Teachers and Chalkboards: What Is Really Wrong with American Education

Introduction

I’m probably the least qualified to write about American public education. I have never been an American public school student. I have never darkened the door of an American public school as a student. Most of my formal education experience took place early in elementary in the private school setting and then, as a college student is thrown into a public college.

Education is one of the most hotly debated policy questions at any given moment in this country. The debate is not always national either. It often occurs at school boards and Parent-Teacher Association meetings at a local level. Every time the state moves to change curriculum again or change how education is conducted, the eternal debate about education begins again in this country.

This is an area, of all areas, that I feel this country should be able to get right. The US boasts world-class research institutions that have shaped our modern world. We have taken waves of immigrants and created a nation of incredibly innovative, creative, and dynamic people through our education system. In the United States, this is done without the selective tracking of the European model. Students go into schools and find their way through the system for their success. Despite the lack of support, many still survive and even thrive in this sink or swim system.

However, the system has a few flaws, and I’ve observed the outcomes of our strategy as I’ve talked to people. What I have noticed is that for some students, a great teacher can make all the difference; however, for many students, no matter how good the teaching, they still manage to fall through the cracks. Due to their circumstances, these are people who can’t easily transition into adulthood productively. For most of this nation’s history, that wasn’t a problem. The wealthy had their options, and everyone simply went to work. Education through adolescence was not expected until the early 20th Century.

After World War II, once you completed high school, if you did, you could simply get a factory job and learn on the job. The need for a post-secondary education was not prominent. Students could have a lousy education and still do very well in life. Now, if a student has a poor education, it can be an economic and emotional death sentence. The jobs available for high school graduates are fewer and fewer, and the pay is notoriously low.

As with most things in America, the problem is uniquely economic. These problems even hit those who go to college. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities found that 46 states spent an average of 18% less per student on public higher education in the 2015-16 school year than before the recession of 2008.

The Great Recession has torn open the problems within the education system, but ten years on, little has been done to solve these problems, and the debate about how to “fix America’s schools” is not a new one. My hope is that, as an impartial observer, I can help frame our education debate in such a way that we can understand it first in contact but also understand the reality of the problems we face in education and how to make the education system work for all.

When approaching this topic, there were a few obvious questions. What is the job of education? Why is education important? How do we fix American education that seems to be failing and riddled with scandal?

The Problem

Education is a gnarled root of problems. When anyone approaches education, you see various issues and ideas about fixing it. Funding is the most important topic discussed in the research. Most schools are funded through property taxes; the better the neighborhood, the more funding schools get. The reverse of that is also true; poor areas with lower taxes tend to have worse schools and worse outcomes.

Teachers and teacher unions are also a hot topic of discussion. Teachers ‘ unions are the most prominent organizations that affect education as a solid group. When teachers’ unions come out against changes, the evolution of education can come to a halt. Indeed, from the beginning of the education system, teachers have been a contentious subject.

The United States expects much from its schools, which has been the case for decades. Parents and communities expect schools to turn unruly children into functional adults. In the post-Recession economy, this has taken the manifestation of asking schools to teach students “real skills.” There are memes on Facebook asking why people had to take Algebra 2 but never a class on buying car insurance or doing your taxes. Popular entrepreneurs attack the education system as a place that suppresses creative ideas, forces people into things they don’t care about, and turns people into drones for corporations.

Others, including employers, complain that schools don’t give them functional employees and that businesses should be able to dictate what schools teach so that they can access a better workforce. Employers use this excuse to import H1-B workers or ship jobs overseas. This continues despite our low labor participation rate.

Then there is the problem of accountability. How do we measure student success? How do we measure teachers? How do we create results that “look good?” The pile-on continues with the ancillary problems like graduation rates, college success rates, and serving all students, especially those with special needs or from minority backgrounds.

We expect schools to handle all of these things perfectly well. We expect schools to turn out good citizens, good workers, and socially adjusted people. Schools are social laboratories. Children learn important social lessons in school with their peers.

One of the most interesting reports about education, the Coleman Report, said that not only do the students’ home and neighborhood affect them far more than school, but he started from a personal standpoint. He realized that the school did not care about boys like him. He felt that the focus on athletics and the social triumph of jocks, cheerleaders, and the “popular crowd” made him disinterested in learning.

That also leads to the problem of race and class. Although Brown v Board of Education in 1954 forced the integration of schools throughout the country, schools remained fairly segregated. Despite bussing policies, where students were moved around the area to force more diverse schools, parents still tended to live in neighborhoods where people looked and thought like them. That meant the neighborhood schools also reflected that reality. Rather than deal with bussing, white parents fled to whiter school districts. This means that most students are likely to go to schools where the student body, at least the majority of it, comes from the same background as they do.

The drive to make schools more diverse has been mainly for naught. People self-segregated, and parents avoided districts where bussing took place. The Supreme Court was fine with this system because it was de Facto, not de Jure, which is simply legal terminology for being “of fact” and not “of law.” As long as schools weren’t legislated to be segregated, the courts gave those districts and those parents a pass.

