There is no denying that the education system of the United States of America has been failing more and more as we continue to slide in basically every educational ranking on a global level. As our children continue to suffer and not reach their true potentials, politicians have been arguing and trying to figure out ways to fix the issue. One of the attempts to combat our slow decline in educational standards was the No Child Left Behind policy that has failed in almost every aspect and which both sides of the political spectrum are looking forward to revise in 2015. However the issue with our system isn’t a federal one, it begins at a state level and repairs should start there.
While the once-proposed solution to our educational woes was focusing on increasing budgets and reducing the average class size, the numbers show that this approach is clearly flawed and that we’re missing something important. The US has 7,000 students drop out of high school every day and of those in prison, 65% dropped out of high school. The reason that we haven’t been able to change the path that we’re going down comes down a matter of attitude and the people who work at the schools that are currently failing. While there are obviously teachers and administrators who care and do fantastic jobs, there is clearly something toxic about the current attitudes of the educational establishment.
There are some simple and cost effective steps that can be taken to help turn the tide that is threatening to overwhelm us. The first is to simply improve the quality of our teachers by making it more difficult to become a teacher. Colleges with the lowest SAT scores are teaching schools and that’s completely unacceptable. Certification laws mean that education schools are able to certify who they want, regardless of skill or desire. This means that those best poised to become teachers don’t want to because of the low quality in peer and education. Improving leadership is also necessary, especially seeing as how the basics to become a school principal are about as low as those for becoming a teacher. If we are able to fix our system at the top and populate it with professional and caring teachers and officials, we will see a drastic change in dropout rates and the quality of student who graduates.
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