The Pros And Cons Of US Education Reform

US education reform has centered on increasing accountability for student performance over the last 20 years. Despite these reforms, student achievement has stayed fairly static. The US primary and secondary school systems continue to produce an overwhelming number of sub-standard graduates, as well maintaining a significant percentage of dropouts.

Instead of changing course, education reforms have tended to “double down” on the same strategy. Reforms tend to blame prior reform failures on a programmatic problem, rather than a philosophical one. This has led to an increasing focus on competition between schools, tying funding to standardized scores, and a push to allow parent choice in their children’s school attendance. And yet, overall outcomes

Schools receive funding through federal, state, and local sources, and each type of funds have unique constraints (Paules, 2015). According to the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) the United States spent more than $621 billion on K-12 public education programs in 2011-2012 or $12,401 per public school student (Institute of Education Sciences, 2015). It’s apparent that the United States, with its towering $800 billion education budget, is treating the education system like a business investment. In The Atlantic article, “American Schools vs. the World: Expensive, Unequal, Bad at Math,” Julia Ryan reveals that the U.S. ranks among the top five nations in the world in educational spending per student. Ryan ascerts that the Slovak Republic spends $53,000 per student while the U.S. spends $115,000 per student (Ryan, 2013). The PISA report notes that, among OECD countries, “higher expenditure on education is not highly predictive of better mathematics scores in PISA.” (as cited by Ryan, 2013).

However, even though education is accessible to all, there still remains a state of inequity in academic achievement, as measured by the reform movement’s standardized tests. As Helen F. Ladd notes in her study the “Presidential Address: Education and Poverty: Confronting the Evidence, “Study after study has demonstrated that children from disadvantaged households perform less well in school on average than those from more advantaged households” (Ladd, 2012). NCES has identified many factors that contribute to low performance and the state of inequity within the national educational system. These differences can be broken down by demographics, participation, and levels of