The main problem with education is that schools are at the forefront of society’s problems. The best and worst of these problems are in our schools, from income inequality to race relations. Schools should be melting pots that help everyone conform to American society. During the great waves of immigration, schools were tasked to take the children of these immigrants and turn them into Americans that express the Anglo-Saxon, protestant values on which this country has been based.

From driving a car to cooking skills and employment, the education system is responsible for many more things than education. If students don’t go to school in Chicago and other poor districts, they often will not get breakfast or lunch. Schools are more social service centers than anything else. For children from abusive homes, the abuse will often be reported by a school official or teacher.

The problems with education are intrinsically social. American schools perform fairly well on a state-by-state level regarding teaching. Some states, like Massachusetts, even perform up to European standards on global exams.

One of the hurdles to solving education, I noticed, is the constant focus on the cost to society. We want to be successful and to do well with our education. Most everyone wants to feel like they have value and that they have worth. What about being happy? What about school-life balance? What about the hours of homework? To fix education, we have to fix much bigger problems. The problem with education isn’t the actual teaching; it is our society.

School Funding

Most school funding is raised at the local level, usually through property taxes. Counties then distribute property taxes to various taxation districts once it is collected. Although the focus on funding happens at a federal level, the federal government only spent $69.4 billion in FY 2017. That’s about $138.8 million per state. The federal government also funds higher education through the Pell Grant Program and federally backed student loans. There is some direct funding for colleges and universities and state funding. This ends up being a patchwork of funding models for a national problem.

For K-12, this means that it’s up to local authorities to find ways to increase spending and means that poorer areas usually have less funded schools and worse schools as a result. If there is one thing about the American model that is broken, it is the funding model. However, more federal control has been repudiated in the courts. In McInnis

v. Shapiro, Federal courts found that the court could not decide what students needed; that was a job for local school boards and educators who could better tell what students required as long as the education was racially integrated. American education has a tradition of local control that extends back to its earliest days. However, this has led to varied outcomes based on the student’s zip code. How much a state or school district can fund education determines how successful students may or may not be in school and ultimately throughout their lives. There are 13,506 school districts and 178 state-dependent school systems in the United States. Each district has its funding model, policies, and right to control curricula. This also means that there are 13,734 possible outcomes for education. What kind of education a student might receive is simply lack of residence.

The federal government has some leverage. Using these federal dollars, the federal government can set requirements for schools to receive those dollars. There are some high-profile examples of this, like Title IX requirements and the integration of schools. However, those programs had to be passed state by state regarding common curriculum standards, like Common Core. Some states who passed Common Core as a new curriculum standard have left it like Indiana.

The local funding model is inherently unfair and needs to be changed. This also extends to local control over the curriculum. Different states allow different things to be taught, like Kansas allowing the Christian creation myth to be taught in schools alongside evolution. To get better outcomes and better funding for schools with much less waste, the funding model must be repaired, and minimum standards must be set.

In the Beginning, There Was a One Room Schoolhouse

The way we know it now, public education is a uniquely modern phenomenon. The system we use now is primarily Prussian. The system of classrooms and bells and moving students around to different teachers all came about in the 19th Century. However, that was a progressive accomplishment of its day. Before that, education was only available to a few. In the United States, the first schools were set up in the 16th Century and wouldn’t become widely adopted until the 19th Century. By the 20th century, public schooling was common, and with the end of child labor, schooling became compulsory throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s. By WWII, most children attended school from age 5-18. Rural areas tended to be the last to adopt these compulsory schooling policies. Education of nearly everyone is a hallmark of modern living.

18th Century

Outside of New England, education in this country was spotty at best. Schools were organized by parents who would hire a teacher or tutors for their children. Consequently, education was something only available to the middle and upper classes. Sometimes, communities would organize a school and hire a teacher to come in and teach their children. However, many communities objected to using public funds for education, and some communities resisted the move to publicly funded education. Massachusetts was the first state to mandate education at the state level. As a result, literacy rates were low. Often, even voting required a test or even a poll tax (later made unconstitutional) to exercise the right to participate in democracy. This meant that poor communities were simply excluded from society for not being able to afford education.

19th Century

One major innovation of the 19th Century education was uniquely feminist. Catherine Beecher and Horace Mann, through their shared love of education and a desire to improve the growing nation through education, created some of the first teacher training schools. Catherine Beecher promoted education as a pathway to make America better and improve the overall morality of the country. These early educators believed that an educated populace would be a moral populace.

Most importantly, she created schools meant to educate women to become teachers. She helped make it acceptable for middle-class women to become teachers, and her teachers went out West to where the country was expanding to teach children how to read, write, and do basic math. This allowed women to access education beyond basic reading, writing, and math themselves. Before this, women-only learned what could be described as an 8th-grade education if they studied at all. Women were shut out of studying serious subjects alongside men. In the middle of the century, due to feminist activists like Beecher, some colleges started experimenting with co-education allowing women to study alongside men. Soon, women would study serious subjects like chemistry, physics, and other hard sciences.

