American Education and its Consistent Overhaul

Reform in education has become as American as apple pie. From the pages of the often referred A Nation At Risk to the high-shooting-but-low-aim having No Child Left Behind, there has always been a sense that American education “isn’t good enough”. Let movies like Waiting For Superman tell it, it is your teachers that sucks. To even back that up, the emotionally charged but highly unrealistic “Won’t Back Down” charged into theaters with low ratings and minimal results. Still, the “reform” idea of education marches on.

Personally, I am partially tired of it and tickled by it in one fell swoop.

It seems like Americans are confused. They want educational reform, yet they stick to educational scripts (standardized testing, homogenized curriculum, etc.) year in and year out. We want our kids to have a well-rounded education, yet we, as a nation, have funding issues surrounding education year in and year out. We champion the charter school movement, yet we ignore the fact that many (but not all) of these schools are no better than their public counterparts year in and year out. We want better teachers, but we don’t make requirements for having “better students” and “better parents” year in and year out. On some level, we have not realized that our words don’t always match our actions or our reality.

It seems as if we “want learning but we don’t want learning”.

Chocolate covered lie: American education needs “reform”.

Well, They Could Be Right

You know what? Maybe there needs to be reform. With dropout rates that seem to be higher than they should and consistent issues happening with our students, maybe it is up to education to make the necessary changes [1]. Maybe we do need more inspirational teachers and innovative approaches. Plus, how would we look if we didn’t try to save all of our children [2]. In short, our nation deserves reform because everyone deserves a high quality of life.

But, There Is More of the Same

Let me say on record: I ABHOR the idea of “education saving people’s lives”. It is partially disabling and wholly stupid.

There, I said it. Don’t like it? Good. Disagree? Great. Education doesn’t save people. People save people.

Oh, and another thing: why are we always trying to “save people”? It seems like every approach to an educational problem deals with “someone saving someone else”. Do we really need to keep up this “Jesus Charade” that envelops everything happening nowadays? How about having people do what REALLY makes a difference: saving themselves? The biggest issue within all of this is that there is always “someone” that should be “saving everybody else”.

Congruently, our educational system is expected to unfairly “save lives”. Teachers are painstakingly asked to “give their all” as teaching jobs and salaries shrink while class sizes grow. Standardization of young minds is the new idea of “success within the curriculum”. More reform is needed because we just “aren’t doing enough”. In truth, if teachers aren’t willing to “throw on a cape” then they need not come close to stepping foot into a classroom.

Only problem with that is many throw on the cape just to learn they don’t have superpowers.

Many tried to push the charter movement to “save our failing students”, yet that didn’t manage to prove very fruitful. In 2009, The Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University, which tracks student performance in 25 states, noted that only 17 percent of charter schools provided a better education than traditional schools, and 37 percent actually offered children a worse education [3]. That would leave approximately 46% of those said schools doing the same as the other public schools. The ones that are successful, such as KIPP and Uncommon Schools, needed to be studied further to see what truthfully made their programs work [4]. Thus, the charter school movement isn’t (and probably never will be) the answer.

Then again, we still ignore one of the biggest factors in success and failure in this country: poverty. How can we honestly preach equality and equitable education when the U.S. has the highest poverty rate amongst wealthy nations at 22 percent [5]? Those more well off children enjoy the perks of a strong support system and non-academic experiences that provide wealthy learning examples. Meanwhile, our poorer students come to school unprepared, inattentive, and chronically absent [6]. Then again, poverty doesn’t always matter when you have a “will and a way”, right?

Oh, and by the way: high achieving countries like Finland and Denmark have a poverty rate of 5 percent [7]. You do the math.

The Skinny

If our educational system needs reform, then our nation itself needs reform. There are improvements needed to the present system; there is no doubt about it. However, the system is not built to “save lives”. Some of the previous reforms (standardized testing and charter schools) haven’t brought much. We say we want “education for all”, so we need to provide that promise or start confessing that we don’t plan on ever doing such a thing.

‘Nuff said and ‘Nuff respect.