Education Reform

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Recommended: Education change and reform

I am entirely certain that twenty years from now we will look back at education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder how we could have tolerated anything so primitive. The pieces of the educational revolution are lying around unassembled."

- John W. Gardner, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, "No Easy Victories" (1968)

Sadly over 40 years later, the the educational revolution still hasn't taken off. The “pieces” are still lying around unassembled and the education in the schools is still tolerated. The need for change of public schools in the United States has been emerging since of the the passage of Pennsylvania's Common School Act in 1834. The Common School Act of 1834, set up a "general” system of education by common schools. People are continuously saying how children are the future and we must nurture them in order to ensure a bright future for our country. However, we are failing at a very basic level. The current education system in the United States is extremely poor. Drop-out rates for high school students continue to rise and student performance has been steadily declining. An article published in 1999 showed exactly how much of a crisis the American education system is really in. The article was written by William J. Bennett, former U.S. Secretary of Education, and it ranked high school seniors form 21 industrialized nations based on their performance in math, science, and advanced physics. American high school seniors ranked 19th in math, 16th in science and last in advanced physics.

Despite the push for education reform some thirty years ago, the American public education system has still not made adequate progress. The issue of education reform is a very complex issue with many di...

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...erican Education." Heartlander Magazine. 1 Oct. 1999. Web. 27 Feb. 2012. .

Liu, Goodwin. "Improving Title I Funding Equity Across States, Districts, and Schools." Iowa Law Review, 2008. Web. 20 Feb. 2012.

Reardon, Sean F. "The Widening Academic Achievement Gap between the Rich and the Poor: New Evidence and Possible Explanations."Center for Education Policy Analysis at Stanford University. Stanford University, 2011. Web. 27 Feb. 2012. .

Whitehurst, Grover J. "Don't Forget Curriculum."- Brookings Institution. The Brookings Institution, Oct. 2009. Web. 27 Feb. 2012.

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As noted by the graph our standings in education is below average, especially with African Americans and Hispanic children compared to other states. If this is the outcome in elementary school what should we expect by grade 8. With all of the various reforms enacted throughout the 30 years the curriculum in public schools did not improve nor did our standing compared to the rest of the world. Even though in each presidency monitoring tool was developed to ascertain the level of learning based on the test. In states where students passing their test equated to more funding of the school as well as the school remains open, jobs for the educators. So oppose to teaching students the information needed educators taught to the test. This is due to politicians not addressing the core issues that prevent children in low social economic status of of color due to cultural biases. Then there is the political climate of education including ignorance towards the benefit of vocational schools and real world learning.
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Education reform in the United States has recently come under scrutiny after many recent failed proposals. President George W. Bush implemented one of the most popular choices of education reform with his “No Child Left Behind” system. However, that policy reform in the past five years has faded to nothing more than a mistake. This mistake has haunted the education systems in America, but it is not the only reform proposal to shake up the school systems across the States. One new proposal that has caught the eye of some current state politicians is the idea of school choice. School choice is giving the option to parents to take their children to different schools, which is different from assigning children to schools based on the location of their houses. Does giving the parents of children an option to choose what school their child goes to create a spirit of competition? That is partly the goal with the school choice reform policy proposal along with many other facets that can completely revitalize the education system in the United States. The stipulations of this proposal involve a variety of suggestions to help strengthen the core of our education system.
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Pros and Cons of Public Education
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Many people think public school can dip their hands into the public treasury for funding if they are ever in need of money; however many schools do not qualify to get these funds. “The disparate funding for public schools and between states and within metropolitan areas has turned some public schools into meccas for affluent students and others into decaying infrastructures with overcrowded classrooms and soaring drop-out rates” (PBS). People who attend the schools that cannot get their hands on the funds fall behind from those who attend highly funded schools. If a school is underfunded students are less enthusiastic since they have inferior supplies and run down building. It is unfair to people to have less opportunity simply because they live in a low income community. These individuals have difficulty leaving the low income neighborhoods due to lack of opportunities and struggle to give their children a better life. those same people often continue to live in one even as they raise their own children plaguing them to the same fate. Underfunded schools exhibit a classic e...
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The reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB, 2011) has made increasing student achievement and reducing inconsistencies in the dissemination of teacher qualifications a national priority (Guarino, Brown, & Wyse, 2011). Classic fixed salary schedules that consider only a teacher’s education and years of experience have been popular since the 1920’s (Koppich, 2005). This traditional system was developed to counter gender and racial discrimination that was allowed at the time by more unrestricted systems (Dee & Keys, 2004). Claims were made that the prevailing system created salary equity between elementary teachers, most of whom were women, and secondary teachers, most of whom were men (Koppich, 2005). Even though this compensation structure has failed to acknowledge that some teaching jobs are harder than others and require more skills, the straightforward standard salary schedule has prevailed in thousands of schools and districts across the country (Koppich, 2005). There was a burst of merit pay activity in the early 1980s. Twenty-nine states had initiated some sort of merit pay program for teachers by 1986. Since then, however, almost all of them have been diluted or discontinued (Dee & Keys, 2004). While the idea of merit pay for classroom teachers has been around for several decades, lately a resurgence of interest has surfaced in a growing number of districts around the country. This may be attributed to a perceived correlation between student achievement and teacher merit pay, and the recent increased funding level for the federal Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF). The TIF program, which is run through the United States Department of Education (USDOE), pr...
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Education Reform

The Common School Case Study

Educational Inequality

The American Education