The school year was shorter for children, with about 100 days of instruction. Schools would open for certain times of the year, and children would attend. Attendance was not compulsory in most states, Massachusetts being an exception to that rule. United States education was local, grounded in self-rule, and locally controlled.

Education was usually taught with “readers.” These small books would be an amalgamation of subjects in linear order throughout the book. Each section would have a passage to be learned and some exercises to cement the concepts. Students would study to learn various topics, especially reading and writing. The popular McGuffy Reader sold 122 million copies. Although many schools used these popular readers, several others did not, and schools were free to choose whatever curriculum they wanted to use. This is still the case at the state level throughout the United States.

By the end of the 19th Century, education became more common for more people. This was also tied to the country’s industrialization and people moving from farms to cities. The increase in wages allowed people to send their children to school. Education was primarily vocational for the working class. Children would learn basic skills that would serve them well in the community. It was presumed that most working-class children would not go to college, despite the rise of land-grant colleges that Congress instituted in the middle of the century. These schools also became an important institution for assimilating new immigrants. This period also saw the rise of catholic schools as most public schools, such as they were, tended to be protestant and teach protestant values. Catholic schools started in New York City and expanded throughout the country. Catholic colleges like Notre Dame were also founded so that children of catholic immigrants could enjoy education more in line with their religious values. However, universal education was still a few decades away.

20th Century

The 20th Century brought more changes. Schools became less local and were organized into large school districts. Education through high school became compulsory after World War II, and state standards set the curriculum. Schools were organized into relatively large districts, and there was central control by school boards and school superintendents. This opposed very local control that dominated the earlier part of the century. Progressive reformers saw the better organization as a way to

Put the experts in charge of education rather than letting local officials hire whomever they wanted for education, including people in the town who were not teachers, not certified in teaching, and may have only had a regular college education. This started the separation of teaching and education as a profession, something to be studied and learned formally rather than by ad-hoc training in schools. President Kennedy poured money into education, especially after the launch of Sputnik. For many people, this was a sign that America was falling behind in the space race and that the Soviets were out running Americans. Money poured into schools to raise a generation that would outpace their Soviet counterparts. The quality of education remained high, and education was not a significant policy area for most governments until the latter portion of the century.

A Nation at Risk

In 1983, President Reagan’s Commission on Excellence in Education produced an influential report called A Nation At Risk. While often maligned for not being circumspect in its view of education, this report still has parts that are true 35 years later. The year 1983 was a difficult time for the country. The economy had taken a nosedive globally. Factories were closing, people were unemployed, and then this education report announced that unless changes were made, the economic difficulties would continue well into the future. The report is still prescient today. It complained that students were not prepared for the jobs of tomorrow. By 1983, it was clear that computers were on the way and would be taking a larger role in the economy. The report looked at SAT test scores and reported that they were going down. The report did not mention that college had gotten much more common, and the average was going down because more people from diverse backgrounds were taking the test. Despite the dubious nature of its findings, it catapulted education into the national conversation and reinforced the broken school narrative. However, the upside was that education had become a national political issue from the White House to local elections.

21st Century

The 21st century has seen the controversy of education continue in the 20 brief years since 2000. 2 pieces of legislation have dominated the discussion on education in the 21st century and a recognition of the failures of the American education system, especially for children from poor backgrounds. The 21st century has seen the popularity of charter schools see progress and a host of online education options enter into the conversation about education.

No Child Left Behind

No Child Left Behind resulted from the rewrite of a 1965 law, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The ESSA was the first national education law and funding program and would later lead to the creation of the Department of Education. George

W. Bush decided to rewrite the law to take a strict guy approach. The standards were stark. Schools that received Title I Federal dollars were graded on student performance every year. Schools that did not make the “Adequate Yearly Progress” standard had to be fixed or closed.

The goal was ambitious. NCLB sought to get all students to their age-appropriate reading and math grade level by 2014. This meant that all 5th graders throughout the nation should be reading at the 5th-grade level. It held all schools and all students to one standard on one timeline. It did not matter where the students were or how much they improved; the point was that if they were not meeting the set standard, then they were failing, and the school was eligible for sanctions.

Schools had six years to fix the problem before they were closed or reopened as a Charter. The law was viewed as a sledgehammer of sorts. NCLB was also incredibly data-driven and test-based. If some of the students were not doing well, the whole school was considered underperforming. This might seem like a good idea at first. If the school could not serve its lowest-performing students, shouldn’t that be a problem worth addressing?

It is a problem worth addressing. However, the schools least able to solve the problem were swamped by the increasing pressure. After two years of underperformance, schools had to offer the students a right to move to a different school, leaving the school with the same problems as before with no better solutions or ways to solve the actual issues of that school. As the sanctions built up, ultimately, restructuring was the final blow. Principals and other administration would be fired or moved to make a big change. According to an NPR article, the “lobotomy” worked. A change in leadership brought a sea of changes to the school, and teachers were often much happier with the result. Experts couldn’t understand why it worked, but it did.

