Personal Narrative: Improving Public Education

It’s no secret that American education is of very low quality. As a victim of public schooling, I have been observing my environment for as long as I can remember. Through my observations and the fact that I’ve been exposed to new ideas, I have formulated ideas that could drastically improve public education, and thus our future. These ideas are as follows: use the same standards, stop using standardized tests for punishment, begin letting students fail, and use more standardized tests. By holding all students accountable with the same standards, they will eventually be better students. Sometimes, life is too easy because someone makes it too easy. Some teachers will give out A’s like candy, and others are stingy when it comes to passing

Scott Barry Kaufman, author of American Education and The IQ Test, says that when it comes to testing, “You're either gifted or you're not, for the rest of your life,” even though “‘human potential’ is a moving target.” My solution is to let students decide which classes they have, so they can prove themselves to be excellent students. In my school, those who wish to take AP courses are free to do so, despite previous test scores from state testing. Another argument is made by Bronwyn T Williams, who in Standardized Students: The Problems with Writing for Test instead of People mentions how standardized tests don’t always accurately measure how well a student does in school. He uses his twin boys as an example, stating that, “One son excels at taking standardized tests of all kinds by understanding the rhetorical structure of the questions and the institutional demands of the exam. The other, though in some ways a more powerful writer and just as strong a student in school, has always found standardized tests rigid and bewildering.” However, he also mentions that “standardized tests can be ‘gamed,’” meaning you can learn how the test is written in order to pass the test. I know from taking practice ACT exams that it takes effort to pass. So much in fact, that I believe that the tests do effectively see how well you can study for something. I’ve also noticed that most people who don’t do well for tests don’t study for them, leading them to have low scores, further proving that standardized tests test how much a student