To continue the discussion on education in the United States, I’ll discuss the curriculums in our public schools, which to a degree are failing the students.
Generally, the United States is viewed as a global superpower, with many people proclaiming that it’s the greatest country in the world. But as far as education is concerned, the US appears to be lagging behind in comparison to its peers. According to Business Insider, the United States currently ranks 27th in the world in education and healthcare. This includes a ranking of 38th in math scores and 24th in science scores. This is despite the fact that the US spent $640.0 billion in public Education in 2020. So, the question is why is the US behind as far as educating their students is concerned? And what can be done to correct this path and bring the US back to the top of the world, education wise.
Perhaps one reason for the US’s underperformance in education is the idea of federalism, which combines governing between a central government and regional governments (in the US’s case, state governments). This principle was outlined within the US constitution and gave certain powers to the central government, while leaving the rest to the individual states’ governments. One of the powers given to the states was education. So states were left to create their own curriculums, with standards that could vary from state to state. So, without these agreed upon standards, students can fail to attain a certain skill level in reading, writing, math, or science by a certain age, which would hamper their development, because the curriculum of that particular state didn’t support them.
Attempts have been made to standardize. The SAT and ACT tests, while used for college admissions, are standardized tests that are consistent throughout the country and verify that students have attained a certain level of proficiency in certain subjects before entering higher education. Of course, these tests have come under fire for a variety of reasons. For our purposes, the way that these tests fall short, though, is the fact that these tests are only meant for students who go to college. Since not all students end up going to college, they decide not to take these tests, so these tests can’t be used to verify how proficient these students are in school subjects. Additionally, these tests are only meant for high schoolers to take. They don’t verify whether students are on track or need some help in order to attain proficiency: rather, they tell students whether students are proficient or not when it’s too late for them to get back on track if they are indeed behind.
Perhaps the most famous example of curriculum standardization, though, is the Common Core. According to its website, “The Common Core is a set of high-quality academic standards in mathematics and English language arts,” which was started in 2009. As of 2022, 41 states and the District of Columbia have adopted these standards so far. In the context of the United States’s ranking in the rest of the world, the Common Core is an international benchmark.
Of course, there have been drawbacks to the implementation of the Common Core which has caused uproar and debate, while not immediately resulting in incredible educational strides. One of these drawbacks is the emphasis on standardized testing. Standardized testing in it of itself is a hot button issue, which was previously touched on in the discussion of the ACT and SAT. It puts students in high pressure situations and expects students to perform well. Some students are poor test takers, while others struggle with these high pressure scenarios, which could negatively impact students’ test scores, regardless of their proficiency in subjects.
Additionally, the Common Core is relatively new. Its implementation meant that established teachers had to change their methods of teaching. This affected their effectiveness, and actually caused many teachers to quit/retire because they couldn’t adapt. Obviously, when the country is already struggling to find qualified teachers, this doesn’t bode well.
Finally, the Common Core has a limited subject scope, as it only establishes standards for the Language Arts and Math. In this day and age, this seems to be more and more consequential. A lack of standardization of the sciences could enable more misinformation to circulate, as students might not be properly educated in subject matters pertaining to evolution, climate change, and immunology/vaccines. Similarly, a lack of standardization in history opens up the states to implementing a curriculum that corresponds to some specific interpretations of history, while leaving others behind. As I previously discussed in my first blog post, this fact has become a national debate, with Critical Race Theory the idea at the center of it. While it’s hard to say that there’s a ‘right’ interpretation of history, there are certain interpretations that are clearly biased towards a certain set of beliefs (whether it be political, religious, etc). The risk, of course, is indoctrination of students in different states to learn history in a specific way that could further divide people.
The Common Core is perhaps a solution to help the United States return to its position as a leader in education. Of course, we still have a ways to go before we can definitively see its affects. Since it only dates back to 2009, we are on the cusp of seeing the first generation of students who have spent their entire school lives in the Common Core curriculum. Furthermore, the first years of its implementation were rocky, so those students could’ve been the victims of poor execution on the administration’s part. Basically, it will take a little while before we’ll be able to see its full effects, see what’s working and what’s not.
Nevertheless, in such a politically charged climate with so many problems and so many potential solutions that are never implemented, it’s nice to see that we can look at this problem related to public education and actually say that a solution is in place. Whether or not it’s a long term solution is yet to be seen, but it’s at least a start, and if it works out, it could be a legitimately good step in the right direction for other problems as well.
I find it really hard to solve the problem of proper standardization in schools in the United States. Implementations like the Common Core and standardized tests have never appealed to me, but at the same time I don’t see any worthwhile way to measure how well a teaching method is unless it is measured on a baseline scale. Therefore, I do think it’s necessary for standardized methods like the Common Core, the SAT, and ACT solely due to there being no better alternative. With so much money, however, being spent on the education budget, I really want to know if there are better teaching methods applicable to high school level students. In a class I took last semester, we talked about the philosophy of education, and one of the general conclusions that was made was that philosophically, traditional teaching methods are poor because they essentially force people to learn material from the teacher rather than be left to discover material from the “world.” This has led to me questioning whether modern teaching techniques are really the best available, and I think there should be funding put towards testing how changes in the classroom environment could influence overall education. Nevertheless, I find standardization necessary, and I agree with what you said about Common Core being a step in the right direction. It shows the government is constantly working to improve its citizens, I just hope that it is the correct approach towards bettering the American education system.
I definitely agree that the federalization of education has an impact. In the least rude way possible, some states are just plain stupid compared to others. I don’t mean that in a political or moral way, I mean that in a pure education way. The average SAT scores, common core scores, reading level, literacy rate, etc. are all significantly lower in some states as compared to others which I think is a big issue. It makes it hard to imagine that all US citizens can participate in the civic life, or can help continue to let the US be the world leader that it is, if they aren’t all receiving the same level of standardized education (K-12). I also recognize that the SAT is contentious (particularly due to its dubious past that we have learned about) but I find myself of the camp that it is a pretty fair indicator to be used as far as college admissions go. Because, while yes, some people can use wealth to gain an advantage by taking classes, my experience on the test with minimal practice was just that you can get all the right answers simply by analyzing and breaking down the question (in other words I think they are a pretty good test of general intelligence). I do see the problem though that this is only for students who want to go to college. That is why I also agree with common core. A lot of my peers in high school would have disagreed, and a lot intentionally didn’t try on the exam, which was a shame because it caused the results to be inaccurate, but I do feel like we need a way to gauge our overall education level, because we certainly are falling behind. We used to be world leading innovators and inventing a lot of modern things and pushing boundaries, we aren’t really doing that as much anymore. I will never forget when a 6th grade student from China visiting my highschool was more proficient in Calculus than we were as 11th graders. It really showed that we are lagging behind, especially in things like math. Thanks for the insightful post.