions that can actually ensure it — irrespective of how different they may look from the ones we now have. We need to reimagine the systems that shape student learning and put the communities whose circumstances we most need to elevate at the center of that process. We need to recognize that we will not improve student outcomes without building the capacity of the adults who work with them, supporting them with high-quality resources and meaningful opportunities for collaboration and professional growth. We need to promote stronger connections between K–12, higher education, and employment so that all students are prepared for lifelong success.

The pandemic has deepened inequities that threaten students’ prospects. But if we seize this moment and learn from it, if we marshal the necessary resources, we have the potential to transform our education system from one characterized by uneven and unjust results to one that puts all students on a path to bright futures.

In a pandemic-induced moment when the American education system has been blown into 25 million homes across the country, where do we go from here?

We Must Learn to Act in New Ways

These are not controversial ideas. In fact, they constitute the general consensus about where American education needs to go. But they also represent a tall order for the people who influence the system. Practically everyone who plays a part in education must learn to act in new ways.

That we have made progress in such areas as high school completion, college-going rates, and the adoption of college- and career-ready standards is a testament to the commitment of those working in the field. But it will take more than commitment to achieve the changes in student learning that our times demand. We can’t expect individuals to figure out what they need to do on their own, nor should we be surprised if they struggle to do so when working in institutional structures designed to produce different outcomes. The transformation we seek calls for much greater coordination and a broader set of allies than would suffice for more incremental changes.

Our starting place must be a vision of equal opportunity, and from there we must create the conditions that can actually ensure it — irrespective of how different they may look from the ones we now have.

Our best hope for achieving equity and the transformation of student learning is to enhance adults’ ability to contribute to that learning. That means building their capacity while supporting their authentic engagement in promoting a high-quality education for every child. It also means ensuring that people operate within systems that are optimized to support their effectiveness and that a growing body of knowledge informs their efforts.

These notions comprise our overarching strategy for promoting the systems change needed to transform student learning experiences on a large scale. We seek to enhance adult capacity and stakeholder engagement in the service of ensuring that all students are prepared to meet the demands of the 21st century. We also support knowledge development and organizational improvement to the extent that investments in these areas enhance adult capacity, stakeholder engagement, and student experiences.

Five Ways We Invest in the Future of Students

These views on how best to promote systems change in education guide our philanthropic work. The strategic areas of change we focus on are major themes throughout our five investment portfolios. Although they are managed separately and support different types of initiatives, each seeks to address its area of focus from multiple angles. A single portfolio may include grants that build adult capacity, enhance stakeholder engagement, and generate new knowledge.

New Designs to Advance Learning

Preparing all students for success requires that we fundamentally reimagine our nation’s schools and classrooms. Our public education system needs to catch up with how the world is evolving and with what we’ve come to understand about how people learn. That means attending to a broader diversity of learning styles and bringing what happens in school into greater alignment with what happens in the worlds of work and civic life. We make investments to increase the number of innovative learning models that support personalized experiences, academic mastery, and positive youth development. We also make investments that build the capacity of districts and intermediaries to improve learning experiences for all students as well as grants to investigate relevant issues of policy and practice.

Pathways to Postsecondary Success

Lifelong success in the United States has never been more dependent on educational attainment than it is today. Completing some education beyond the 12th grade has virtually become a necessity for financial security and meaningful work. But for that possibility to exist for everyone, we need to address the historical barriers that keep many students from pursuing and completing a postsecondary program, and we must strengthen the options available to all students for education after high school. Through our investments, we seek to increase the number of young people able to access and complete a postsecondary program, with a major focus on removing historical barriers for students who are first-generation college-goers, low-income, or from underrepresented groups. We also look to expand the range of high-quality postsecondary options and to strengthen alignment between K–12, higher education, and the world of work.

Leadership and Teaching to Advance Learning

At its core, learning is about the interplay between teachers, students, and content. How teachers and students engage with each other and with their curriculum plays a predominant role in determining what students learn and how well they learn it. That’s not to say that factors outside of school don’t also greatly impact student learning. But the research is clear that among the factors a school might control, nothing outweighs the teaching that students experience. We focus on supporting educators in implementing rigorous college- and career-ready standards in math, science, and English language arts. We make investments to increase the supply of and demand for high-quality curricular materials and professional learning experiences for teachers and administrators.

Public Understanding

As central as they are to the education process, school professionals are hardly the only people with a critical role to play in student learning. Students spend far more time with family and other community members than they do at school. And numerous stakeholders outside of the education system have the potential to strengthen and shape what happens within it. The success of our nation’s schools depends on far more individuals than are employed by them. 

We invest in efforts to engage families and other stakeholders as active partners in supporting equitable access to high-quality student learning. We also support media organizations and policy research groups in building awareness about key issues related to educational equity and improvement.

Integration, Learning, and Innovation

Those of us who work for change in education need a new set of habits to achieve our vision of 21st-century learning. It will take more than a factory-model mindset to transform our education system into one that prepares all learners for an increasingly complex world. We must approach this task with flexibility, empathy for the people involved, and an understanding of how to learn from what’s working and what’s not. We work to reduce the fragmentation, inefficiencies, and missteps that often result when educational improvement strategies are pursued in isolation and without an understanding of the contexts in which they are implemented. Through grants and other activities, we build the capacity of people working in educational organizations to change how they work by emphasizing systems and design thinking, iteration, and knowledge sharing within and across organizations.

Two recent surveys by Carnegie Corporation of New York and Gallup offer insights into how our education system can better help all Americans navigate job and career choices

Join Us in This Ambitious Endeavor

Our approach of supporting multiple stakeholders by pulling multiple levers is informed by our deep understanding of the system we’re trying to move. American education is a massive, diverse, and highly decentralized enterprise. There is no mechanism by which we might affect more than superficial change in many thousands of communities. The type of change that is needed cannot come from compliance alone. It requires that everyone grapple with new ideas.

We know from our history of promoting large-scale improvements in American education that advancements won’t happen overnight or as the result of one kind of initiative. Our vision for 21st-century education will require more than quick wins and isolated successes. Innovation is essential, and a major thrust of our work involves the incubation and dissemination of new models, resources, and exemplars. But we must also learn to move forward with the empathy, flexibility, and systems thinking needed to support people in making the transition. Novel solutions only help if they can be successfully implemented in different contexts.

Only a sustained and concerted effort will shift the center of gravity of a social enterprise that involves millions of adults and many tens of millions of young people. The challenge of philanthropy is to effect widespread social change with limited resources and without formal authority. This takes more than grantmaking. At the Corporation, we convene, communicate, and form coalitions. We provide thought leadership, issue challenges, and launch new initiatives. Through these multifaceted activities, we maximize our ability to forge, share, and put into practice powerful new ideas that build a foundation for more substantial changes in the future.

We encourage everyone who plays a role in education to join us in this work. Our strategy represents more than our priorities as a grantmaker. It conveys our strong beliefs about how to get American education to where it needs to be. The more organizations and individuals we have supporting those who are working to provide students with what they need, the more likely we are to succeed in this ambitious endeavor. 

LaVerne Evans Srinivasan is the vice president of Carnegie Corporation of New York’s National Program and the program director for Education.

TOP: Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, a lower-school substitute teacher works from her home in Arlington, Virginia, on April 1, 2020. Her role in the school changed significantly due to the pandemic. Whereas she previously worked part-time to support teachers when they needed to be absent from the classroom, amid COVID-19 she now helps teachers to build skills with new digital platforms so they can continue to teach in the best way for their students and their families. (Credit: Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images)

The former editor of the Washington Post argues that without democracy, there will be no independent press, and without an independent press, there can be no democracy 

Five nonprofits work together to help low-income young people tap their cultural wealth and thrive in college and careers 

Why Is The U.S. Education System Failing?

Published: June 2019 Updated: September 2023

Why Is the American Education System Failing?

In 2019, teacher walkouts and protests dominated the K-12 education sphere, bringing deeply embedded and longstanding disinvestment issues to light. Since 2020, the mass teacher exodus has shown that burnt-out teachers understand they bring value to other industries and will be compensated for it. Classrooms, districts, states, and the country as a whole have been severely impacted by the general lack of funding since the systemic disinvestment following the 2008 Great Recession. Now, educators are demanding that their needs be addressed. Problems with the American education system foster critical limitations in student achievement and, moving forward, it’s essential we repair the system to retain teachers .

Prioritizing Investment In Education

Once upon a time , a formal education system was created to meet the demands of young citizens in need of guidance, and America made secondary education compulsory. It was unprecedented in the 1800’s, but the rigid system has failed to adjust that model in the following years as we’ve moved towards global innovation, a competitive economy, and shifting economic needs. A lack of investment in education and educators is one of the 10 reasons the American education system is failing.

Simply put - educators as professionals are undervalued, and by extension, students are missing out on improved educational outcomes, predominantly affecting low-income students . Money plays a crucial role in the quality and affordability of education. In recent years, many districts have offered raises to faculty, substitutes, and staff, however many teachers say it’s too little too late. These are the first small bonuses or raises teachers have received in years, and it is still not met with the extra support they need as their workload grows. Teachers are funneling out of the profession.

Local, state, and federal governments play a part in overall education funding; all constituents perpetuate some inequalities. This requires public policymakers to consider building an even playing field when it comes to spending in the poorest and wealthiest districts within a state. Unequal finding is one of the major problems with the American education system because it leads to quality issues .

As of now, instructional quality and related support are systematically unavailable to students in impoverished schools. A large body of research indicates that educators in the top 25 percentile of experience are less likely to teach in low-income areas and/or students who are Latino or Black. Although the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act highlights Congress’ recognition of “the need for a federal role in ensuring equal educational opportunities,” students in certain states receive only a fragment of funds that students in other states are given.

Historical increases in education funds are generally associated with one to one teaching in schools and increased student graduation rates among other life-changing benefits. Needless to say that school funding has the responsibility to provide significant additional resources for low-income students if we expect to overcome issues of poverty and equity .

The 2019 protests were in states starved of public education that continue to cut funds: West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona, Colorado, and North Carolina . Resulting from over a decade of frustration, teachers demanded a higher liveable wage, tired of working multiple jobs to make ends meet. Other states demanded better funding for students to be able to replace outdated textbooks and supplies as well as sizable classrooms.

Download the eBook: Making Educational Equity a Reality for All. Join the movement and make a difference.

Where Are The Teachers?

On a related vein, researchers have called attention to the worsening teacher shortages , including state-by-state subject area vacancies and the overall decline in enrollment for teacher preparatory programs. School teacher shortages are perpetuated by low salaries, high student loans, increasing workloads, and reduced budgets. As a result, class sizes have increased to spread the reach of certified teachers producing less interactive and personalized learning. Restoring student-to-teacher ratios to pre-crisis levels is challenging.

Some states, like Oklahoma, are turning to emergency or short-term certificates to fill teachers in the classroom regardless of their experience. In other words, positions are filled recklessly by those who may have a bachelor's degree or have further education requirements to fulfill.

The effect that this has on young students is clear. Between the lack of consistency and quality of their education, student achievements are negatively impacted. Furthermore, teacher shortages are worse within high-poverty district lines. It is easy to infer that qualified teachers, high in demand, have more options with respect to where they want to teach and are more likely to be recruited by higher-income districts.

Although some states saw marginal success through their activism, such as a 9 percent increase in funding in Arizona or the 11.7 percent pay raise for educators in Denver, these states still rank amidst the worst in America. What’s even more shocking is that none of these states are close to the level of funding they would receive before the Great Recession.

Teacher strikes are becoming a common organizing tactic, especially in places where government investment is not following inflation patterns. In the wake of this social change, the American Federation announced an initiative to encourage lawmakers to increase funding. The initiative, Fund Our Future , draws attention to the fact that “25 states spend less on K-12 than they did before the Great Recession.”

A first step in exploring inequities in teacher access is acknowledging that the shortage is a result of several interdependent factors that create imbalances.

A Revolutionary Solution To Helping The Chronic Disinvestment

For decades, access to quality education has been outside the realm of possibility for thousands of low-income students in America. Whether the barriers stem from geographic or demographic restrictions, students’ learning opportunities are largely shaped by factors out of their control. In any case, synchronous virtual education is curbing limitations and dramatically expanding educational opportunities.

According to The Heritage Foundation , as many as 1 million children - roughly 2% of the K-12 population - are participating in some form of online learning. Today, 27 states offer statewide virtual schools that allow students to take a class online, and 24 states and the District of Columbia offer students the opportunity to attend a virtual school full-time.

In light of the growing crisis, Proximity Learning , a K-12 online provider, educates over 50,000 students every day. Contrary to asynchronous, self-paced online programs, Proximity Learning’s services provide live certified teacher-led instruction delivered via livestream directly into classrooms that may otherwise suffer from a number of disadvantages .

