Problems with American Education System

The American Education System provides an equal opportunity for all children in the United States to get a quality education. Although it is not completely uniform across the country, with every state making its own guidelines, everyone is still presented with a chance to attend a public school from kindergarten through twelfth grade. This enables all children with an education to advance further in life. For giving everyone that opportunity this system should be praised, but in the system it also has many flaws. The lack of proper funding for schools, retirement of many quality teachers, and the rise of Internet schools to name a few. But in the upcoming paragraphs I will focus mainly of the over emphasis on testing and how it affects the schools. Too much testing, and putting too much value into the tests has created a problem in which many teachers now strictly teach to the materials on the test, creating better scores, but decreasing overall knowledge.

Compared with many foreign countries, we perform worse on many subjects on the tests. This is for a number of reasons. One reason is that in some other countries, only the smarter children pass on from grade to grade. So for example in twelfth grade in one country, o

Also we separate our children into different levels of classes, this hurts the test scores as well because some students do not receive the same quality education as other because they are believed to be not as gifted as the students in the higher classes. Once you are placed into a lower level it is very hard to earn your way up into the "Honors" type classes. In the same regard if your not able to keep pace in the higher levels, it may be embarrassing to have to drop down a level.

A solution to this problem may be to just stop worrying about how we look as compared to the rest of the world. Yes, at certain levels we don’t score as well on tests, but that is for many different reasons besides teacher quality or intelligence of students. If the facts were available to everyone as to why we are not scoring as well maybe then they could realize teaching to the test to improve our scores is not helping anyone. In fact it is just hurting the students because it limits the overall knowledge they receive in school. Making the facts available to everyone may not be a realistic goal, and even if it is achieved it may not be totally successful. Many people would still just look at the overall scores, notice the U.S. is low again, and become angry and demand changes be made.

The problem of teaching to tests, and over emphasis on tests in general may get much worse if it is not corrected. Many people base achievement solely on number