Public Education

"A world-class education is the single most important factor in determining not just whether our kids can compete for the best jobs but whether America can out-compete countries around the world.  America's business leaders understand that when it comes to education, we need to up our game. That's why we’re working together to put an outstanding education within reach for every child" - President Obama

Just as Bush did, President Obama has created a program to help fix our public school system.  The theory is that by giving money to the schools that develop the most innovative techniques for fixing our education system schools will become better because they will be forced to compete against each other.  I do not, however, think that this program will work.  I think that for our public schools to truly be fixed our government needs to be less involved with them instead of more involved.

Everyone knows that, compared to other developed countries, American students test lower then many other countries’ students.  Because of this fact, the federal government has concluded that American students must not be as smart as students from other countries.  This assumption does not make sense.  A student’s test scores only show how well they know the material the test is on, not how intelligent they truly are, so assuming that by bringing American students’ test scores up we will have more intelligent Americans is a naive idea.

Our education system does have many problems.  Every year hundreds of thousands of students head off to college unprepared for the work they will be given.  I think that this problem stems from the government’s increased involvement in trying to fix the educational system.   Teachers are told their students must know certain things by certain times and are given a specific curriculum to follow.  This does not give teachers the freedom they need to accommodate for individual students needs.  I think there needs to more focus on how to learn material, not just what to learn.  If a student knows how to study on her own and when to ask for help, then she can learn virtually anything.  The government’s focus, however, is not on how a student learns, but what they learn.  If the government was less involved with regulating public schools then teachers would have more freedom and would be able to teach their students how to learn, not just what to learn.  

Even though I think the government should be less involved in public education I know that it would be foolish to say the government should get completely out.  Public schools are funded by the government so it makes sense that the government would want to have some say in how they are run, but problems occur when the government gets too involved.  For our public education system to be fixed the government will have to realize that it’s increased involvement is actually hurting education, not helping it.  Unfortunately, the day the government realizes this is probably a long way off.