Some of the key advantages that Proximity Learning brings to education are giving access to certified teachers and flexibility for students who are not succeeding in traditional schools. Most importantly, the curriculum feeds into the consistency needed for progressive education.

“We are not simply throwing them in front of a computer to 'learn' on their own,” said Proximity Learning live instruction teacher Kris Wedington. Certified teachers lead lessons cia livestream and interact with students all year, providing a high-quality, personalized education for the class.

Proximity Learning was specifically designed to serve the common cause of providing every student with engaging and affordable educational opportunities . Now more than ever, our nation is in need of academic institutions that surpass financial barriers and accessibility, giving students an equitable means to lead productive lives. As the evidence points to students benefiting from these revolutionary and relatively new routines, enrollment in online programs like Proximity Learning’s virtual school is expected to increase over the next few years.

“As we grow, we have spread our wings and begun to offer more non-traditional subjects--perhaps Marine Biology, Geology, world languages like Arabic, Spanish for the Medical field, and French for the Business field. Our reach and our offerings are limitless,” said Wedington.

Learn more about how we are striving to provide equity for 1 million students.

Rimsha Syed

Rimsha Syed is an Austin-based Pakistani Muslim daughter of fierce immigrants. In Urdu, her name means a bouquet of flowers. Rimsha is a freelance journalist, community organizer, and creative who hopes to disrupt imperial influenced media and re-write history from the perspective of all those oppressed by systems of power meant to exploit working-class people of color globally. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 2019 where she studied journalism and women and gender studies.

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The Education System of the United States of America: Overview and Foundations

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Prevailing discourse in the USA about the country’s teachers, educational institutions, and instructional approaches is a conversation that is national in character. Yet the structures and the administrative and governance apparatuses themselves are strikingly local in character across the USA. Public understanding and debate about education can be distorted in light of divergence between the country’s educational aspirations and the vehicles in place for pursuing those aims. In addressing its purpose as a survey of US education, the following chapter interrogates this apparent contradiction, first discussing historical and social factors that help account for a social construction of the USA as singular and national system. Discussion then moves to a descriptive analysis of education in the USA as institutionalized at the numerous levels – aspects that often reflect local prerogative and difference more so than a uniform national character. The chapter concludes with summary points regarding US federalism as embodied in the country’s oversight and conduct of formal education.

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Better Schools Won’t Fix America

Like many rich Americans, I used to think educational investment could heal the country’s ills—but I was wrong. Fighting inequality must come first.

Long ago, I was captivated by a seductively intuitive idea, one many of my wealthy friends still subscribe to: that both poverty and rising inequality are largely consequences of America’s failing education system. Fix that, I believed, and we could cure much of what ails America.

This belief system, which I have come to think of as “educationism,” is grounded in a familiar story about cause and effect: Once upon a time, America created a public-education system that was the envy of the modern world. No nation produced more or better-educated high-school and college graduates, and thus the great American middle class was built. But then, sometime around the 1970s, America lost its way. We allowed our schools to crumble, and our test scores and graduation rates to fall. School systems that once churned out well-paid factory workers failed to keep pace with the rising educational demands of the new knowledge economy. As America’s public-school systems foundered, so did the earning power of the American middle class. And as inequality increased, so did political polarization, cynicism, and anger, threatening to undermine American democracy itself.

Taken with this story line, I embraced education as both a philanthropic cause and a civic mission. I co-founded the League of Education Voters, a nonprofit dedicated to improving public education. I joined Bill Gates, Alice Walton, and Paul Allen in giving more than $1 million each to an effort to pass a ballot measure that established Washington State’s first charter schools. All told, I have devoted countless hours and millions of dollars to the simple idea that if we improved our schools—if we modernized our curricula and our teaching methods, substantially increased school funding, rooted out bad teachers, and opened enough charter schools—American children, especially those in low-income and working-class communities, would start learning again. Graduation rates and wages would increase, poverty and inequality would decrease, and public commitment to democracy would be restored.

But after decades of organizing and giving, I have come to the uncomfortable conclusion that I was wrong. And I hate being wrong.

Read: Education reform and the failure to fix inequality in America

What I’ve realized, decades late, is that educationism is tragically misguided. American workers are struggling in large part because they are underpaid—and they are underpaid because 40 years of trickle-down policies have rigged the economy in favor of wealthy people like me. Americans are more highly educated than ever before, but despite that, and despite nearly record-low unemployment, most American workers—at all levels of educational attainment—have seen little if any wage growth since 2000.

To be clear: We should do everything we can to improve our public schools. But our education system can’t compensate for the ways our economic system is failing Americans. Even the most thoughtful and well-intentioned school-reform program can’t improve educational outcomes if it ignores the single greatest driver of student achievement: household income.

For all the genuine flaws of the American education system, the nation still has many high-achieving public-school districts. Nearly all of them are united by a thriving community of economically secure middle-class families with sufficient political power to demand great schools, the time and resources to participate in those schools, and the tax money to amply fund them. In short, great public schools are the product of a thriving middle class, not the other way around. Pay people enough to afford dignified middle-class lives, and high-quality public schools will follow. But allow economic inequality to grow, and educational inequality will inevitably grow with it.

By distracting us from these truths, educationism is part of the problem.

W henever I talk with my wealthy friends about the dangers of rising economic inequality, those who don’t stare down at their shoes invariably push back with something about the woeful state of our public schools. This belief is so entrenched among the philanthropic elite that of America’s 50 largest family foundations—a clique that manages $144 billion in tax-exempt charitable assets—40 declare education as a key issue. Only one mentions anything about the plight of working people, economic inequality, or wages. And because the richest Americans are so politically powerful, the consequences of their beliefs go far beyond philanthropy.

A major theme in the educationist narrative involves the “ skills gap ”—the notion that decades of wage stagnation are largely a consequence of workers not having the education and skills to fill new high-wage jobs. If we improve our public schools, the thinking goes, and we increase the percentage of students attaining higher levels of education, particularly in the STEM subjects — science, technology, engineering, and math—the skills gap will shrink, wages will rise, and income inequality will fall.

Annie Lowrey: Wages are low and workers are scarce. Wait, what?

The real story is more complicated, and more troubling. Yes, there is a mismatch between the skills of the present and the jobs of the future. In a fast-changing, technologically advanced economy, how could there not be? But this mismatch doesn’t begin to explain the widening inequality of the past 40 years.

In 1970, when the golden age of the American middle class was nearing its peak and inequality was at its nadir, only about half of Americans ages 25 and older had a high-school diploma or the equivalent. Today, 90 percent do. Meanwhile, the proportion of Americans attaining a college degree has more than tripled since 1970. But while the American people have never been more highly educated, only the wealthiest have seen large gains in real wages. From 1979 to 2017, as the average real annual wages of the top 1 percent of Americans rose 156 percent (and the top .01 percent’s wages rose by a stunning 343 percent), the purchasing power of the average American’s paycheck did not increase.

Some educationists might argue that the recent gains in educational attainment simply haven’t been enough to keep up with the changing economy—but here, yet again, the truth appears more complicated. While 34 percent of Americans ages 25 and older have a bachelor’s degree or higher, only 26 percent of jobs currently require one. The job categories that are growing fastest, moreover, don’t generally require a college diploma, let alone a STEM degree. According to federal estimates, four of the five occupational categories projected to add the most jobs to the economy over the next five years are among the lowest-paying jobs: “food preparation and serving” ($19,130 in average annual earnings), “personal care and service” ($21,260), “sales and related” ($25,360), and “health-care support” ($26,440). And while the number of jobs that require a postsecondary education is expected to increase slightly faster than the number that don’t, the latter group is expected to dominate the job market for decades to come. In October 2018 there were 1 million more job openings than job seekers in the U.S. Even if all of these unfilled jobs were in STEM professions at the top of the pay scale, they would be little help to most of the 141 million American workers in the bottom nine income deciles.

It’s worth noting that workers with a college degree enjoy a significant wage premium over those without. (Among people over age 25, those with a bachelor’s degree had median annual earnings of $53,882 in 2017, compared with $32,320 for those with only a high-school education.) But even with that advantage, adjusted for inflation, average hourly wages for recent college graduates have barely budged since 2000 , while the bottom 60 percent of college graduates earn less than that group did in 2000. A college diploma is no longer a guaranteed passport into the middle class.

Meanwhile, nearly all the benefits of economic growth have been captured by large corporations and their shareholders. After-tax corporate profits have doubled from about 5 percent of GDP in 1970 to about 10 percent, even as wages as a share of GDP have fallen by roughly 8 percent. And the wealthiest 1 percent’s share of pre-tax income has more than doubled, from 9 percent in 1973 to 21 percent today. Taken together, these two trends amount to a shift of more than $2 trillion a year from the middle class to corporations and the super-rich.

The state of the labor market provides further evidence that low-wage workers’ declining fortunes aren’t explained by supply and demand. With the unemployment rate near a 50-year floor, low-wage industries such as accommodations, food service, and retail are struggling to cope with a shortage of job applicants—leading The Wall Street Journal to lament that “low-skilled jobs are becoming increasingly difficult for employers to fill.” If wages were actually set the way our Econ 101 textbooks suggested, workers would be profiting from this dynamic. Yet outside the cities and states that have recently imposed a substantially higher local minimum wage, low-wage workers have seen their real incomes barely budge.

All of which suggests that income inequality has exploded not because of our country’s educational failings but despite its educational progress. Make no mistake: Education is an unalloyed good. We should advocate for more of it, so long as it’s of high quality. But the longer we pretend that education is the answer to economic inequality, the harder it will be to escape our new Gilded Age.

Read: The 9.9 percent is the new American aristocracy

H owever justifiable their focus on curricula and innovation and institutional reform, people who see education as a cure-all have largely ignored the metric most predictive of a child’s educational success: household income.

The scientific literature on this subject is robust, and the consensus overwhelming. The lower your parents’ income, the lower your likely level of educational attainment. Period. But instead of focusing on ways to increase household income, educationists in both political parties talk about extending ladders of opportunity to poor children, most recently in the form of charter schools. For many children, though—especially those raised in the racially segregated poverty endemic to much of the United States—the opportunity to attend a good public school isn’t nearly enough to overcome the effects of limited family income.

As Lawrence Mishel, an economist at the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute, notes, poverty creates obstacles that would trip up even the most naturally gifted student. He points to the plight of “children who frequently change schools due to poor housing; have little help with homework; have few role models of success; have more exposure to lead and asbestos; have untreated vision, ear, dental, or other health problems; … and live in a chaotic and frequently unsafe environment.”

Indeed, multiple studies have found that only about 20 percent of student outcomes can be attributed to schooling, whereas about 60 percent are explained by family circumstances—most significantly, income. Now consider that, nationwide, just over half of today’s public-school students qualify for free or reduced-price school lunches , up from 38 percent in 2000. Surely if American students are lagging in the literacy, numeracy, and problem-solving skills our modern economy demands, household income deserves most of the blame—not teachers or their unions.

If we really want to give every American child an honest and equal opportunity to succeed, we must do much more than extend a ladder of opportunity—we must also narrow the distance between the ladder’s rungs. We must invest not only in our children, but in their families and their communities. We must provide high-quality public education, sure, but also high-quality housing, health care, child care, and all the other prerequisites of a secure middle-class life. And most important, if we want to build the sort of prosperous middle-class communities in which great public schools have always thrived, we must pay all our workers, not just software engineers and financiers, a dignified middle-class wage.

Today, after wealthy elites gobble up our outsize share of national income, the median American family is left with $76,000 a year. Had hourly compensation grown with productivity since 1973—as it did over the preceding quarter century, according to the Economic Policy Institute—that family would now be earning more than $105,000 a year. Just imagine, education reforms aside, how much larger and stronger and better educated our middle class would be if the median American family enjoyed a $29,000-a-year raise.

In fact, the most direct way to address rising economic inequality is to simply pay ordinary workers more, by increasing the minimum wage and the salary threshold for overtime exemption; by restoring bargaining power for labor; and by instating higher taxes—much higher taxes—on rich people like me and on our estates.

Educationism appeals to the wealthy and powerful because it tells us what we want to hear: that we can help restore shared prosperity without sharing our wealth or power. As Anand Giridharadas explains in his book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World , narratives like this one let the wealthy feel good about ourselves. By distracting from the true causes of economic inequality, they also defend America’s grossly unequal status quo.

We have confused a symptom—educational inequality—with the underlying disease: economic inequality. Schooling may boost the prospects of individual workers, but it doesn’t change the core problem, which is that the bottom 90 percent is divvying up a shrinking share of the national wealth. Fixing that problem will require wealthy people to not merely give more, but take less.

This article appears in the July 2019 print edition with the headline “Education Isn’t Enough.”

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Act: Inspiration

Flaws and fallacies of the american education system: thoughts on the dissonances and difficulties faced by the modern college student.