NCLB was also a bit of a blow to local control because the federal government was using the power of the purse to reach directly into schools and cause change without the consent of the local school boards or even state regulators. If they wanted to continue receiving federal dollars, changes had to be made. The idea behind the law was a good one; no child should be left behind, but trying to wed all students to one standard, as set in Washington, D.C., seemed to cause more problems than it helped.

In a 2018 video from What School Should Be, they asked teachers at the National Teachers’ Hall of Fame Induction what word came to mind with the effects of NCLB. Those words included “frustration,” “emptiness,” “misinformation,” “interesting concept,” and “disappointing.” One teacher from Wyoming shook his head and said, “It took the soul right out of teaching.” The teachers would go on to say that it was not fair or accurate to reduce every student to a number or how they performed on a test on a certain day at a specific time. Another teacher from Ohio said, “we don’t treat children as people anymore; they are just point averages.”

NCLB ushered in an era of high-stakes testing. The performance on state-wide tests would determine the accountability measurements of how well a school was doing. High-stakes state testing has become such a problem that one teacher, Joshua Kratz, in an Akron University TED Talk, reported anxiety of 3rd graders over these tests. According to his observations, even kindergarteners have concerns over these tests. To do well on the test means, to the children, that their pathway is set for them.

They feel if you do well on the tests, you can go to college and be successful; to do poorly on the test means many other pathways are cut off.

As Kratz points out, standardized tests do very little to give you a complete picture of a student. This is repeated over and over again. Some students will always do well on standardized tests. However, a test will not measure the student as a person. It will not tell you how well the student is doing even if they are “underperforming.” It does not grade students on character or personal advancement. It does not grade them where they are successful, which could be in areas that we could never measure on a test.

The NCLB was not successful in its goal to get all children up to proficiency in reading and math by 2014. Even as states picked their tests and standards, the constant accountability and restructuring did not achieve this goal. Even the break out of data to decide how children in different groups did little to solve the real problems facing the school in question. Although the law provided a chance for students to move schools, many did not. Although free tutoring was to be available for underperforming schools, there were problems with that. One of the biggest problems was money. Congress never allocated the funding necessary to make this law happen. Even the requirement that teachers be “highly qualified” by getting degrees in the field they teach and getting a state certification fell short as the teachers were not distributed as evenly as the law required.

This is the chief failure of NCLB, and it was these failures led to the act being replaced by two different pieces of legislation, the Every Student Succeeds Act and the Race to the Top.

Race to the Top

In 2015, President Obama signed two pieces of legislation to replace NCLB: The every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) and the Race to the Top. ESSA was a reauthorization of the ESEA Act from 1965, and Race to the Top was a grant program to let states compete for new federal dollars to help them meet standards. States had to compete for 4.35 billion dollars in grants. With the exceptions of Alaska (who complained it was too urban-focused for their state), most states applied, North Dakota, Vermont, and Texas. Although those states did not apply for these dollars, they often adopted policies to comply with the standards. The lucky states to receive these grant dollars were Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Pennsylvania, New York, Georgia, Florida, Arizona, Delaware, North Carolina, Tennessee, Maryland, the District of Columbia, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Kentucky, New Jersey, Ohio, and Louisiana. By 2014, 80% of the states had adopted Race to the Top Policies.

Race to the Top had many ambitious goals, which included:

• Individual student progress assessment
• Teacher/student matches
• Evaluations of teachers and principals for effectiveness
• Plans to turn around low performing schools
• Adoption of high-quality standards
• Reformation of teacher removal plans
• Increase the number of STEM teachers
• No caps on charter schools (highly performing)
• STEM courses
• Funding for charter schools
• Support for non-charter autonomous schools

Race to the Top was no more successful than the NCLB and only doubled down on the high-stakes testing model that was already in place. It forced states to adopt massive changes to their education systems, and it put states in competition for a small amount of federal dollars that would not be renewed. It was an ambitious set of goals that was also somewhat tied to the state-by-state adoption of Common Core standards.

These laws created a specific vision for education and have been at the heart of the debate between local control and federal standards. Even within school systems, that tension can be explosive. In the late 1960s, New York and Newark, New Jersey were both gripped with a major strike from the United Federation of Teachers, the largest teachers’ union at the time. Under that system, large school districts and school boards controlled schools, which made the major decisions. In a completely failed experiment, they tried significant local control at the behest of minority parents who wanted to change education radically. Not only did this put teacher’s unions against the civil rights movement (both were allied at one time), but it ended up being no better for the students. Even when it comes to who should be in charge of the schools, the results still seem to be lackluster.

