Educational System in the United States

Embark on a quest to dissect the U.S. education system, from its celebrated achievements on the global stage to its pressing issues at home. Join us as we navigate the labyrinth of policies, funding challenges, and student perspectives shaping the future of American education.

The U.S uses a tiered system of education, where students start in an elementary school, transition into a middle school, then move to a secondary school (high school), and finally reach a tertiary school (college). When looking up “Countries with best-ranked education system” on Google, you will find the United States is in either 1st or 2nd in every single report. However, when you dive deeper and do some digging, we discovered that in multiple other studies the United States did not rank so high. For example, “According to a Business Insider report in 2018, the U.S. ranked 38th in math scores and 24th in science”. One cause for the United States to fall behind in these could be inflation and lack of funding from the government. While different studies use different techniques for analysis and understanding how each study is done and what its results mean is crucial. A lot of studies do not look at elementary schooling but only at education at the college level, where the U.S tends to perform better. A final thing to note is that no one study is the best, some countries have better students taking exams, while others have a more diverse group, which can vary scores, as well as many other factors.

Pros

An excellent opinion that points out the best of the U.S. System is by author Justin Baeder in "Why U.S. Schools are Simply the Best". When looking at the United States, some pros that instantly draw attention is the availability of education to the masses. Students from around the country, even in very remote places almost all have access to free education for 13 years of their life. Along with a bus system, no need to purchase uniforms, and sometimes even lunch. Many other countries simply can not compete with this, and it is a tremendous benefit to the lower levels of the American educational system. As well, the United States offers excellent gateway classes at the high school level to provide students with a better opportunity while proceeding to higher education (college); offering more freedom to students to take courses that they find interesting and that will help prepare them better for college than other countries. Finally, the United States has incorporated societal problems into our system, where students get to learn about drug/alcohol abuse and event that are happening around the world at the time.

Cons

When looking at common problems with the U.S. education system, Mathew Lynch has an amazing article titled “18 Reasons the U.S. Education System is Failing”. One of the biggest drawbacks pointed out was that schools are overcrowded. Due to the openness of our system, it should not come as a shock that 14% of U.S. schools are overcrowded. Another large downside is the teachers’ lack of innovation. In other words, with technology has changed so much, students have been able to learn at a much younger age. In addition, we all have access to the information we need on the internet at any point in time; with this, teachers need to adjust the learning style, all the way from kindergarten to college. To speak to more of this issue in college, there have been many courses I have taken where I needed to use memorization to succeed. While to a certain degree it makes sense for students to memorize certain information, most of it was just useless as all of this information could be accessed at the tip of my fingertips with an electronic device. There have been professors and teachers adapting to this, making exams open-note, and so on, but this is a change every teacher should adopt. The final problem to point out is the lack of spending. School spending in the United States has become stagnant, regardless of the growing economy. A study showed that 34 states are spending less per student than they did during recession years. With that, states are responsible for 44% of total education funding, so this lack of financial backing for our students (K-12) will always create a rift in students’ education.

Other Countries Strategies

Other countries all have their unique strategies and cultures, yet many of them are outperforming the United States. So, why don’t we adopt what other countries are doing? To start, France has banned mobile phones after a” research conducted in England found that this may be a very good policy, as students who attended schools that had enforced a ban saw a significant increase in their grades, with this effect being even more pronounced for struggling students.” China, on the other hand, has been developing a “growth mindset”, where they implement significantly more practice problems for their students, which tends to leave them up to three years ahead in subjects compared to other countries. Finally, Marc Tucker has a very interesting article in which he pointed out that other countries outperforming the U.S. all have educational systems that “are coherent, in which each policy supports the other policies at every level of the system, from the classroom to the top of the ministry of education.” In the United States, our standards usually consist of comparing teachers’ performance to students’ test scores, and this system has failed. With this system in place, and teachers not having the “materials available to support what the students were supposed to learn, the teachers had never been taught to teach what their students were supposed to learn, and the way students progressed through the grades had not been redesigned against the targets specified by the standards, and no effort was made to reorganize the work of teachers so that they would have more time for students who would need additional help to reach the standards” These factors all get taken into more consideration in countries with this interconnected education system.

What Students Suggest

While there are many problems with the system, who better to ask for ways of improving than past and current students. Well "The New York Times” has an article with just that. To sum up some of the main points students should have less stress, learn more life-applicable lessons, have a better school environment, and a deemphasis on grades. While there are more suggestions, these stood out to me.

Conclusion

While the U.S. educational system is not perfect, it is not nearly as bad as some of the media make it out to be. A big part of this could be in politicians trying to push their agenda. However, there are a lot of places for improvement, and we should adopt strategies from other countries that are working well and adapting to the ever-changing environment of our technologically advancing world. It is interesting to see that students' suggestions are vastly different than what authors are writing, and that is something to consider. We should not ignore what students suggest as they are the ones on the inside experiencing the system as we discuss it from a bird's eye view. Deemphasizing grades can have a huge effect on lowering stress for students, which is at an all-time high for our younger generations. As well, adopting a new way of measuring students' progress in school and changing our teaching methods to put more focus on helping students individually so no one gets left behind or is left to keep up with a pace that is too quickly could lead to an increase in our testing scores. Overall, the U.S. has some work to do to refine this system, and it should be a priority for all of us so we can prepare the younger generations to continue advancing our world!

Ready to be part of the conversation about reshaping the U.S. education system for the better? Dive into the insights shared in this article and join the movement to advocate for positive change in our schools.