By Jake Marble , originally published by Resilience.org

June 20, 2018

In a hair under three years from this date, I will graduate with a college degree. Now, of course, many, many factors go into play for this all to go according to plan, including, but not limited to: continuing to finance the $25,000 per year price tag- cheap by higher ed standards- juggling the trials and tribulations of newfound adult freedom, and, of course, passing my classes (Yes, Mom, I promise to not slack off too hard…). But, for simplicity’s sake, let us assume that in May of 2021 I graduate from the University of Minnesota, clutching in triumphantly held fist a small maroon-and-gold diploma certifying the completion of my undergraduate higher education.

On that day, in the not-too-distant future, I will probably feel pretty good about myself. All of my hard work will have paid off, so to speak, on that day of commencement. I may hold myself higher than all those poor, unfortunate chaps lacking the great rubber stamp of approval that is adhered to achieving a college degree. It may seem, as Dr. Seuss would say, that, “Today is your day. You’re off to new places! You’re off and away!” Perhaps, even, I will feel something like Charlie Bucket in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory did that fateful moment in which he found the “golden ticket,” excitedly unwrapping an automatic fast track to candy-coated wealth and success. Ruefully, though, in reflecting on the sum of all of my experiences and observations in and of American education up to now, I find that this golden ticket metaphor is perhaps not too extreme an exaggeration.

What is your very first memory of school? For some, it might be spelling bees, or elementary school playdates; for others, perhaps learning the alphabet song, or running and regaling on the playground, or fond remembrances of first crushes. However, the single memory that I most clearly hold from my earliest days in school is a simple one; sitting on the brightly-colored, easy-clean rug of my preschool, toying with, and being slightly confounded by, a pegboard filled with many different shapes to match up. Now, whether my geometrically-challenged self at the time did in fact correctly match all of the pegs to their respective homes will forever be unknown. But what I do find interesting in so reflecting is that, somehow, this memory now seems a very apt analogy for my fifteen-plus years of school to follow.

When speaking of education, and the purpose it serves to the current, as well as future development and well-being of both youth and young adults such as myself, I believe that there are two main definitions at play within our society today; what education is believed to be for, and what it should be for. With over a decade-and-a-half of American schooling under my belt, I feel that I can assert with absolute certainty that there are some fundamental flaws in how we have chosen to structure education. From the simpler nature of early education onwards, the entire system, it seems, has fallen under the exact economically-driven, growth-inducing, productivity-focused spell as our wider society as a whole. These flaws start around middle school, and exacerbate in high school, where, no matter if a kid goes to the wealthiest charter or the most budget-cut, floundering public, the current mantra remains similar across the board: Study hard, Get tested, Repeat. Do better than everyone else, Go to the “best” college. Land a lucrative career and be considered successful . Optional: Be happy, healthy, sane, low-stressed, and enjoy life along the way. Simple, straightforward, productive. Keep society progressing, GDP growin’ and strain on our precious planet’s health a-goin’.

We can see the secondary educational system displaying this mantra in many forms today; including oft instances of teaching-to-the-test, memorization-based learning, the ever-widening influence of standardized assessments and courses, and the stressful, dog-eat-dog rat race that is the college application process, as just several examples. With all of these things shoved down our throats and preached to us as the best, newfangled ways forward, how can one not feel like just another bubble on a Scantron, letter grade scribbled in red ink, or product on the factory line? Simply enough, as long as anyone studies hard, passes the tests, and jumps through the numerous hoops during secondary education, they can fulfill their academic duty and be made ready to march on as a well-greased cog in the consumptive wheel of human society. We are teaching young people that being really good at succeeding on academic tests is a first-class ticket to personal success, while glossing over many other, far more important aspects of education.

Why give kids the encouragement and opportunity during middle and high school to read, write, and explore their interests for fun when they could be prepping for the ACT, or dredging through mountains of busy work, or cramming for fact-based assessments? Why encourage stress-free, creative, interpersonal environments for learning when students can instead be graded endlessly, ranked among their peers, and scored up for college readiness like pigs at a market? Why judge ability by the strengths of the individual student, when it can instead be markered against other students by test-taking ability (ACT, SAT, etc.) and class ranking? Why give young people about to enter a turbulent world practical skills, life perspective, belief in their intrinsic self-worth, and resilience to difficulties when they could rather feel that their success during a miniscule time period of their lives will determine that of the rest of it? And, why teach the youth of our future what that exact future will most call for, literacy in sustainability, environmental science, big picture synthesis, systems thinking, and ecological respect, when what we are teaching, both directly and indirectly… I guess…  is so much more pressing?

As my preschool peg game taught me, square pegs do not fit in round holes, no matter how hard your chubby fingers try. Yet, by focusing so hard on such things as standardizing testing, pushing college prep programs, and inundating students with busy work- all thereby playing a hand in stressing adolescents to ballooning levels of mental illness- we are doing exactly that on a large scale, structuring our education system as a giant, one-size-fits-all hole, despite each student being their own unique peg to be fit. The world, and all of the socio-ecological issues plaguing it today, cannot be righted by standardized, inside-the-box methods. Even my own AP Environmental Science course in high school, one that should, rightly, be concerned first and foremost with showing students radical, innovative ways of approaching all too commonplace social-environmental discordances, fell prey to this; through no fault of the teacher, or school, but the wider American educational environment. Rather than be allowed to give the practical field experience, time to collaborate on problem-solving, and opportunity to deeply reflect on the state of the world so needed and beneficial for young minds to connect book-smarts with world-smarts, we were relegated, as a result of the stringent requirements of the College Board program, to hammering out classroom-based, fact-heavy units at breakneck speed in order to adequately cram our brains for the year-ending AP exam. (And a growing number of educators themselves are echoing this frustration: see here and here .)

What I am saying, therefore, is not that our present K-12 system is entirely failing at the ultimate goal, of, well… educating. Rather, I believe that our current means of reaching proper, needed levels of education for young people are not well-lent to the ends. Where is simply the love of learning, the stress-free, deadline-free, grade-free, dog-eat-dog-competition-free desire to understand who, where, and why we are ? Teaching our children that complex, interconnected problems require creative, outside-the-box solutions is what education should be for.

I am still currently right in the thicket of this systemic problem, as it only furthers in post-secondary education.

Dissonance, as it is usually thought of, is the lack of harmony between musical elements. However, a lesser known iteration exists in the mental realm, known as cognitive dissonance. Rather than a sparring of tones, cognitive dissonance relates to a clash of two or more values, beliefs, and ideas simultaneously held within a person. For a businessman, this might be valuing dedicated, hard work but feeling unable to do so under a terrible boss. For a mother, it might manifest as a fundamental desire to keep her children safely close-at-hand, while also recognizing the necessity of promoting their gradual independence. For a college student like myself, though, the greatest of these may very well be recognizing and appreciating the wonderful opportunity to be in school, while also believing that more meaningful channels of energy could instead be directed towards change-making in the wider world.

Though I would be loath to admit that my beloved Gophers are not in fact all that different from, say, the despised Iowa Hawkeyes, when it comes down to it administratively, all American colleges are essentially one and the same. As with any money-making, bureaucratic institution with a bottom line to meet, universities like mine are incredibly hampered by the utmost of process, restricting their ability to be forward-thinking beyond their yearly agendas and quotas. Such a reality is tough to reconcile for action-oriented students, who recognize the urgency by which our society must act on the many socio-ecological issues we face, but feel absolutely disheartened by the crawling pace of change at colleges. I have first-hand experience with this. This past school year, I headed a student government committee at the University of Minnesota which pushed for greatly expanded organics recycling across campus. Although our year-long campaign to school officials did yield a successful pilot program in three university-owned residence halls, I do not believe it naïve to say that much, much more could have been achieved during that span were there not seemingly endless consideration periods, lapses in communication, deferrals and referrals, and deviations from agreements, all by administrative figures. All, literally, to put in place and procedure a few bins with compost bags in them.

This is just one facet of great frustration that I, and others I know of around me, express with post-secondary institutions in general. But even beyond the bureaucratic processes that hamper forward-thinking change, it is quite possible that the core nature of university education itself is flawed. For the many aforementioned reasons, I believe American higher ed to be somewhat analogous to a giant factory line for degree-producing, which, as a result, cannot adequately adapt to, address, or rectify our present problems as a global society. However, I am not the only one to hold this view. Two of my very own professors this year, both teaching environmental sustainability-type classes, echoed almost the exact same sentiment; that education, or at least our current form of education, cannot do enough to be a catch-all answer. This does not mean that we should not educate, nor have universities; however, 21st-century problems cannot be solved by either centuries-old academic institutions or their equally out-of-date methodologies. As a paraphrase of both of their words, “Education, in general, is a long-term solution to short-term, pressing problems.” Pressing problems, which, the question remains, our current university system is even a solution to at all. When all anyone is ever pressed to figure out, decide, and act upon is their specialized path, their plan for college, and their future plans, how can acting in service to everyone’s future really be part of the equation?

Person 1: “What’s your major?”

Person 2: “[Insert major here].”

Person 1: “Okay, cool. So what do you want to do with that?”

This conversation could be taking place on any college campus, to anyone, at any time. It is positively unavoidable. And it goes right along with this expectation of immediate specialization.

“Well,” I would respond, “I’m majoring in Global Studies with minors in Sustainability Studies and Environmental Sciences… and, uhh, I have no idea what I want to do with that yet…” I mean… should I?

Should we be predicating to my, and future, generations that climbing the wealth, status, and career ladder by immediately laser-focusing on a lucrative field, living out that rich dream, and then kicking the bucket is really the definition of success in this life? Is it in their best interests? How about that of our planet?

We are churning out hordes upon hordes of über-specialized young adults, when what we, and our planetary future, most desperately need are skilled generalists to connect the dots and remind us that there is in fact a bigger, wiser, and more beautiful picture than personal success. It is all too easy to live through this brief, precious existence we have with such blinders on; nose bent down to the grindstone, naïvely slaving through early education, high school, college, careers, and the rest of our post-grad lives. Working, and working, and striving, and striving for what our consumptive human enterprise at large believes should be strove for… a Manifest Destiny of manifesting destruction. As evolved, social creatures, it may be our innate tendency to amass status, security, and riches among our tribes in this way; however, today we inhabit a fossil fuel-driven age of compounding ecological distress and collapse in which such a psychological nature is entirely unsustainable. The very fact that we can spend our hours debating Socrates, doing obscure lab research, and learning the arts all across our plush, tree-lined campuses is a function of the energy-plenty, privileged times we live in. Though none of these aims are wrong, academia does not even consider this; that the existence of universities is not a law of the universe, but a flash-in-the-pan result of an opportune blip of climate stability, resource plenty, and the invisible hand of progress giving us rise today. Yet, likely sooner than we know, there will come a day when we would be apt not to waste this miniscule window of opportunity for academic pursuits on those “progress-driven” aims which drive our impending doom. Therefore, education must do its absolute to expose, shift away from, and wisen our coming generations to this reality.

So, in three years, my maroon-robed self will likely stride forth to receive my college diploma. That symbolic token that I clutch may reveal nothing much more than my name, but magnitudes greater will be ingrained in that parchment than simply the ink on paper. There are, and forever will be, many fantastic things about this American education I am experiencing, as well as many… not. Taking all into account, being a modern college student is no cakewalk, no. It is certainly flawed, and there are certainly fallacies. However, perhaps the most fundamental origin of this dissonance I describe originates from so badly not wanting higher education to be wasted. Being part of the approximately seven percent of the world’s population fortunate enough to be receiving any form of college education, we should be inspired, stretched, challenged, broadened rather than über-focused, and be preparing, in doing so, to lead a future in which we spread the wealth and fruits of our opportunity, not keep it for our personal “betterment.” I do not devalue, depreciate, or disrespect any of the schooling that I have received up to today. On the contrary, I hope that I, and all of my peers in the same place as me, afforded this incredible gift of furthered education, will appreciate it to its fullest extent. Then, and only then, can it be used and improved upon not for personal gain, and thereby self-alienation, but for lasting ecological, social, and cognitive systemic change, which all of our futures so desperately call for.

Teaser photo credit: By ChristianSchd – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24564856

Jake Marble

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The alarming state of the American student in 2022

Subscribe to the brown center on education policy newsletter, robin lake and robin lake director, center on reinventing public education - arizona state university @rbnlake travis pillow travis pillow innovation fellow, center on reinventing public education - arizona state university @travispillow.

November 1, 2022

The pandemic was a wrecking ball for U.S. public education, bringing months of school closures, frantic moves to remote instruction, and trauma and isolation.

Kids may be back at school after three disrupted years, but a return to classrooms has not brought a return to normal. Recent results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) showed historic declines in American students’ knowledge and skills and widening gaps between the highest- and lowest-scoring students.

But even these sobering results do not tell us the whole story.