Both the NCLB and Race to the Top failed to do what it takes to improve the lives of students and treat them as people. Students can spend weeks working on getting ready for a test, and some students will take 20 tests a year. However, according to former Assistant Education Secretary Diane Ravitch in a powerful op-ed in the New York Times in 2016, standardized testing merely informs educators about the students’ income level. Researchers have known that testing reveals the socio-economic background and little else for some time. Ravitch reinforces this point. Wealthy students do well on tests; poorer students just don’t. Why continue to insist on a measurement that is so deeply flawed? It’s easy. It makes for a good headline: “Test Scores Are Up!” It makes for good headlines and good speeches for politicians seeking re-election. However, it gives an incomplete picture of the students, and when teachers and others talk about these high-stakes tests, they repeat that repeatedly. Even more, commentators complain that we are merely raising a generation of kids who can take tests well but are not creative or are afraid to learn because they might do very poorly. Ravitch offers a simple but difficult conclusion to implement: give students great teachers in well-maintained buildings with an opportunity to learn and do well.

Becoming American Through Educational Opportunity

Education needed to be non-sectarian, and common republican values were taught. This was important as the integrated catholic immigrants from Europe. One of the things that we ask schools to do is to create new Americans. School is their first chance to learn about their new country for immigrant children. In school, they learn English and the American government and begin the process of integrating into existing American society. They know American values and history. If America is a melting pot, schools are the burner beneath the cultural fondue.

The US offers education to all children no matter where they come from. This system is used to create a better society and to be inclusive. American culture isn’t always as inclusive as it could be, but education is one of the few ways that America offers everyone a little part of the American Dream.

Education is a democratizer. When people can read, write, and have an education, they can engage in society in a very different way than if they didn’t have access to education. Education theoretically allows anyone to do anything. Education is aspirational and creates an opportunity for people. The challenge for American education is how this can be true for more and more people.

Integration, Segregation, and Education

School segregation was codified into law in 1896 with the Plessy v. Ferguson decision that established the policy of “separate but equal.” The idea was that states could segregate schools by race as long as the facilities were equal. However, the facilities were often not similar and were simply substandard. However, despite this problem, black children could go to black schools and receive an education from black teachers. However, at the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement, this all changed, especially the part about black teachers.

In his insightful podcast series, Revisionist History, Malcolm Gladwell spent an hour talking about another side of integration following Brown v. Board of Education, and that is what happened to all the African-American teachers that seemingly disappeared from classrooms following the landmark decision. The episode delves into the issue in-depth with interviews with those still alive who survived the decision’s fallout. Eighty percent (80%) of America’s teachers are white. Black teachers are rare. In the days after the federal government forced the states to integrate schools “with all reasonable expediency,” white parents did not want black teachers in charge of their children. Rather than finding places for black teachers, school districts instead simply fired all their black teachers. This led to black students going through two major changes: learning

alongside white peers and losing their best advocates for their education: teachers that looked like them. The loss of black teachers in the classroom is one of the downsides of integration. Even some black parents at the time resisted integration. They believed in the schools that had been created to cater to their children and that were run by people like them that they trusted. Parents were now also in situations where they were integrating with schools they were unfamiliar with and dealing with teachers and administrators who were not always embracing them or their children.

Integration of schools ended up causing many schools and school districts to be more segregated than before, only this time it was voluntary. White parents moved their children, avoided districts that bussed, and left schools and school districts in a state of voluntary segregation that exists to this day and policymakers are attempting to undo.

Why American Education Falls Behind – The Broken System Narrative

Most people assume the education system is broken. When I started this essay, I started from the same perspective. I wanted to know why education is such a divisive issue, why our education system is broken, and how we might fix it. However, this narrative might not be so fair to the education system.

Both in the past and now, we rely on our education system to do several things:

• Academics
• Vocational training
• College prep
• Helping students become functioning adults
• Teaching students from diverse backgrounds, including students for whom English is not their first or second language

Most other countries don’t lean on their education system for things like physical education or health class. Most other systems also don’t lean on their schools for arts and humanities. The American education system is trying to be all things to all people. By the very nature of that premise, it’s not going to do that job very well. American education is attempting to be like a crossover SUV, part truck, part car, and part off-road vehicle. Like its automotive comparison, the American education system has become a grotesque system that doesn’t do any of those tasks very well. Although overgrown, overburdened, and underfunded, it does, like its crossover SUV cousin, at least runs and drives and accomplishes the task of getting from point A to point B.

When we measure the American education system purely on test scores, we leave out all the schools’ other things for children and young people. Sports are an important part of education, and we use schools as the training ground for future professional athletes. This is uniquely American. The top high school players go to college, where a select few go on to play professionally, and an even more select group

gets to play professionally for some years. Most NCAA players do not play professionally, yet sports take up valuable space, teaching time, and resources that could otherwise be spent elsewhere. The American education isn’t so much broken, much more like poorly measured. The education system is broken narrative does serve certain interests, and it also serves political narratives.

Johnny Can’t Read

The education system has been under attack almost since its inception. There’s always something wrong with education. Rudolph Fleisch borrowed the lyric of the popular Don Henley song in the 1980s to explain why America’s schools were somehow failing its children. This broken system narrative has spawned several organizations, think- tanks, and groups invested in intervening in education. Education has been the darling cause of First Ladies and has been the primary focus of people like Bill Gates. The narrative is so baked into education that people hardly question it. Of course, education is broken, they maintain, and they have charts and data to prove their point.

