Crisis in School

Most Americans have always been passionately devoted to education. The current national panic over our plummeting learning scores is only the latest sign of this devotion and is remarkably similar to the panics over education crises that have occurred throughout U.S. history. Unfortunately, almost all of the politicians and so-called education “expert” rushing forward to solve this latest education crisis seem to have forgotten the simplest facts about the early history of American education, which enabled this country to produce far more than its share of the world’s most creative thinkers.
A hundred years ago, eight and a half per cent of American seventeen-year-olds had a high-school degree, and two per cent of twenty-three-year-olds had a college degree. Now, on any given weekday morning, you will find something like every 26 seconds a American kid dropping out of school, according to the world known New York Times columnist Bob Herbert on his article “ Clueless in America by
Herbert.”
Education is nowhere mentioned in the American Constitution, However; the creations of the world’s first system of universal public education—from kindergarten through high school—were born in America over the years. The system—which is one of the world’s most ethnically diverse and decentralized—is, as a whole, succeeding. Local school districts must find a way to compete in the market place to attract and retain the very best people to teach our children or they will soon be unable to staff their classrooms. Of course, not all American schools are failing. Many are very successful…but they are independent of the government. “America’s public schools were once the best in the world.” Although many parents believe their children are receiving a quality education, the reality is that elementary and secondary school curricula have been vastly dumbed down. Now even our best students rank below those in other countries. Work also needs to be done on the level of scheduling the day. Imagine that you are not familiar with any particular method for structuring a school day. Keeping in mind that a school should be a community that truly fosters the intellectual development of the students, how should you structure the average day? Is it prudent to divide the day into approximately seven discrete periods and assign each student to go from class to class during this time and work with the same teachers day after day in this manner? This seems to be more like a factory than a school.
The challenge before us is how to move forward from our current position. America need to reclaim an authentic vision of education, and we need to do so for our culture and from where we currently stand in our culture. One solution is to turn to home schooling. This is an important option that has worked well for many. Beyond this, however, I am optimistic that much good can be done on the level of schools as well. What is essential is that schools become less process-oriented.
Here’s a fact that may not surprise you: the children of the rich perform better in school, on average, than children from middle-class or poor families. Students growing up in richer families have better grades and higher standardized test scores, on average, than poorer students; they also have higher rates of participation in extracurricular activities and school leadership positions, higher graduation rates and higher rates of college enrollment and completion. According to the New York Times article “No Rich Child Left Behind by Sean F. Reardon.”
Maybe we should take a lesson from the rich and invest much more heavily as a society in our children’s educational opportunities from the day they are born.
There is no blame and finger pointing in this article. It's stating facts and those facts are that we are becoming a society in which the economic class you are born in has become a very big factor in determining how you do later on in life. We live in a country where money and connections are helping those who do not need the help while people who do need assistance are paying too high a price for it in interest on student loans, lack of time for family, increased stress because of economic insecurity.

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/ http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2010/09/27/100927taco_talk_lemann http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=132376&page=1 http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=132376&page=1 http://www.heights.edu/reflections/the-real-reason-behind-the-modern-educational-crisis/