After nearly three years of tracking pandemic response by U.S. school systems and synthesizing knowledge about the impacts on students, we sought to establish a baseline understanding of the contours of the crisis: What happened and why, and where do we go from here?

This first annual “ State of the American Student ” report synthesizes nearly three years of research on the academic, mental health, and other impacts of the pandemic and school closures.

It outlines the contours of the crisis American students have faced during the COVID-19 pandemic and begins to chart a path to recovery and reinvention for all students—which includes building a new and better approach to public education that ensures an educational crisis of this magnitude cannot happen again.

The state of American students as we emerge from the pandemic is still coming into focus, but here’s what we’ve learned (and haven’t yet learned) about where COVID-19 left us:

1. Students lost critical opportunities to learn and thrive.

• The typical American student lost several months’ worth of learning in language arts and more in mathematics.

• Students suffered crushing increases in anxiety and depression. More than one in 360 U.S. children lost a parent or caregiver to COVID-19.

• Students poorly served before the pandemic were profoundly left behind during it, including many with disabilities whose parents reported they were cut off from essential school and life services.

This deeply traumatic period threatens to reverberate for decades. The academic, social, and mental-health needs are real, they are measurable, and they must be addressed quickly to avoid long-term consequences to individual students, the future workforce, and society.

2. The average effects from COVID mask dire inequities and widely varied impact.

Some students are catching up, but time is running out for others. Every student experienced the pandemic differently, and there is tremendous variation from student to student, with certain populations—namely, Black, Hispanic, and low-income students, as well as other vulnerable populations—suffering the most severe impacts.

The effects were more severe where campuses stayed closed longer. American students are experiencing a K-shaped recovery, in which gaps between the highest- and lowest-scoring students, already growing before the pandemic, are widening into chasms. In the latest NAEP results released in September , national average scores fell five times as much in reading, and four times as much in math, for the lowest-scoring 10 percent of nine-year-olds as they had for the highest-scoring 10 percent.

At the pace of recovery we are seeing today, too many students of all races and income levels will graduate in the coming years without the skills and knowledge needed for college and careers.

3. What we know at this point is incomplete. The situation could be significantly worse than the early data suggest.

The data and stories we have to date are enough to warrant immediate action, but there are serious holes in our understanding of how the pandemic has affected various groups of students, especially those who are typically most likely to fall through the cracks in the American education system.

We know little about students with complex needs, such as those with disabilities and English learners. We still know too little about the learning impacts in non-tested subjects, such as science, civics, and foreign languages. And while psychologists , educators , and the federal government are sounding alarms about a youth mental health crisis, systematic measures of student wellbeing remain hard to come by.

We must acknowledge that what we know at this point is incomplete, since the pandemic closures and following recovery have been so unprecedented in recent times. It’s possible that as we continue to dig into the evidence on the pandemic’s impacts, some student groups or subjects may have not been so adversely affected. Alternatively, the situation could be significantly worse than the early data suggest. Some students are already bouncing back quickly. But for others, the impact could grow worse over time.

In subjects like math, where learning is cumulative, pandemic-related gaps in students’ learning that emerged during the pandemic could affect their ability to grasp future material. In some states, test scores fell dramatically for high schoolers nearing graduation. Shifts in these students’ academic trajectories could affect their college plans—and the rest of their lives. And elevated rates of chronic absenteeism suggest some students who disconnected from school during the pandemic have struggled to reconnect since.

4. The harms students experienced can be traced to a rigid and inequitable system that put adults, not students, first.

• Despite often heroic efforts by caring adults, students and families were cut off from essential support, offered radically diminished learning opportunities, and left to their own devices to support learning.

• Too often, partisan politics, not student needs , drove decision-making.

• Students with complexities and differences too often faced systems immobilized by fear and a commitment to sameness rather than prioritization and problem-solving.

So, what can we do to address the situation we’re in?

Diverse needs demand diverse solutions that are informed by pandemic experiences

Freed from the routines of rigid systems, some parents, communities, and educators found new ways to tailor learning experiences around students’ needs. They discovered learning can happen any time and anywhere. They discovered enriching activities outside class and troves of untapped adult talent.

Some of these breakthroughs happened in public schools—like virtual IEP meetings that leveled power dynamics between administrators and parents advocating for their children’s special education services. Others happened in learning pods or other new environments where families and community groups devised new ways to meet students’ needs. These were exceptions to an otherwise miserable rule, and they can inform the work ahead.

We must act quickly but we must also act differently. Important next steps include:

• Districts and states should immediately use their federal dollars to address the emergent needs of the COVID-19 generation of students via proven interventions, such as well-designed tutoring, extended learning time, credit recovery, additional mental health support, college and career guidance, and mentoring. The challenges ahead are too daunting for schools to shoulder alone. Partnerships and funding for families and community-driven solutions will be critical.

• By the end of the 2022–2023 academic year, states and districts must commit to an honest accounting of rebuilding efforts by defining, adopting, and reporting on their progress toward 5- and 10-year goals for long-term student recovery. States should invest in rigorous studies that document, analyze, and improve their approaches.

• Education leaders and researchers must adopt a national research and development agenda for school reinvention over the next five years. This effort must be anchored in the reality that the needs of students are so varied, so profound, and so multifaceted that a one-size-fits-all approach to education can’t possibly meet them all. Across the country, community organizations who previously operated summer or afterschool programs stepped up to support students during the school day. As they focus on recovery, school system leaders should look to these helpers not as peripheral players in education, but as critical contributors who can provide teaching , tutoring, or joyful learning environments for students and often have trusting relationships with their families.

• Recovery and rebuilding should ensure the system is more resilient and prepared for future crises. That means more thoughtful integration of online learning and stronger partnerships with organizations that support learning outside school walls. Every school system in America should have a plan to keep students safe and learning even when they can’t physically come to school, be equipped to deliver high-quality, individualized pathways for students, and build on practices that show promise.

Our “State of the American Student” report is the first in a series of annual reports the Center on Reinventing Public Education intends to produce through fall of 2027. We hope every state and community will produce similar, annual accounts and begin to define ambitious goals for recovery. The implications of these deeply traumatic years will reverberate for decades unless we find a path not only to normalcy but also to restitution for this generation and future generations of American students.

The road to recovery can lead somewhere new. In five years, we hope to report that out of the ashes of the pandemic, American public education emerged transformed: more flexible and resilient, more individualized and equitable, and—most of all— more joyful.

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About half of Americans say public K-12 education is going in the wrong direction

About half of U.S. adults (51%) say the country’s public K-12 education system is generally going in the wrong direction. A far smaller share (16%) say it’s going in the right direction, and about a third (32%) are not sure, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in November 2023.

Pew Research Center conducted this analysis to understand how Americans view the K-12 public education system. We surveyed 5,029 U.S. adults from Nov. 9 to Nov. 16, 2023.

The survey was conducted by Ipsos for Pew Research Center on the Ipsos KnowledgePanel Omnibus. The KnowledgePanel is a probability-based web panel recruited primarily through national, random sampling of residential addresses. The survey is weighted by gender, age, race, ethnicity, education, income and other categories.

Here are the questions used for this analysis , along with responses, and the survey methodology .

A majority of those who say it’s headed in the wrong direction say a major reason is that schools are not spending enough time on core academic subjects.

These findings come amid debates about what is taught in schools , as well as concerns about school budget cuts and students falling behind academically.

Related: Race and LGBTQ Issues in K-12 Schools

Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say the public K-12 education system is going in the wrong direction. About two-thirds of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (65%) say this, compared with 40% of Democrats and Democratic leaners. In turn, 23% of Democrats and 10% of Republicans say it’s headed in the right direction.

Among Republicans, conservatives are the most likely to say public education is headed in the wrong direction: 75% say this, compared with 52% of moderate or liberal Republicans. There are no significant differences among Democrats by ideology.

Similar shares of K-12 parents and adults who don’t have a child in K-12 schools say the system is going in the wrong direction.

A separate Center survey of public K-12 teachers found that 82% think the overall state of public K-12 education has gotten worse in the past five years. And many teachers are pessimistic about the future.

Related: What’s It Like To Be A Teacher in America Today?

Why do Americans think public K-12 education is going in the wrong direction?

We asked adults who say the public education system is going in the wrong direction why that might be. About half or more say the following are major reasons:

• Schools not spending enough time on core academic subjects, like reading, math, science and social studies (69%)
• Teachers bringing their personal political and social views into the classroom (54%)
• Schools not having the funding and resources they need (52%)

About a quarter (26%) say a major reason is that parents have too much influence in decisions about what schools are teaching.

How views vary by party

Americans in each party point to different reasons why public education is headed in the wrong direction.

Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say major reasons are:

• A lack of focus on core academic subjects (79% vs. 55%)
• Teachers bringing their personal views into the classroom (76% vs. 23%)

In turn, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to point to:

• Insufficient school funding and resources (78% vs. 33%)
• Parents having too much say in what schools are teaching (46% vs. 13%)

Views also vary within each party by ideology.

Among Republicans, conservatives are particularly likely to cite a lack of focus on core academic subjects and teachers bringing their personal views into the classroom.

Among Democrats, liberals are especially likely to cite schools lacking resources and parents having too much say in the curriculum.

Note: Here are the questions used for this analysis , along with responses, and the survey methodology .

• Partisanship & Issues
• Political Issues

Rachel Minkin is a research associate focusing on social and demographic trends research at Pew Research Center .

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United States of America and Its Educational History

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Education System in the United States

​introduction.

Ideally, education should continually prepare an individual for life so that they may live it to the fullest while aiming at an experience of the greater good for all and sundry. Nurturing of the human capacity for creativity requires a fertile environment for growth. Thus, education can be acquired from home, where the educative process is informal. It can also be appropriated from an institutionalized setting in the form of a public school or a privately owned school. In the United States, each of these environments is well represented as a source of education. The extent to which each of them has been instrumental in the drive for the greater good has, however, not yet been established.

Also, it would be an interesting engagement to try and determine how much each of the three entities have contributed towards this goal in the American context. This article shall explore education in the United States based on the aforementioned sources of enlightenment. According to the National Catholic Educational Association, no database extant in the American continent provides data regarding public schools. Furthermore, no database collects the same; also, no database compares findings concerning private and public schools (NCEA, 2010). This treatise shall attempt to make such comparisons. Findings of privately run schools and home-based learning centers shall be considered in mutual exclusivity, and comparisons made of the same regarding various parameters of interest. The author shall then endeavor to draw logical conclusions from the comparisons thus made.

​General Structure of the Education System in the United States

In the United States, education can be seen from two perspectives. There is a level at which education is considered not to be compulsory, and there is compulsory education. The non-compulsory level of education is below kindergarten. Different states have different ages at which children may enter compulsory education. This is usually six years of age. However, the range is usually between five and seven years (USAEducation, 2011). This level of education is also known as pre-higher education, and it lasts for ten years on average. For example, a child who joins compulsory education classes at the age of six years shall be expected to graduate at the age of sixteen, approximately ten years later. Within this level, one starts with pre-schooling, which commences from age three to six. The types of schools that provide pre-primary education include nursery schools, kindergarten, and daycare centers. A child in kindergarten spends two years in school (EuroEducation, 2011). In some cases, certificates are awarded as proof that a child indeed attended pre-primary classes. These certificates make the children eligible for admission into Elementary school.

Elementary school lasts four years, and the age of entry is usually six years, immediately after completion of Kindergarten. There are four grades at this level, but that also depends on the state and local practice. At ten years of age, one is likely to graduate with a certificate or a diploma that is awarded by the State or District. The student is then eligible to join Middle School. Sometimes, however, the issuance of awards may not be necessary (EuroEducation, 2011). For example, when a student is to maintain their residency within the same school, there will be no need for proof of graduation to the next level since the student is already known.

From ten to fourteen years of age, a student attends Middle School. This is from grade four to grade six but in some cases, it may go up to grade seven, or grade eight. On average the level takes three years to be completed. High school is from grade seven (or eight) to twelve and lasts six years; from thirteen to eighteen years of age. Some schools offer a level known as the Junior Secondary, which typically runs from thirteen to fifteen years of age and lasts an average of three years. The representative grades in this level are grade seven to eight, seven to nine, or eight to nine. It is a level followed immediately by the Upper secondary. The latter takes five years, is composed of grades nine or ten to twelve, and involves children who are between fifteen and eighteen years of age. Twelfth grade is the level for graduation from secondary school in all states. When one graduate, they are awarded a High School Diploma together with a transcript which details the marks that the student obtained and the curriculum in which he or she was involved (USAEducation, 2011).