There are many arguments for what’s wrong with education. The Right will accuse schools of being indoctrination centers. Others will complain that our schools are built to make factory workers instead of the workers we need for a modern knowledge economy. This causes people to look at how teachers can personalize learning or include technology more or eliminate the traditional classroom where teachers stand in front of the room and children sit at desks.

American education has quite an enormous task before it. It has to make people, citizens, and educated people who are ready for the workforce. Schools do not merely engage in dumping facts into children’s heads and sending them home. We depend on schools to be the primary training ground for life. American schools feature things like physical education, sports, music, art, and other activities that are missing from the other country’s systems.

Why Do Teens Get Disinterested in Learning in High School?

In the Democratic Dilemma of American Education, the books highlight sociologist, James

S. Coleman, who blamed social currency as the reason high school, as it stands, kills learning for many children. His 1961 report, which stemmed from his own experience, held that high school had killed learning for him personally because he realized that the only people that the school valued were the first-string varsity football players. He also attacked segregation. He argued that if the interests of whites were not included, they would undercut segregation. He was right; whites fled school districts that bussed students favor those who did not. His problem with the education had nothing to do with books, teachers, salaries, or buildings. It was purely the investment of social currency. In 1986, he issued a follow-up report comparing public and private schools and found that schools with a more communal atmosphere that reduced cliques created great academic achievement. When students felt valued, no matter what they did, they improved academically.

Another reason many teens get disinterested in high school has to do with socio-economic pressures. Teens in poorer backgrounds are often called upon to care for younger siblings while parents work. Teenage students may also be called upon to enter the workforce to help pay for expenses at home. Teenage immigrant students are more likely to drop out than their native-born peers for this reason. This leaves teens tired and exhausted despite needing nine to eleven hours of sleep. This also leaves them less time to study or complete homework assignments, resulting in poorer outcomes.

Those that look overseas for answers point to Japan and South Korea, where the students clean the school instead of the janitorial staff. Schools are an essential place to learn how to socialize with one’s peers, but that could also have an adverse effect, at least according to Coleman. Many people, especially young men, do very well in K-8, but it can quickly suck the passion for learning out of even the most ardent student when high school arrives. Cleaning the school and creating a better chance to build and spend social currency does not account for the authentic socio-economic problems that teens face.

High school students face various pressures, and for many, it may not seem like high school is not worth the trouble. It is tough to plan for the future and take a long-term view when students face very present survival problems. Also, the current model of high-stakes testing and the pressure to do well on tests to go to college can also cause students to give up on school simply. Even if they keep attending, they have already checked out the system. Despite all the problems, the United States boasts an 80% graduation rate. This graduation rate is impressive for a nation that educates 50 million students in 100,000 schools with only 3 million chronically underpaid teachers.

The socio-economic problems in the United States have also created a situation where many students never have a real chance to make it in society. These unfortunate students are sucked into an insidious system aptly called the school-to-prison pipeline.

School to Prison Pipeline

The 1990s were a crazy time. Crime rates had been climbing through the 1970s and 1980s, and the news media had spent hours splashing these crimes across television screens. Like COPS and other true-crime shows, popular shows revealed the underbelly of crime and poverty in America. The country seemed unsafe, and people demanded answers. The 1994 landmark crime bill or the “Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act” created the framework for minimum sentencing laws, authorized boot camps for minors, required mandatory drug testing for those on probation and parole for federal offenses, and a host of other requirements that adversely affected poor and minority communities. This “tough on crime” attitude also extended into the school system through zero-tolerance policies toward discipline in the classroom.

The situation seems dire. According to Vox, schools with large minority populations have more officers at their schools, 97% of which have guns and handcuffs. Arrest rates for black students are far higher despite the rates of white and black children being

sent to the principal’s office being similar. According to the ACLU, students missed a collective 11 million school days in 2015-2016 due to suspensions and expulsions. That adds up to 66 million hours of lost instruction. Students that have been suspended or expelled graduate at lower rates, and their chances of having further interactions with law enforcement increase.

Because this system starts at school, these children often commit other minor crimes and end up in prison. Because finishing school or gaining employment is difficult with a record, these children often cycle in and out of the prison system for years into adulthood. Student loans are restricted from those with criminal histories meaning that these students, who are often poor, have little chance for a future. Increasing police at schools have turned minor behavior infractions into criminal offenses that begin this pipeline. Suspensions and expulsions don’t seem to work. Some schools are moving to a restorative justice model where a panel of students, guided by teachers, decide what the offender should do within the school community to redeem their poor behavior. This system is being praised for keeping students within their school community and not piling on legal problems to young students.

The lack of good data stood out in the research collected around this issue. Although the United States Department of Education requires reporting for suspensions, expulsions, arrests, and serious crimes, many districts reported false numbers or didn’t report at all. Because of issues around interviewing and photographing children, many researchers and journalists are blocked from doing any sort of independent reporting in these areas leaving school districts to do the research themselves. The problem could be far worse than current data shows.

