Education Reform Dbq

Since the beginning of the first education reformation, there has always been criticism on how education should be provided and taught. Throughout time, different countries have made reformations to provide better educations to their people. These examples range from creating a better school system, to providing free education in elementary and secondary school. Education reform is not over as it is still an ongoing process in the making that may never end. Education reform first started to happen in ancient Greece with Socrates, Plato and other great Greek scholars. They studied the “how’s” and “why’s” of life. They also believed in creating a better education system for the common people. It went so far as Socrates creating the first university

For example, two years after NCLB was put into law, North Carolina had 9 schools in the state that needed some levels of improvement. 5 years later, that number rose to 521 schools (Turner). This was due to low performing schools not able to provide a so called “quality education” by the states. When an underperforming school didn’t meet the state’s requirements, they were given sanctions and were told to fix their problems or more consequences will follow. The problem was that schools were not given more money to fix their sanctions so they were left to start to cut programs. If schools still didn’t fix their sanctions, the state would tell the school to go tell their students to start looking to transfer to another school in the district. Lastly, if schools still didn’t meet their sanctions, they were then forced to shut down the school. Schools got overwhelmed with stacks and stacks of sanctions. The problem was that rich districts could afford to fix every problem while poor districts were forced to cut programs to gain more money and struggle to provide an “equal and quality” education for their students (Turner). Schools were now left on their own to fix their sanctions without government

There are shocking comparisons on how they educated their students compared to South Korea. Finnish students get less than half an hour of homework a night as long with no school uniforms, honor societies, valedictorians, tardy bells, classes for the extra ordinary students, or standardized tests. These kids don’t even start school until they are seven yet they have the smartest kids at 15 compared to all other students in the world (Gamerman). So how does Finland rank so high in education? Like Americans, Finnish kids also are one of the top countries to waste hours throughout the day but are still on track to being the world’s most productive workers. What Finland does is quite remarkable. They create well trained teachers and teach children responsibility at a young age instead of putting kids in schools. Since children don’t go to school until they are seven, their parents educated their kids how to be responsible young adults. Once the children start school, they are equally trained by teachers. There are no students who finish first instead they focus on the weaker students to catch up than concentrating on the more advance students in getting further ahead