Beyond secondary school education, there are two branches of education that one may opt for. They may get vocational education and training. This does not culminate in one being awarded a degree, but under certain circumstances, there may be transferable credits that lead to the award of a degree. On the other hand, a high school graduate can opt for the pursuance of a degree in any field that interests him or her (USAEducation, 2011). Higher education, also called post-secondary education can last an entire lifetime. It might also last for only three years after which the student decides to seek employment either in a field relevant to the acquired knowledge or an entirely different field. The transmutability of knowledge gained from higher education places the scholar at an advantage in that they are not confined to their area of expertise. The open-minded graduate will find gainful employment in whichever field they opt for. The essence of education is not to end up having a job, but to live life fully. Therefore, one who gets a job after they have acquired their degrees is fortunate

​Subjects Taught at Various School Levels

Much of what children are introduced to while they are in Kindergarten is repeated through the course of their elementary school life. Numbers, language, and social science are taught using computers, film, and books. These lists are, however, not exhaustive. Teachers have the responsibility of shaping the way children will think at this level and what the children learn shall be important determinants of whether or not the students shall be successful in the future. The teacher encourages them to play so that they may develop language and social skills. At Elementary School, one or two teachers are usually held responsible for a group of children whom they instruct in one of several special subjects. These subjects include science, music, and art (United States Bureau of Labour, 2002).

​The private education system in the United States

Behind every decision for one to embrace either the public school system or private school system, there is a motive. The rationale behind American people opting for private education is multi-faceted. However, there seems to be one underlying reason (opines the author) that traverses all others and that is, a collectively disgruntled group of people who have lost faith in the education that the public sector provides. What are some of the reasons for opting to go private? If the 2004 publication on private schooling is anything to go by, private schools are a reserve of the financially capable. The same publication gives the impression that the majority of rich people prefer having their children attend private schools that have no religious affiliations (Education Week, 2004). It would also so appear as if this group of people detests the idea of their progeny being indoctrinated with religious dogma; that not being relevant to their realization of the good life. Moreover, it depicts the definition of “the good life” as something subjective, arguable depending on personal perspectives of what comprises the good in life. If the observations on religious dogma were true, then a paltry 10% of the school-age population would still be an overestimation of the proportion of people who do not view success in life as a function of one’s religiousness or lack thereof.

According to the Council of American Private Education, one of the reasons the American populace opts for private educational institutions is the provision of quality education that they appropriate (CAPE, 2011). The implication of this is that, for the parents of school-going children who attend private school, the delivery of quality is better experienced away from public institutions. Other reasons cited for preferring private to public schools are supportive communities, safety and orderliness in private environments, and the impartation of morals and ethical values. When each of these factors is taken in isolation and regarded as a polarizing factor, it does not appear to hold much water, if any at all. About the quality of education, for example, it would be expected that public schools would offer better quality. This is because the federal government has the backing of the whole American population, albeit begrudgingly for some, in form of income tax returns. Therefore, the acquisition of quality personnel and educative amenities would/should not be an unbearable burden.

The National Centre for Education Statistics (NCES) defines a private school as one that does not obtain its financial support primarily from public funds. Besides, such schools use classrooms to deliver educative material from kindergarten up to grade 12. Other levels that compare to K-12 but as yet ungraded are also considered, for example, some Montessori schools assign institutions to “primary” or “intermediate” levels rather than giving specific grades. The said schools should also employ one teacher or more, for them to snugly fit within this criterion. The NCES does not consider a private school an institution or organization that does not use a classroom set-up to deliver instruction. It has been running the private school survey since 1997, with data derived from administrative personnel in the same institutions (NCES, 2011).

According to NCESs 2009-2010 survey, some private schools had religious orientations and these formed the majority of private schools (Broughman, Swaim and Hryczaniuk, 2011). The religious leanings notwithstanding, an interesting fancy that comes to mind is a look at the reasons behind these proclivities. It would also be of sensual appeal to study the various religious interests represented in the various school, to find out which is the most represented and why.

From the same survey mentioned above, it was evident that the majority of private schools around the United States had no religious affiliations at all. That is, not one religion had several schools that exceeded that of schools devoid of religious inclinations. These “unspiritual” (read non-sectarian) schools were closely followed in number by private schools that are predominantly Roman Catholic (Broughman, Swaim, and Hryczaniuk, 2011). According to the National Catholic Educational Association, when a single year is considered, examining test scores to determine student achievement, and to compare the quality of education between public and private schools avails very little relevant information (NCEA, 2006). This statement has been construed to engender the lack of comparison of other relevant data within any single academic or survey year.

For example, based on the 2009-2010 NCEA report, one may easily compare the enrolment of students in Roman Catholic schools and those in the Baptist church, thereby concluding that the higher the number of schools, the higher the number of students who enroll in them. This conclusion, however, is flawed, especially when one goes a step further and makes the same comparisons with, say, Jewish schools. The conclusion would imply direct proportionality between the number of schools and the number of enrollees. Nevertheless, the Jewish schools number less than half of the Baptist schools, but students enrolled in Jewish schools are more than half the number of those in Baptist schools. Similarly, it would be expected that since the number of Greek orthodox schools are exactly half the number of schools of the Church of God in Christ, the enrollees in the latter institution would be, ideally, half the number in the former give or take a few thousand students. A stark contrast is observed in this case, when the number of Greek orthodox enrolees exceeds the number of enrollees in schools considered to be affiliated with the Church of God in Christ (Broughman, Swaim and Hryczaniuk, 2011). With such discrepancies, it is highly unlikely that comparisons within different years would avail anything different.

From the survey carried out by the NCEA, several questions are likely to arise in the curious-minded. One would ask, for instance, how religious affiliations affect examination scores or how the religiously inclined to turn out in life after attending school. Furthermore, one would be interested in knowing the drop-out rate per grade of the religiously inclined vis a vis the non-sectarian. This, followed by an exploration of the reasons why would be a worthwhile engagement leading to a keener understanding of the school demographics. It would also enlighten one who needs to make decisions regarding which school his or her children ought to attend. However, the report provided addresses none of these concerns. Where one would probably get the answers to these questions, the data is not as detailed as to be of much relevance. A document by the Council for American Private Education, in mentioning the scores by students doing science, states that in 2009, 44% of the students in private schools “scored at or above the ‘proficient level’ in science”. The same publication further states that, for students in the fourth grade, 48% were deemed proficient according to NAEP (CAPE, 2011). It is thus evident that one might need to investigate to arrive at the answers to the queries above.

Apart from the meager statistical information from the well-established institutions like NAEP and the NCEA, several studies have been carried out whose objectives are congruous with the raised questions. Some studies have concluded that students from private schools perform better than their public school counterparts. However, other studies find conflicting results. Those whose results are in the affirmative invariably find out also that the best performers are students from catholic schools (Figlio & Stone, 2011).

According to Figlio and Stone, these studies did not employ robust instruments for the adjustment of non-random selection. They, therefore, proposed the implementation of a system of study that would improve system power prediction by about three times compared to studies done before theirs. They, like the aforementioned National Catholic Educational Association, did their studies while considering high schools in three categories: religious private high schools, nonreligious private high schools, and public high schools. Having made these modifications, they found out that nonreligious schools have a significant superiority to the religious schools in as far as science and mathematics subjects are concerned (Figlio and Stone, 2011).

There exists a debate about the benefits (if any at all) that private schools bring to the American schooling system. Those who criticize the private schools say that parents decide to opt for them being driven by the desire to appear socially elite or simply to separate themselves. It is the collective points of view of these critics that parents do not necessarily choose private schools because of better academic performance. They contend that these parents are hell-bent on keeping their children separate and untainted from those who come from other races and backgrounds. Furthermore, they say that for these parents, their children’s attending private schools is an attractive status symbol. The critical punch line they put forward is that private schools propagate segregation by class and race (Education Week, 2004).

On the other hand, there exist proponents for private education. In support of the system, they say that the monopoly extant with many public schools is not competitive. They add that a competitive system that opens up the opportunity for people to choose the schools to which they shall take their children is required. To support this point, they say that private school students are superior academies to their public school counterparts. They contend that schools need to be autonomous, and such a system would promote this autonomy; also adding that due to autonomy, student performance would improve. The proponents say that there is bias in the private school system. They propose an opening up of the system by the introduction of children from low-income families and those whose affiliate groups are underrepresented. This would mean that a means of supporting these students’ education be established. They, therefore, propose the use of vouchers as well as school choice programs (Education Week, 2004).

The proposal regarding the use of vouchers and increased school choice was given a counter-offer by the group called Americans United. On their website, they gave several reasons why people ought not to support this emerging trend. Among the reasons was the fact that the First Amendment gave a guarantee of freedom of religion from state influences. That is, they invoke the unending debate of the separation of church and state. They contended that this law would be broken when Americans agreed to support the issuance of vouchers for schooling. Citing the fact that a majority of private schools have religious affiliations and that these institutions have the mandate to indoctrinate the students and to educate them as well, the Americans United felt that Americans would be inadvertently supporting religion against their free wills. Americans would be paying for their children to be indoctrinated with religious dogma with which they did not agree (Americans United, 2011).

Ostensibly, the issuance of the voucher would be a tad more acceptable if it appreciably led to an improvement in the academic performance of students in their academics. That not being the case, however, the Americans United group is vehemently opposed to the idea. They contended that students in public schools performed much better in mathematics and reading than students in private schools. Furthermore, they would have expected the program to cause several changes in the students who participated in it. For example, participants were expected to have positive aspirations concerning their schooling in the future and to improve in the frequency with which they did their homework. However, the program never did bring such changes. On the contrary, student participants’ likelihood of absenteeism from class increased significantly (Americans United, 2011).

The report by the NCES never detailed graduation statistics for the year 2009-2010. Instead, it had data for the previous year. Whereas the reason for missing this data remains unknown, the NCES reported that of the twelfth graders who were enrolled in October 2008, ninety-eight percent graduated in 2009 (NCES, 2011). That was a very high success rate for graduates in private schools, which would have been taken as indicative of the quality of education that private institutions have to offer. Furthermore, 64% of the high school graduates from private schools later enrolled in 4-year colleges. This was representative of 308,813 high school graduates, who enrolled by the fall of the same year as they did graduate (NCES, 2011).

Using multiple sources of data, Heckman and LaFontaine made estimations of trends of graduation rates in the United States high schools. They noted that previous calculations were rife with biases and corrections had to be made for their study to be acceptable. Eventually, they found out that the rates provided by the National Centre for Educational Statistics were substantially high and thus misleading. They also found out that for forty-odd years, there had been a decline in the rate of graduation. Furthermore, they observed that even though the number of immigrants and minorities was on the increase in American society, this was not the cause of declining high school graduation rates among native populations. Therefore, they were able to explain why college attendance was also on the decline. Findings concerning gender differences in graduation from high schools were also useful in deciphering the reasons behind the gaps extant in male-female college attendance, and why those gaps were gradually increasing (Heckman and LaFontaine, 2011). These findings were not specifically for high school graduates from private high schools, but a traversal of all high schools regardless of their administrative leanings. In an appeal to the part being a representative of the whole, one would comfortably suggest that these findings could be transmuted to the private school population with similar implications.

The sizes of private schools might affect the effective transmission of knowledge and its receptivity among students. Here, the paper explores what other people have said regarding this, and the recommendations that they put forth towards improving the education system in the United States. Taken from an economic perspective, larger school sizes are better than smaller ones because of economies of scale benefits realized in the former. According to Ferris and Leung though, this is a consensus that requires revision because the benefits accrued from one side are outweighed by the disadvantages from other fronts. They cite the fact that more and more students are growing frustrated by the system, and coupled with the escalation of violence in the same schools, the drop-out rates are also on the rise (Leung and Ferris, 2008).

Since class sizes in most private schools are small, the student to teacher ratio critical for individual attention is easily achieved. This ratio stands at 15:1, but smaller ratios are more advantageous both to the teachers and students alike. With smaller ratios, teachers have fewer students to deal with and can divide their time well among the few students demanding their attention. Each student benefits by having more time spent with the teacher. Therefore, each student in a private school classroom has the opportunity to be personally aided by the teacher when the need calls for it (Kennedy, 2011).

​A Summary of Some of the Benefits of Private School System

According to the United States Department of education, when private school students and their public school counterparts are compared, the former generally outperform the latter on standardized achievement tests. Also, for the former to graduate, they pass through requirements that are more demanding than for their counterparts. Completion of advanced-level courses is more likely for private school graduates than for their public school counterparts when they take three academic subject areas. National Assessment of Educational Progress results showed that private student scores were above average nationally. Experts recommend students to take up challenging subjects that push them into striving for excellence. Private schools make provisions for this by making it a requirement for students to take difficult courses like calculus before they graduate. When it was assessed who between the two was more likely to attain a bachelor’s degree by their mid-twenties, those who had gone to private schools in their eighth grade scored 52% compared to 26% for the public school attendees (CAPE, 2011b).

