Why Are Curriculum Should Be Harder

Why Are Curriculum Should be Harder America’s education is on a down fall. It seems like every year we drop a little more on the world wide rankings. The United States education system is not as competitive around the world as it used to. America is focusing too much on the upper class and not enough on the middle to lower class. The United States is currently ranked around 25th in math, 17th in science, 14th in reading, and 17th overall. But a recently released study by Martin Carnoy, professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, and his research partner, Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute, argues that this assessment might be too harsh and that, in fact, international education ranking reports misinterpret the
United States’ global ranking. According to the study’s findings, a re-estimate would improve the United States’ place in the ranking of all Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries from 14th to 4th in reading and 25th to 10th in math based on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) test administered in 2011.
The tests also show that the United States has had a greater improvement in both math and reading than the top-scoring countries, such as Finland, Korea, and Canada.
Rebecca Strauss, associate director for CFR’s Renewing America publications, wrote “The real scourge of the U.S. education system — and its greatest competitive weakness — is the deep and growing achievement gap between socioeconomic groups that begins early and lasts through a student’s academic career, and while America does spend plenty on education, it funnels a disproportionate share into educating wealthier students, worsening that gap,” All this does is allows rich kids to higher education through expensive private schools and forces the middle to lower class people into public schools where the standards of education are low but on the rise. This
also forces the kids in poverty into whatever the cheapest school is around and it’s usually the worst school around, whose standards are the bare minimum a state requires. This means unless your family is rich you won’t be receiving the best education in America, but if your family is rich America’s education system has it set up to where you will receive all the help you need to succeed. According to a report done by the Council of Foreign Relations, the United States has slipped 10 spots in both high school and college graduation rates in the past three decades. The gap is in part due to the majority of developed countries investing more resources per pupil in lower-income school districts than in higher-income ones. Other countries are spending more money improving the education for the poor instead of for the rich. The CFR reports that although the Obama administration “has worked to reform and improve federal programs that serve low-income students, some of the biggest changes in federal funding priorities favor wealthy students who need the least help.” Which means even though the government is trying to help “change” the education for the lower class, they are still spending way too much time on the wealthy, who need the least amount of help.
Now how do you think Ada ranks versus all the other schools in Ohio? Top 20? Top 50? Try barely in the top 100! A study done by The US news ranked 21,000 high schools in all 50 of the states and the District of Columbia. If you do Ohio school by ranking Ada ranks 95 in the state! How do some of the school around us rank? Columbus Grove is ranked number 20 in Ohio (502 in the nation), Shawnee is ranked 38th in Ohio (914 nationally), and Kalida is ranked 60th (1249 nationally). We got ranked 95th in the state and 1706 nationally which was enough to get us ranked with a silver medal for best education in the nation. In the nation our school was ranked the 1706 best school; that means there are over 1700 schools out in the US alone that are more prepared for college and a career than us. Do you like knowing that there are 1705 better schools in the US than Ada, because I don’t. I want the best education that there is for me which is why we should raise the high school curriculum.
College wise our rankings are misleading because worldwide we have the best colleges in the world.
A study done by Times Higher Thinking (THE World University Rankings) did a study of the best 400 colleges. Out of the top 26 colleges we have 20 of the 26 best colleges. The best college in the world in California Institute of Technology, then tied for second was Stanford and Oxford (UK), 4th is Harvard, 5th is Mass. Institute of Tech., 6th Princeton, 7th is Cambridge (UK), 8th is Impereal college of London (UK), 9th is California, Berkley, 10th is Chicago, 11th is Yale, 12th is ETH Zurich – Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (Switzerland), 13th is UCLA, 14th is Columbia, 15th is Pennsylvania, 16th is Johns Hopkins, 17th University College London (UK), 18th Cornell, 19th Northwestern, the 20th best college in the world is the University of Michigan, the 21st is Toronto (Canada), the 22nd is Carnegie Mellon, the 23rd is Duke University, the 24 is Washington, and tied for 25th are Georgia Tech and the University of Austin Texas. If you look at it collegiately the US is ranked number one but since other countries have great elementary programs and high school programs they don’t need college to be successful. Other countries which advanced high schools will send their academically gifted students to the US or to the UK for college or even Switzerland. Our colleges are in fact the top colleges in the world but our current high school education doesn’t prepare us for
these difficult colleges.
All America has to do is raise the curriculum for high school students and grade school students. Other countries begin learning more advanced stuff than we do earlier so they are more prepared for college and finding a career, so all we have to do is start learning more, earlier. The top countries like Korea aren’t improving their test scores by much or at all while we show a huge gain and which today’s technology and if we advance our curriculum I believe that one day we will be able to out perform these other countries.