Monthly Archives: March 2016

Issue Brief: Reforming the Current STEM Educational System

In my issue brief topic I will be looking at the current system for STEM education primarily at the pre-collegiate level. Currently, STEM related subjects are taught in a way that don’t teach students skills that they will use on an everyday basis and are often disregarded if students do not continuing in a STEM related field.

 

I will frame the issue by posing that our current society has taken a form in which the most prosperous and powerful nations are the ones that are able to embrace and further science and technology. The world has grown to become dependent on science and technology, yet almost no one knows anything about these crucial areas of knowledge. Our politicians are making vital decisions based on funding and regulations, although most of them don’t have any more than a baseline scientific knowledge. If this continues as we begin to exponentially expand the boundaries of these fields and uncover new possibilities, it could potentially be very damaging to our country. I agree with these claims and also feel like the current educational system is not focussing on underlying critical thinking principles of STEM related subjects that are often lost by many disinterested students.

 

The policy actors that I will be addressing will primarily be the groups responsible for education in the United States. Additional policy makers that I am debating including are network providers who may be able to produce short televisions series based on STEM subjects which recently have been successful in reaching a wider audience by provide information in an accessible and entertaining manner.

 

Tentative Thesis: The current STEM related curriculum of the pre-collegiate educational system  in the United States is not efficient at providing citizens with a sufficient working knowledge of science and technology that is crucial in today’s age, and should be reformed in order to emphasize its importance, critical thinking skills, and relevant knowledge so that citizens can make educated decisions.

 

 

Deliberation Nation Reflection

I attended the deliberation titled “The Dilemma of K-12 Education: Flaws, reform, and the future of America”. During this deliberation, the current educational system was looked at and analyzed in order to determine if there are flaws in the current system, and if there were possible solutions to current issues. This topic began to resonate with me after it was framed as I had not put much thought into the organization of the current pre-collegiate educational system prior to the deliberation.

 

The approaches were well set up and did a good job addressing the current issues and possible solutions to them. They involved career preparation, individuality, and equal opportunity. I found that the individuality and equal opportunity approaches struck more with me as well as most of the other deliberators. The big issues that were examined in detail were that the current educational system is focused too much on teaching in order to test students and that currently there is a large disparity in educational quality related to income.

 

The general consensus that was made by the deliberators was that schools are currently teaching in a manner that is not most effective to learning due to desiring more funds from standardized tests. In order to possibly fix this we agreed that the teaching style could be changed in order to emphasize personal problem solving and critical thinking skills rather than standardized test preparation. Additionally, there should be more of an effort to ensure equal funding to all schools, rather than prioritizing schools with higher standardized tests scores.

 

At the end of the deliberation I felt that we had addressed some very important issues facing our country today and had reached a sufficiently efficient consensus. However, I personally feel as if revamping the current educational system would be very difficult to achieve and would take a lot of time in order to be successfully executed.