Depending on a school’s financial resources, compensation for private school teachers might be higher than that for public school teachers. On the whole, however, they are usually comparably lower. The teachers usually benefit from getting free housing and meals as opposed to the public school teachers who do not get such benefits. Also, teachers in private schools have widely variable pension schemes. They are required by private schools to be credentialed. That is, a teacher has to have a teaching certificate backed with a degree in the relevant subject. Armed with these two documents, a teacher stands a greater chance of being hired than one who does not have them. However, concerning budgetary costs, public schools stand a better chance of raising significantly large amounts of money. They do so by making annual appeals, cultivating alumni, and soliciting grants from corporations. Private schools nurture strong bonds with their alumni. Therefore, they also have high rates of fund-raising success. They also have a management structure that is considered to be lean. This means that a critical decision does not have to pass through several authorities to get approval. Rarely, if ever, will a private school have to contend with a union of teachers (Kennedy, 2011).

​Some observed discrepancies to the generalizations regarding private school superiority

Rothstein, Carnoy, and Benveniste filed a report regarding the accountability of private schools to students’ parents, the outcomes parents expected of their children, and policies for retention and selection of teachers. They found out that in elementary school accountability to students’ parents does not differ significantly from the same in public schools. There was also no clearly defined school outcome expectation in private schools, and that was in no way different from the situation in public schools. Neither type of school did mentor teachers nor evaluate them formally to assess variation in their performance and delivery of instruction. They also found that where there was a competition between private and public schools, innovations by private schools never made their competitor public schools improve in any way whatsoever. Therefore, they made a point to the proponents for choice in public education, that to improve academic achievement, choice of public versus private institutions held very little weight (Benveniste, Carnoy and Rothste, 1999).

Private schooling also has its disadvantages. Some things are not implicitly taught in private schools. For example, a graduate from a private school would find it difficult to strike a conversation with any other person, who is essentially different from them. Unless it was a fellow graduate who came from the same institution, or a school with a similar status, building meaningful rapport would not be easy. Indoctrination also occurs in private schools albeit of a different kind than the commonplace religious dogma inculcation. That indoctrination goes a long way to assure students of private schools that they are better than those who never succeeded in attending similar schools.

The latter is seen as inferior people who are not even worth spending time with. The effect of this influence upon the indoctrinated was made evident in the Democratic presidential nominee, Al Gore, who could not speak to the populace. Thus, such students remain ignorant of some facts like there being other smart people apart from those who attend similar schools to theirs. They remain unaware that some highly adept people never see the inside of classrooms. Also, they realize rather belatedly that some of the so-called smart people are not smart at all. School is lacking in the instruction on social intelligence, the ability to be creative, and it does not teach emotional intelligence (Deresiewicz, 2008). Deresiewicz does not, however, give the way through which one may be educated in these latter aspects, pertinent through the acquisition of this knowledge might be.

The private school system achieves the creation of analytically biased minds, thereby developing lopsided intelligence that may not be entirely beneficial in seeing and appreciating the value inherent in other people. Such people are more adept at dealing with machines or analyzing books than interacting with other members of the human race. The system of private schooling essentially alienates one from that which is human in the sense that it creates a block to interpersonal interactions that are every bit human. Besides, a person develops a misguided sense of how worthy they are to receive certain rights and privileges. The unbearable truth in all of this is the fact that all through the life of a student who has been in private school, they have been graded using numerical rankings. Such students end up equating their grades to their identity and value. Absolute excellence, they forget, does not imply academic excellence or vice versa (Deresiewicz, 2008).

Whether it is a private school or a public school, one would contend that both have a common disadvantage. This is about the type of interaction a school-going child is exposed to. They can only interact with their age-mates while in school. Bigger children invariably bully the smaller ones, who in turn do the same to yet smaller ones. Among these children, none appreciates how to interact with grownups. The fear that is inculcated into them by the bullies they meet in school becomes the same fear that they show towards their parents back at home. Fear is a monster that feeds upon itself, however. Therefore, the fear engenders a reciprocal propensity for abuse from parents who do not know better. It is not a seldom occurrence to find children who’ve been abused by otherwise well-meaning parents.

The vicious cycle started with their being taken to school, which alienated them from their parents. They then picked up bits and pieces of strange behavior from their peers, which they came home with, much to the chagrin of their unprepared parents. Thus, there is a growing concern that home-schooling would be the only best option for a growing child (Oeser, 2011). Furthermore, time taken out to quietly reflect on one’s own is an alien concept to school-going students, who are more inclined to be rowdy, loud, and disorderly. Also, since they learn to pass their examinations, school-goers eventually lack long-standing applicable knowledge. Most of what they learn is quickly forgotten with the passing of the examination. Their understanding of concepts is not adequate as the knowledge they have does not correlate well with real-life issues.

​American Education in Public Schools: A Brief History

A majority of people in the United States who come from low-income backgrounds take their children to public schools. Currently, the parents whose children attend private schools are rather similar in characteristics. For one, they are from affluent backgrounds. The fact that school fees charges in private schools are high shields this elitist group of people from other influences. However, if the restrictive costs of financing education in private schools were to be revised downwards, up to 59% of parents would opt for private education. This would be aided by vouchers which would, ideally, be catering for the whole tuition fees. Besides, parents with low income show greater enthusiasm for private school enrolment, but money continues to be their major hurdle. It is opined that there would be a greater diversity of parents and the group would inevitably be larger if the price of private education were reduced (Education Week, 2004).

For some people, the public education system is the ideal system of instruction. However, it faces a lot of criticism, and many times it has had to be revised so that it may continue playing a pivotal role in the shaping of public opinion regarding solidarity with the government. Having developed in the nineteenth century, its inception was the result of a suggestion by the then President Jefferson. Public school education is under the management of states and school districts. Whereas education in the United States began with puritans and Congregationalists, a purely Christian group of people, the introduction of the public school system came much later. With the coming of people from different countries, there was a foreign influence upon the natives. The entrant people did not all embrace the Christian faith, they have been of different inclinations. For this reason, private education began and thrived in the mid-eighteenth century (Thattai, 2011).

​Disadvantages of Public Schools

In public schools, teachers generally get better remuneration. However, starter salaries are usually very low. This leads to very few teachers being retained in the public sector. Too much bureaucracy in the public sector implies that decisions take very long to be made even when those decisions are critical. Public schools are usually bogged down with political influences and union contracts. The rules that they adhere to while at work are also antique (Kennedy, 2011). Some courses are considered to be more challenging than others. It is less likely for a student in a public school to be required to take such courses as calculus before they graduate (CAPE, 2011b). This has the effect of developing an individual who shall not strive to excel in real life. It also relegates such an individual to a life of relative ease or one that is not well equipped to face challenges. Such an individual ends up having difficulties solving personal problems. Suicidal tendencies and drug-related escape mechanisms are rife among these people who will under most circumstances seek the easiest way out of any rut. The ways that appear easy, however, are illusions and present the individuals with a false sense of comfort or repose from the hardships they experience.

​Of Co-Educational Schools versus Single-Sex Schools

Both private and public schools can be regarded as single-sex institutions or co-educational. In the latter case, a school trains students of both sexes, while in the former the school is exclusively for girls or boys. A debate continues regarding whether the genders should be separated in the school set-up. Those who oppose the idea are the conservative types who feel that there is the looseness of morals that comes into play when members of the two genders are nearby for extended periods. For the feminists, a separation of the sexes is the ideal environment for women to achieve success in life. Historically, it has been normal to separate girls and boys, giving them unequal status to each other based on their acquired societal roles in later life. Literacy was, therefore, more prevalent among males than among females. The former was trained in subjects that would be relevant in their workplaces, politics, and war. Girls, on the other hand, were trained on how to be better performers in the home arena. Thus, the inception of co-education was a threat to the widely accepted status quo, where men were regarded in higher esteem than women (Rury, 2008).

​Controversies in the Adoption of Coeducation

In 2006, Title IX regulations of the US department of education were amended. This allowed single-sex school enrolment, but with reservations. It contended that the enrolments ought o be voluntary. Also, an equal school for the opposite gender should have been present or catered for. While endeavoring to convert to single-sex institutions, some schools have been met with challenges like meager finances and political pressures. Enrolment in such schools has also been a problem for some of the administrators (Rury, 2008).

It would have been thrift for the United States to have learned a thing or two from her European contemporaries. Europe’s experience with coeducation has been anything but rosy. They have documented disadvantages that they have observed against female students in such schools. They state that contrary to their expectation that coeducation would bring about a keen appreciation of either gender by the other, the opposite remains true. Girls have invariably been the sufferers while boys (and teachers) have been the perpetrators of a myriad of atrocities. In a literal sense, girls lack adequate space in these schools. They are the objects of boys’ desires, and often battered with lewd suggestive remarks. Male teachers also tend to get romantically attached to girl students. Girls do not get as much appropriate attention from teachers as the boys do, and they are also taken as social workers to be strategically seated next to ill-mannered boys. This is done to cause the boys to learn some good manners from the better-behaved girls. The missing point in all this is that the bad behavior of the boys seated next to the girls might (and does) rub off on the girls, whose behavior will then be all the worse (Anon., 2004).

In coeducational institutions, inequity exists in the meting out of punishments for wrongdoing. Girls get punished more severely than boys even when their misdeeds are essential of similar magnitude. It is understood, in a discriminatory manner, that girls are more diligent than boys, but that boys are more intelligent than girls. Therefore, when a girl performs well in class, it is attributed to her diligence, while if a boy does the same, it is said that he passed or excelled because he is intelligent. Boys are encouraged to be competitive while girls are frowned upon if they act similarly. The latter is expected to conform. They are also given less time for verbal expression than boys are given in class (Anon., 2004).

Other issues that have arisen through the years after the introduction of coeducational institutions include the argument by some doctors that women would suffer from overexertion and get harmed. It was argued that the overexertion would come from the girls’ competition with boys. Indulgence in sexual impropriety was also pointed out as being highly likely when the two sexes were left to interact for extended periods (Rury, 2008).

Outcomes of education that are of most interests to parents and students include academic achievement test scores, an appropriately delineated concept of self, and long-term success indicators. These are more evident in single-sex schools than in coeducational schools, and they give leverage for the proponents for single-sex schools. In comparison, single-sex schools perform academically better than coeducational schools.

​Current Trends of Education in the United States

In the late twentieth century, there arose a drive for the reformation of elementary education in the United States. Its purpose was to indiscriminately improve the academic performance of students. Children were left accountable to the schools, districts, and ultimately the states for their academic achievement. However, concerns have been raised that the United States students perform relatively poorly in their academics compared to students of other countries. They blame this on an educational system that they deem not to be enabling the students to perform as it should be. Elementary education in the United States is constantly being reformed and refined. The United States is democratizing its education so that it does not support systems that are representations of goals and expectations, and are industrial or social. It is drawn toward an education system that is open and universal (Howey and Post, 2011).

When students perform poorly, the education system is seen as being a failure. It thus behooves the government to ensure that a running system strikes the right balance. One that places a lot of demands on the students is sure to cause them to perform poorly. A very lax system, on the other hand, will produce individuals who are ill-equipped for their roles in society. Thus, the government has put in place measures to ensure that all children have equal access to quality education. These measures include the creation of a welcoming environment, which embodies the prevention of bullying and harassment, and the outlining of the responsibilities that education providers have towards this goal. The onus rests on education providers to ensure that harassment does not occur. Such harassment might be from the education providers themselves, or other sources. Education providers should take the measures necessary to remedy harassment when they know that students are being harassed. Otherwise, they (education providers) face imminent sanctions, since their laxity (or presumed indifference) allows the education system to be poisoned. Harassment is seen as one of the impediments to the ease of access to educational services. When one is harassed, they may not “participate fully in the educational experience” (OHRC, 2011).

An education provider helps reduce instances of bullying and harassment by being non-tolerant to the act of bullying and being unequivocal about the consequences a student has to face for being a bully. The educator further communicates this by educating students concerning disabilities; he or she then encourages them to appreciate diversity. Appreciating diversity will imply that the students do not taunt their peers who may be disabled in one way or another. They will respect their disabled peers, and even protect them from further harm if necessary. The education provider may also get involved in role-playing to cultivate compassion and awareness of the impact that bullying has on other people. They may act like the ones upon whose taunts are being thrown or being big, act as the bullies. In either case, the students will see the folly behind bullying as a front. Bullies are essentially weak people who hide their weaknesses by attacking others. Finally, the educator protects students who report bullying by maintaining confidence regarding their report (OHRC, 2011). The educator does not let other students know the one who reports instances of bullying to the authorities.

