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.
Hey Tyler!
Wow, this actually seems like a really cool deliberation event to attend! I would argue that it’s almost a commonplace that the education system has some major flaws, but the disagreements come in with how to fix these flaws. One of the main problems that comes in when discussing how to fix these flaws, however, is the unequal funding that schools receive. Schools in poorer areas will likely have less funding, and the children living in the area could receive a lower quality education as a result. On the flip side, schools in higher-income communities will be well funded (in general) by taxpayer dollars, and thus changes can be more easily made to the school system to help the students.
All in all, this seems like a great event that I would’ve enjoyed; I should’ve attended!
Hey Tyler!
This sounds like an extremely interesting deliberation nation to attend. The education system in America certainly needs reform, so its good that a group of people wanted to discuss it. There is way too much of a focus on test scores that in general have a hard time proving intelligence. And because schools get more funding if their test scores are higher, schools in poorer areas tend to be trapped in a bad education system. It’s a system that clearly needs reform. I’m glad to hear that the approaches were set up well, and a consensus was reached. I agree with you though, it will take a lot of time before the education system can finally be fixed.
Great post!