Getting Workers Ready for the Workforce

Especially since the financial crisis, one of the criticisms of education for both K-12 and higher education is that they do not produce people the companies need for the workforce.

Higher education has been criticized for this problem. You will see people regularly making fun of “Gender Studies” degrees in online discussions and elsewhere. Before that, it was “underwater basket weaving.” This view comes from a place that any sort of education, especially an expensive college education, should come with a profitable career afterward. This is a basic return on investment. If you are going to spend $50- 60 thousand on a college degree, you should be able to quickly and easily make that money back. Employers complain that employees lack basic skills or are simply incompetent. However, this is a problem that isn’t limited to schools. There is no way for schools to fully prepare students for working in any business.

However, the picture is far more nuanced than that. There has been a tension between job skills and academic education since the late 19th Century. Academic education focused on real-world skills. Immigrant parents in New York City pushed back and

demanded academic instruction, and that has defined education in this country since. This means that students leave K-12 with a broad education that can empower them to take various other educational opportunities and jobs. A 23-year college graduate will be armed with knowledge, study skills, and critical thinking skills. They aren’t going to have the same working experience as a 33 or 43-year-old employee who has been in the workforce. Businesses must take these new graduates and build them into the employees they need.

Education is a long game. It takes years to realize the societal gains from education. Generally speaking, an educated populace makes for a better populace. The earning potential takes decades to realize, as well. However, thanks to the advances in the Progressive Era (1890-1945), Americans, after World War II, were able to flood into high schools and colleges, attain an education, and then take jobs in the workforce that paid well.

Higher Education and Jobs

University was never meant to be a vocational training environment. Liberal arts education, which dominates American education, is meant to create a student with a broad exposure to a variety of subjects and to create a whole person who has had the chance to study a variety of things. In the past, armed with this kind of education, regardless of major, they would then enter the workforce as entry-level employees trained in a specific field within an industry or field. They would then move up the ranks armed with this knowledge. Even those who chose not to go to college were opportunities to be trained and learn new skills at their existing jobs.

However, the economy has changed. Employers now expect students to come to them with all the skills they want “out of the box.” To see this in action, search entry-level professional employment listings. There are plenty of instances where there are a variety of requirements for positions meant to be entry-level. Employers ask for experience that would be impossible to have at a young age. The burden of job training has been moved from the employer to the employee. This is the result of an economic environment where companies are looking for any place that can shift costs. Training employees is a long game and is expensive. This is especially troubling for companies when employees take those experiences and leave for other opportunities. To reduce this cost, the employee now has to invest in those training costs, if they can. Asking a 22-year-old graduate to have five years of experience is no way to advertise an entry-level position. By its very nature, that requirement isn’t entry-level. Instead of taking responsibility for training, many thought leaders have blamed the education system for not supplying them with workers who already have all the knowledge, skills, and experience they are looking for to bring into their firms.

However, employers are not serving themselves well with this policy. When companies train workers, it works out very well for them. Ford Motor Co. supplies an excellent

example. When they chose to move engine production to Mexico, one of their problems was the lack of skilled workers in their new location. Ford decided to train local workers to make engines for their cars. Within five years, they produced quality engines that were on par with the quality of engines that had been previously made in the United States. That investment paid off for Ford, and it also paid off for the employees who were able to take those valuable skills to other industries. Now, that engine plant is the only engine plant in North America for Ford, and they provide all the engines for the Ford North American operations. The example from Ford gives us insight into how the education system can and should work. For modern job seekers, it’s not schools; it’s the economy. When companies train workers, they succeed better. When they invest in their workers’ skills, they do really well, benefiting both the worker and the company.

Who Teaches the Teachers

One of the biggest parts of education has to do with teachers. There has always been a certain nervous attitude toward teachers. After all, parents are placing an incredible amount of trust in the hands of essentially strangers to teach their children and spend 7+ hours a day with them.

In the United States, teacher education was not formalized until the late 19th Century. Normal schools and teacher schools were opened to train teachers in the latest teaching methods. This began the formalization of American education. As these newly educated teachers went to classrooms armed with Bachelor degrees, it was viewed that more educated teachers would be able to do an even better job of educating children. Before teaching colleges, usually, teachers had only completed some sort of formal education and often took a test for proficiency. They merely had to be satisfactory for the local school board or the local parents hiring a teacher. Formal education increased teacher quality and education improved right alongside that.

Usually, teachers are the first to be criticized in education. Credentials, training, and constant improvement are required of modern teachers. Continuing education is a big part of the life of a modern teacher, and there are usually pay increases to compensate for the hours spent and the additional credentials achieved. To ensure quality, the education of teachers has been formalized within the university system. Teachers can achieve certifications in teaching and then are eligible for either the national PRAXIS exam or a state-level teaching exam to teach.

However, this does not tend to attract the brightest and best to the profession. This is primarily due to low pay and difficult classroom situations. However, if you are a professional looking to teach in the K-12 system, there are barriers to entry. The K-12 school system doesn’t attract the best and most qualified teachers to the profession. Most teachers have education degrees rather than degrees in subject areas. Professionals who want to teach in K-12 schools must endure two more years of preparation before entering a classroom.