​The Role of Universities in the United States Education System

There was a decline in American education as was documented in 1983 by the National Commission on Excellence in Education. This brought about a change that saw the inception of standardized testing and accountability (Heckman & LaFontaine, 2011). A 2001 Act called the No Child Left Behind Act sets out requirements for each state to identify low-performing schools. Another of its requirements is for the annual assessment of students in reading and mathematics. Declining standards in the secondary school level of education imply that very few students get enrolled in universities around the country. America boasts of the largest number of institutions of higher learning throughout the world, but if these institutions cannot enroll Native Americans due to mediocre performance in their secondary schools, one is left to marvel at what the future holds for university education within the country.

Scientific research in universities thrives on funding from various sources. Research is important to the advancement of knowledge since it creates new perspectives to what is already known. Much of what results from research can be applied in areas such as pharmaceuticals for the production of new drugs. The current trend tends towards genetic science, which has brought about a lot of controversies. When universities lack students to carry out research then there is a paucity of funds from donors who fund the research projects. This brings a complication to the universities, which rely much on donor funding. The case of Berkeley and Novartis appears to have been instigated by such a state of affairs as has been described above. Berkeley signed an agreement with Novartis in November 1998 and rescinded about one-third of its patent rights to Novartis in exchange for a $25 million grant towards research (Washburn, 2005). The said company had vested interests in the outcome of the research and, thus, was in a way investing in it. That movie had a lot of ethical connotations.

Another issue that was highlighted in Washburn’s book is the notion that universities have gradually been shifting from their academic role to institutions that run businesses. This is a pithy subject since the university ought to be an institution of higher learning and not drawn into the rigmarole of generating income. Universities ought to set the pace for industry to follow, by making breakthroughs in research projects that will enhance the human experience of living within the planet earth. That notwithstanding, universities have become embroiled in the shaping of individuals to prepare them for employment within the industries. One may contend that they are responding to the dire needs of the economy by providing the market with the best brains the country has to offer. However, the country appears to stand no gain, especially when such patents as were aforementioned are left in the hands of foreign companies (Washburn, 2005).

A reversal of roles is readily observable in that the industry now makes the demands and the universities dance to her tune. For example, when the industry demands chemical analysts, the universities respond by giving their analysts to the industries. Due to the lack of employment in the country, an analyst who finishes their course at university and immediately finds a source of income sees herself as being very fortunate. This, however, results in a dilution of the high standards of excellence that are expected of all public institutions of higher learning. Universities need to maintain an autonomous stance that is neither swayed by the government nor by the industry as these two entities seek to push their agenda (Washburn, 2005). On one side is an entity with political ideals while on the other is one that seeks financial gains. Both the government and the industrial entities stand in opposition to the universities’ values of serving the common good of all humankind.

The involvement of outside forces in university affairs has made even students forget their primary agenda at having joined the universities. Like Reynolds in the Washburn (2005) book, many a scientist ends up being a politician due to these disruptions in the curriculum. If even the students should get derailed from their “calling” in such a manner, in all probability, the future of the universities is painted in bleak colors. It is necessary to redefine the role of the university and give the students clear guidelines as to the parts they ought to play therein. Not only are grades falling within secondary schools, but also those who end up in university, having attempted and succeeded at a difficult feat, may get disillusioned at what they find.

Hirsch (2006) appears to have the answer to one of the woes so far when he says that students have to read and comprehend. Any student can read, given the time to do so. But their understanding of what they have read is the most crucial part of their acquisition of knowledge. Comprehension is the difficult bone that students need to chew while at school to enable them to sit their examinations and pass with flying colors. Since they are not taught to comprehend, it follows that their performance in class also suffers. They are not even prepared within their extant grades for the grades which they shall be facing in the future. Hirsch says that a broad range of knowledge is required for students to be able to comprehend what they read (Hirsch, 2006). One may question at this point from whence that a “broad range of knowledge” shall be obtained.

Hitherto, it has been observed the diverse challenges that the American child faces as he or she pursues an education. The challenges start right from kindergarten through to university. The American child is also exposed to a lot of information that buffets them from all types of sources: the internet, television, radio, movies et cetera. These sources of information together with the students’ own experiences (however few and apart those experiences might be) ought to be sufficient to give the background knowledge that Hirsch craves for them. If these sources are not enough to give the American child the vast knowledge that Hirsch talks about, then it remains an enigma where else the knowledge shall come from. The school has synthesized the knowledge for the students to acquire, not in its raw form, but in a form that has been more purified; akin to the sugar that one gets on the table compared to the sugar from the cane.

According to Hirsch (2006), knowledge is all around us, but it is taken for granted. In essence, he says that even the modern student has a lot to learn from his or her surroundings. As they walk along the streets, go sightseeing or listen to music on the radio, all these areas hold a bit of knowledge here and a bit there that may stand the observer in good stead when they are faced with the problem of comprehending written material in class. It may be added that comprehension is context-dependent but knowledge garnered from one source can be transmuted to an application that is far much different than its source. Therefore, as students learn to be more in touch with their environments, they shall be better equipped to face the future challenges that they are bound to meet. They shall be able, when in university, to stand for what they know is right, disallowing the interference of other institutions whose missions stand at variance with the mission of the academia.

​Conclusion

Reforms in education in the United States are bound to be a collective effort involving, not only the government but also all other stakeholders. America was founded as a nation on solid Christian principles, and these guiding principles worked well for the founding generation as well as the few generations that stood by them thereafter. The encumbrances that America faces are as a result of her generosity toward all nations. These nations have brought with them influences that have diluted the American spirit of democracy and freedom; for even the freedom that the founding father fought for has been misinterpreted. It is time that America went back to her first principles; for there lays the answer to most of the problems she faces nowadays. Democracy per se is a boon that the American people can never take for granted. Nevertheless, it only speaks of good things that have not been counterbalanced by the “bad”. A bit of non-democratization may be required to create the critical balance that America requires. The government needs to step up its authority to ensure that things happen in the correct way that they should, but that ought to be done with discretion as there still is an extant law that governs the land. It is a law that the people have put forth by themselves, and it is in the power of the people to repeal the same and come up with better laws.

The breaches in the education system in America are not irreparable. Since the United States has shined in glory in the past, she still can do the same but only if the people are willing to rise together and make that dream a reality. Right from elementary school to the university level, students have the latent ability to excel, for America does have the mental capacity to read and understand books. She is well endowed with comprehensive skills.

Reference List

Americans United. (2011). 10 Reasons Why Private School Vouchers Should Be Rejected . Web.

Anon. (2004). The Damages of Co-Education . Web.

Benveniste, L., Carnoy, M., and Rothste, R. (1999). Can Public Schools Learn From Private Schools? Colorado: EPI and The Aspen Institute’s Nonprofit Sector Research Fund.

Broughman, S. P., Swaim, N. L. and Hryczaniuk, C. A. (2011). Characteristics of Private Schools in the United States: Results From the 2009-10 Private School Universe Survey.  

CAPE. (2011b). Benefits of Private Education . Web.

CAPE. (2011). Council of American Private Education (CAPE) Home page . Web.

CAPE. (2011). Outlook. Maryland: Council of American Private Education.

Deresiewicz, W. (2008). The Disadvantages of an Elite Education.  

Education Week. (2004). Private Schooling .

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EuroEducation. (2011). Structure of education system in the USA . Web.

Figlio, D. N. and Stone, J. A. (2011). School Choice and Student Performance: Are Private Schools Better?

Heckman, J. J. and LaFontaine, P. A. (2011). The American High School Graduation Rate: Trends and Levels.  

Hirsch, E. D. (2006). The Knowledge Deficit: Closing the Shocking Education Gap for American Children. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Howey, K. R. and Post, L. M. (2011). Elementary education: current trends . Web.

Kennedy, R. (2011). Private vs Public Schools .

Leung, A. and Ferris, J. S. (2008). School Size and Youth Violence – revised version. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization , 318–333.

NCEA. (2010). Catholic School Data . Web.

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NCES. (2011). Private School Universe Survey (PSS) .

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OHRC. (2011). Guidelines on accessible education . Web.

Rury, J. L. (2008). Coeducation and same sex schooling .

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USAEducation. (2011). Structure of US education system . Web.

Washburn, J. (2005). University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education. New York: Basic Books.

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American education system

Table of Contents

Introduction

Lack of respect for the teaching profession is a common problem experienced in various nations across the globe. The teaching profession in the United States has been disrespected through disregarding and discriminating teachers. Research indicates that in America, the assessment of teachers’ effectiveness is not carried out as it is done in other professions (Mulkeen 49). This fails to display the importance of teachers in the society, thus, affecting their identity. Another way through which teachers have been disrespected in the nation is through low wages and salaries. In a social perspective, the amount of salary rewarded in various professions determines the importance of the profession. Highly rewarded professionals are more respected than the professionals receiving low rewards are. The significance of these acts of disrespect to the teaching profession makes influential impacts to the entire education system. Failing to respect teachers leads to poor delivery within the profession. Disrespected teachers are demotivated to deliver great quality, and this affects the performance of the American education system. Therefore, as this essay argues, lack of respect for the teaching profession is the core problem with the education system in America.

How the Teaching Profession is Disrespected in America

One of the prime ways through which disrespect has been experienced in the American society is low wages. American teachers experience many hardships with less salary to enjoy at the end of the month. Firstly, for one to qualify as an American teacher, they must go through all the levels of education in the state. The must achieve grades that above average in both the lower and higher education levels. This depicts the struggle that teachers are subjected to through their training courses only to end up with a profession with low wages. Secondly, the teaching profession involves great risks. Teachers are posted in regions where the security is low because of factors such as the presence of terrorists. Research indicates that very few American schools run under the surveillance of security officers to ensure that the environment is safe (Blumenstyk 22). Therefore, in many cases, teachers operate under the risk of deadly attacks. This makes the career too risky to be rewarded low wages. Hence, the government and private sectors have dishonored the teaching profession in the United States through offering low wages to teachers. The social impact of this to the public is stimulated disrespect for teachers and the teaching profession. Members of the society view teachers as poor citizens in a discriminative career, as they do a lot of work with low wages to enjoy. For this reason, few people in the state would want to join the teaching profession. Therefore, the prevalence of disrespect towards teachers in the United States is evidenced by rewarding the teachers poorly for their duties.

The Impact of Disrespecting Teachers in the American Education System

The reason I find disrespecting the teaching profession as a chronic problem affecting the American education system is that it has significant impacts concerning the quality of education provided to students by teachers. Through factors of disrespect such as low wages, the teachers recruited in the American education system are discouraged while offering quality education to their students. The roles of a teacher include ensuring that the students comprehend the academic concepts learned in class. This requires proper attendance to the students and an investment of time, energy and resources to ensure that they all understand despite their different levels of intelligence. However, when a teacher is poorly rewarded, they feel demotivated to invest their energy and time in the teaching profession. The fact that they want to beat their basic needs that might not be met by the little amount of salary earned from the teaching profession may cause them to look out for activities to earn them more money during their part time (Farber 72). This leads to the creation of a gap between teachers and the students, as their time will be divided between students and other activities. This is contrary to what is required of them, as they should invest all their time in making students understand. It is also an inevitable fact that a demotivated teacher will not be effective in employing their teaching skills to reach out to students. Therefore, disrespecting teachers through minimal payments reduces the quality of education offered by the American education system.

Secondly, the American education system is affected by the lack of respect for the teaching profession through the shortage of personnel to deliver quality education. When members of the society develop a mental perception that the teaching career is not an effective way of meeting their daily needs, few people want to train as teachers. When the time to select their courses arrives, many American students rush to pursue the respected courses in the nation. This leads to a reduction of the population of training institutions that offer teaching skills. When only a small portion of citizens trains to be teachers, the number of teachers in the future will reduce, leading to the lack of sufficient trained personnel in classrooms. Since the prevalence of this problem in the academic system, the quality of education offered by the American education system decreased (Ravitch 130). Only a handful of teachers is expected to deliver to large populations of students in classrooms, leading to overworking of the available teachers. Overworked teachers with reduced salaries are overpowered by the demand of students in classrooms leading to poor delivery of education. In such schools, the poor performance of students leads to degradation of the nation’s education system. Therefore, disrespect for teachers in the United States affects the education system through the insufficiency of trained personnel.

As this essay argues, lack of respect for the teaching profession is the core problem with the education system in America. This has occurred through the reduction of quality delivered by teachers in American schools. Disrespecting teachers by offering them low wages of salaries with intense teaching tasks and risks has caused demotivation within the teaching stuff. This leads to poor delivery of their services to students. Additionally, this level of disrespect has offered led to discouraging members of the society from applying for teaching courses. This leads to a reduction of trained personnel within the education sector, sequentially causing poor quality of services offered by teachers in crowded classrooms.

