When it comes to education standards in the United States, it is clear that reform is necessary. The country consistently falls short when compared to other countries around the world, and there are no reliable standards within the country; a high school education from Massachusetts is vastly different than one that a student in Kentucky would receive. States are intended to be the “laboratories” for new ideas to be tested, but I feel that the experimentation period has gone on for long enough and that it’s time for more uniform standards to be applied across the country in order to begin addressing the national education problem. I have been fortunate enough to attend public schools in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and California, and a private school in Singapore (which ranks 3rd on Pearson’s education index ranking, compared to the US’s 14th placing) which followed an American curriculum. All of these schools were very different from each other in terms of class size, teacher relationships, intensity, pace, and many other factors. While I don’t believe that there should ever be a national curriculum, I do feel that a more general set of common standards would benefit the nation, if implemented properly.
My feelings when it comes to standardized state tests have always been mixed. On the one hand, I have never personally been bothered by them. The material that they test has always seemed incredibly basic and hardly worth taking the time to do, but I’ve always had the vague sense that the scores will be important in some way due to the emphasis that schools and teachers always place on them. I have always been against using them as a standard to judge teachers and schools because I feel that it’s simply an unfair policy. At a younger age, many students are unused to the format of long, multiple choice tests, and score poorly as a result. As students get older and realize that standardized test scores can’t actually affect them in any way, they don’t prepare for the test and don’t try their hardest. The results end up having little to do with how well a teacher has taught the material and have more to do with how well the teacher can motivate the students to actually take the test. However, there must be some metric so that states can compare their students. The common core tests may be less tested than the current exams, but I don’t see how they could be much worse, and we’ll never accumulate data if we don’t actually implement them.