• Blumenstyk, Goldie.  American Higher Education in Crisis? What Everyone Needs to Know . New York: Oxford University Press2015. Print.
• Farber, Katy.  Why Great Teachers Quit: And how we Might Stop the Exodus. New York: Skyhorse Publishing 2015.
• Mulkeen, Aidan.  Recruiting, Retaining, and Retraining Secondary School Teachers and Principals in Sub-Saharan Africa .Washington: World Bank, Africa Region, Human Development Dept, 2007. Print.
• Ravitch, Diane.  The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education . New York: Basic Books 2016. Print.
• Academic Success
• Child Observation
• Early Childhood Education
• High School
• Homeschooling
• Is College Worth It
• School Uniforms
• School Violence

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During the 17th century, prior to the American Revolution, public education didn’t exist in the original thirteen colonies. Primarily, during the Colonial period, only the upper-class children in received a proper education of reading and writing, prayers, basic math and poems. Lessons were memorized since paper and books were scarce. The most common book read was the Bible.

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First American Schools

The first Colonial public school was established on April 23, 1635 in Massachusetts. Today, the Boston Latin School remains the oldest standing school in the U.S. The school’s existence derived from the vision and determination of Reverend John Cotton. He was driven to construct a school teaching Latin and Greek that paralleled to the Free Grammar School of Boston, England. Later, the Mather School, the first free taxpayer-supported public was established in Dorchester, Massachusetts, in 1639. To follow, in 1647 a progressive law was enacted in Massachusetts that required a teacher to be hired in towns having more than fifty families and for towns with a hundred or more families, they must build a grammar school. (1.)

During the 18th Century, there was an emphasis on literacy by the Puritan’s which helped increase the literacy rate. Education was influenced on your social and family status. As a result, a child’s education, mostly boy’s, were given by the family.

The rural South didn’t have many schools. Private tutor’s education wealthy children, whereas middle-class children could only learn to read or write if their literate parents taught them. The poor, middle-class white, and black children weren’t formally taught in schools. Most people worked farming. As a result, literacy rates were drastically lower in the South than the North; this remained true until the late nineteenth century. The only exception during this time was the Ursuline Academy in New Orleans, founded in 1727 by the Catholic sisters of the Order of Saint Ursula. Today, it remains in operation and recorded as the oldest Catholic all-girl school and convent in the U.S. It also has graduates with the America’s first woman titles. Such as the first female pharmacist, the first woman to receive a book of literary merit, first to have classes for women of color, and Native Americans all free of charges. This part of history really amazed me when I did my French Louisiana genealogy. There were no schools or churches until the 1800’s. I noticed and expected that most spoke French but didn’t realize the prevalence of illiteracy until after the 1900’s according to the censuses. My grandmother once told me that they were shamed and punished, made to kneel on rice in the corner if she spoke French. They were forced to only speak English. The Boys would go to school to learn to read then quit to work on the farm. The girls would only stay in school long enough to read the Bible. My great-grandmother was the last of that generation, she only had a fourth-grade education. She was born in 1904 and the oldest of seven children. The last two siblings, one a brother and the other a sister graduated high school and went to college. The opportunities definitely improved as time went on. However, a huge part of our French culture was destroyed by preventing the language to be spoken. There are only a few towns that still speak the Cajun dialect, one being where I am from, Evangeline Parish where the most French speakers in America reside. Today, schools are teaching French again, but it will never be prevalent in the homes again. In the same respect, all other immigrants go through the same hardship even today.

Education in 1700s

To follow into the 1700s, education in America was modernized and motivated to meet broad, nonsectarian needs. One of our Founding Fathers and future president of the U.S, Thomas Jefferson aspired to reach past educating only a small privileged class or only giving religion teachings. He upheld the idea that education should vastly be offered to white children from every background regardless of money or status. Next, in 1749, another future president and Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin came up with a new form of secondary school, replacing the unpopular Latin grammar school, the academy. He presented this idea in the Proposals Relating to the Youth of Pennsylvania. Even after many years have gone by, both Jefferson and Franklin’s ideas became American educational practices, but the desire for modernization to education was taking place. (Sadker, David M., Page 214.)

An important person in education history was Anthony Benozet, he was a Huguenot immigrant that became a Quaker. He wrote a book putting an importance of a well-versed education. In 1750, he taught classes in his home to black people. Then later in 1754 he began the first Philadelphia secondary school for girls. To follow, in order for a deaf and mute girl that was attending the school to participate, he created a special program for her. He wrote against slavery and spoke of equality. His other accomplishment came in 1770 when he persuaded Quakers to construct the first free school for African Americans. Later, when he died in 1784, he willed his entire estate to support the education of the Native American and African American people.

Thenceforward, were the prints from Benjamin Harris, his reading textbook, The New England Primer was extensively used for the next century. Another significant book we actually use today, the Webster Dictionary was written by Noah Webster in 1783. It was consisted of three-volumes and called, A Grammatical Institute of the English Language.

Another significant law passed for education was in 1785 by Congress requesting the Northwest Territory to be surveyed, part of which today is Ohio. This was to pursue ‘townships,’ which also reserved land for a local school. Resulting into ‘land grants’ and becoming the U.S. system of ‘land grant universities,’ which today we know as our public state universities.

Another pivotal date in American history was 1791, when Congress ratified the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gave control of education to all individual states. ‘The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Education in 1800s

Pre-technology, my memories of learning as a child heavily consist of reading and writing down what my teacher wrote on the chalkboard. This method of teaching lessons and writing in schools was the result of James Pillans’ discovery in 1801 when using chalk on a blackboard teaching geography. It was a math instructor at West Point Military Academy that first used it in America. Then, in 1805, a wealthy businessman established a “Lancastrian” modeled school to educate poor children in New York. It had one “master” that taught hundreds of students in a room. Thereby, the older students receive a rote lesson by the master, which whom would then teach the younger students. These school’s main emphasis was strict discipline and obedience since these are the prime qualities that factory owners desired in their employees.

Sadly, throughout history women were not given the same educational opportunities as men up until this point. If they were fortunate, they went to grade school long enough to learn to read the Bible. That is, not until 1831, where a coeducation Mississippi College granted a degree to two woman, Alice Robinson and Catherine Hall. Soon after that, Oberlin College becomes the first U.S. College to admit both women and men in 1833. Horace Mann, the foremost supporter for the creation of a freely open common school. Today, it’s called the public elementary school. Horace Mann is considered to be an outstanding advocate of education for the common person (the Common School Movement), nick-named “the father of the public school.”

Congress passed a law making it illegal for Native Americans teaching native languages in schools. Children starting at four years old were sent to off-reservation boarding schools, Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Development through 90s

In the late 1800’s, education began to grow and become more organized. Hence, the first Department of Education was formed in 1867. The Pledge of Allegiance was first used in public schools on Columbus Day in 1892 and remains in most schools today. Going into the 1900’s, laws were being passed. The U.S. Supreme Court requires public education to the children of Chinese immigrant California residents in 1905. Then, the minimum wage was enacted and prohibiting children under the age of 12 to be employed. In 1918 it became mandatory that students attend school in every state which increased literacy rates. The following year, every state had passed a law to provide public funding for students to have school transportation. As a result, in 1939, Frank W. Cyr lead a conference on student transportation and the national standardization of school buses to later become the Father of Yellow School Bus. A great program since I’m sure everyone that attended public school rode on a yellow school bus at some time or another.

Prior to the mid-1950’s, public schools were segregated, the white children did not inter-mix with black children or ethnic groups such as Hispanics and Native Americans. White schools received most of the education funding, which lead to better school conditions and textbooks. Finally, in 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court passed the law that made segregated schools illegal with the case Brown v. Board of Education. There was still a long road ahead to provide an equal opportunity to all students to receive an education since a follow up plan wasn’t in place, only to desegregate not integrate. Slowly, a decade later, Jule Sugarman founded the Head Start Program in 1965 that provided an educational program for low-income preschool children. Today there are debates whether the program is effective and worth the Congressional funding.

As a result of the 1983 Reagan Administration’s report, “A Nation at Risk,” the nation’s confidence in the school system was crushed, igniting a new education reform that started vouchers and charter schools to privatization. Following that reform was another attempt to improve the education system with President G.W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act, implementing student testing, in return holding the schools and educators accountable for the student’s achievement. There are arguments on the unfairness of penalizing schools for the students attending, resulting in teachers not wanting to work in those schools. On the other hand, some civil rights groups feel this is an important method to uphold high standards and recognize schools in need.

Regardless of the past and present-day education reforms and programs, a struggle for equality, diversity still exists today. However, slowly we have progressed forward in the school system that was paved for us by many past American’s and their vision for an open and free education. Present day educators also possess a common goal of meeting the tough new academic standards in education. Today, the debate continues: do any of the present-day strategies for diversity and equality challenge the Founding Fathers’ philosophies of an open and free common school, or are they the only a remedy in a multifaceted society?

• ‘History of Boston Latin School—oldest public school in America’. BLS Web Site. Archived from the original on 2007-05-02. Retrieved 2007-06-01.
• ‘Education Law.’ American Law Yearbook 2007. . Encyclopedia.com. 24 Sep. 2018
• Cooper, Forrest Lamar (2011). Looking Back Mississippi: Towns and Places. University Press of Mississippi. p. 23. ISBN 9781617031489.
• Irimia R, Gottschling M (2016) Taxonomic revision of Rochefortia Sw. (Ehretiaceae, Boraginales). Biodiversity Data Journal 4: e7720. https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.4.e7720
• Guinier, L. (n.d). From Racial Liberalism to Racial Literacy: Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Divergence Dilemma (Publication).
• Lyndsey Layton, ‘Obama signs new K–12 education law that ends No Child Left Behind’ Washington Post Dec 11, 2015
• Curti, M. E. The social ideas of American educators, with new chapter on the last twenty-five years. (1959)
• Sadker, David M.. Teachers Schools and Society (Page 215). McGraw-Hill Higher Education. Kindle Edition.

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• Admin, ERN. “The Effects of Unequal School Funding.” Educational Research Newsletter and Webinars, 30 Sept. 2002, https://www.ernweb.com/educational-research-articles/the-effects-of-unequal-school-funding/.
• Bullock, Richard H., et al. “Homeless on Campus.” The Norton Field Guide to Writing, W. W. Norton & Company, 2019, pp. 764–769.
• Bullock, Richard H., et al. “Does Texting Affect Writing .” The Norton Field Guide to Writing, W. W. Norton & Company, 2019, pp. 131–138.

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The Problem Schools Have Accurately Identifying English Learners

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Federal law requires states and school districts to identify if children need English-learner services and special education services to equally access instruction.

But despite the legal requirements and the evolving research and supports to help educators do better evaluations, accurately identifying English learners who also need special education services remains a persistent problem.

A U.S. Government Accountability Office report published in May underscores this.

The report found that while most states use federal guidance on how to identify English learners, and that most provide schools and districts assistance to help do the evaluations, there’s scant follow-up. That means many states don’t actually know if schools are accurately distinguishing between whether students are experiencing language acquisition issues, specific learning disabilities, or speech-language impairment.

Of the 41 states providing such assistance, only 17 reported taking steps to determine how well schools and districts are able to distinguish between language acquisition needs and disability-related needs. Another 16 provide no such follow up.

“That seems to me to be a place where there’s an opportunity for a lot of states to do better,” said Jacqueline Nowicki, a director in the GAO’s education, workforce, and income security team.

Accurate identification of English learners and English learners with disabilities is critical

The GAO survey went to all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Only Utah did not participate. (Participation was not required.)

The agency sought to determine how states and districts identify English learners and how they ensure that they are accurately identifying English learners with disabilities.

One of the biggest challenges involved in this identification work is the evolving demographics of the nation’s English learners. While the latest federal data show that Spanish remains English learners’ most prevalent home language, states and districts must ensure that home language surveys account for the hundreds of languages present in their communities to best address students’ language needs, Nowicki said.

“Given the increasing diversity of the public school population, including languages that are spoken at home, it is not surprising to me that a lot of states may struggle in having resources available to translate their home language surveys into languages spoken by so many students,” she said.

Identification of students’ linguistic needs— as well as any special education services they require—must be done in a timely manner, said Lisa Hsin, a developmental scientist and senior researcher at the nonprofit American Institutes for Research.

The same goes for deciding when English learners no longer require language acquisition services—known as reclassification—to ensure those students receive appropriate support and access to quality education, Hsin said.

One way to ensure that identification work goes smoothly is to have states provide assistance and then follow up on how well districts are faring. Such oversight may not guarantee that all districts in a state are identifying students correctly, Hsin said, but without such oversight and district data, states may not accurately gauge how well their districts are identifying students.

Historically, districts have underserved English learners and students with disabilities, including facing technical issues in accessing classes during remote instruction at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Nowicki said.

It’s why she sees an opportunity for more states to ensure that their districts are correctly identifying and then providing appropriate services to students.

“We can have all the laws and all the requirements and all the good intentions that we want. But unless people are diligent about making sure that what they’re doing is actually achieving the purpose or the intent, we’re not going to get very far in making sure that all kids have equal access to a quality education,” Nowicki said.

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