When it comes to criticizing teachers, it is hard to make broad sweeping statements. There are approximately 3.2 million teachers that teach around 16 students per teacher. There are great teachers, beloved teachers, and people who may have no business teaching children at all. One thing is clear; teachers have to overcome several problems to teach well. This can include non-responsive administration and difficult parents. In this way, Teachers are sandwiched between an increasingly overbearing administration and parents who care only for results. Of all the complaints that teachers make, overbearing administration ranks high. One teacher interviewed for this essay stated that she would rather deal with more paperwork if that meant less administration.

How to Attract Better Teachers

Attracting better teachers involves several solutions, not the least of which is private-sector levels of pay, a good retirement plan, and finding ways to get professionals to be involved in K-12 without onerous requirements. This requires some fundamental changes with how we value teachers, education, and how we think about teachers. Rather than considering them a one size fix to every student’s problem, teachers need support from school counselors and nurses who can help students be ready for learning. When students are prepared for learning, the job will be so much easier and perhaps even enjoyable. Teachers are the backbone of education, and currently, there is a shortage. Why would someone go into a profession where pay and continued employment are tied to students’ performance, a variable they cannot control. A teacher can do their best teaching job, but if the student faces educational challenges, teachers cannot always bridge those gaps and deliver exciting content at the same time. In short, it is time to let teachers teach.

The Teacher Wars

There have been various methods and efforts to improve teaching in the classroom. However, test scores have been the most popular method in recent memory. The throughput of the logic seems rather straightforward: if the students are doing well, they were taught by effective teachers. If the student’s test scores are not doing well, it doesn’t say anything about the student; it says much more about the teacher and their effectiveness. However, there are other methods like regular teacher observation and student evaluations.

In the Teacher Wars, Dana Goldstein visits one of these such schools where observations are a regular occurrence. Teachers are constantly given feedback on every observable metric, from classroom management to the time spent talking about a particular subject. Shanghai, China uses teaching methods like less time alone for teachers (they have more help) and observation to improve student performance. The community is also deeply involved in the school as well.

Teacher’s Unions

There is probably no more contentious an issue with education than teacher’s unions. Teacher’s unions organized beginning in 1870. Like many labor unions, there are two sides. The side in favor of unions focuses on collective bargaining and the advocacy within state capitals and school boards that control education standards and funding. On the opposing side, those against teacher’s unions talk about how they are a bureaucratic nightmare that allows terrible teachers to continue teaching and that they prevent any sort of school reform by using their political power to block reforms. In states where teachers are unionized, the school district signs a collective bargaining contract that sets out the rules for how many hours teachers work, vacation, breaks, pay, and other matters.

Performance-based Pay

One of the most significant reforms in education that teacher’s unions have fought against is performance-based pay. The idea is straight from the private sector; teachers should be paid based on their performance. Unfortunately for teachers, it has little to do with their performance and more to do with their student’s performance. The idea is that if the students are doing well, then the teacher must be doing a good job. However, the Coleman Report and other reviews reveal a different picture. Many factors go into a student’s performance, of which the actual person doing the teaching is only a part. Students that must take care of siblings instead of doing homework come from poverty or other difficult home environments have income/housing/food insecurity and often cannot perform well in the classroom. Under a performance-based system, teachers get punished through their economic security because they are not responsible for and cannot solve these problems.

Working Hours

Teachers are often criticized for not working enough. One article from City Journal complained that teachers showed up a few minutes before the students and left near dismissal instead of staying after school and before classes. The article complained that many teachers take the contractually obligated classroom hours like gospel and just don’t put in the extra effort. Imagine criticizing a professional for only working the hours that they are required.

This is emblematic of the requirements that we put on teachers. Society expects them to go above and beyond every day and sacrifice their own lives for the collective well-being of the nation’s children while keeping them chronically underpaid, despite being in unions. Asking teachers to pay for their supplies, provide their support, and work extra long hours, essentially for free, is simply unfair, and it’s not a way to have an effective education system or attract the best people to the field.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, one of the biggest advocates for modern education we know, stated it quite simply, “education will never reach its highest-end till the care of the physical, social, and moral interests shall take precedence to mere intellectual development and acquirements.” While teachers play a part in the overall discussion on education, especially when it comes to things like curriculum and the method of instruction, they are only a part. Putting all the blame on them simply isn’t fair to the reality of what it is like to live as a child in this country where social services for many children do not nearly meet demand if they exist at all.

If there is anything a teacher’s unions defend, it’s the right for teachers to teach and not live in fear of being constantly fired. Teachers are people, too, with financial goals, families, and all the things that everyone else has; it’s just that their job has a unique place in our society because they are responsible for creating the next generation of citizens. In decades past, teachers taught children how to bathe and brush their teeth when these things were not common. It’s part of why health class is included in most schools; that is the legacy of teachers needing to give students support they weren’t getting at home.

The legacy of schools being where students become people is still ongoing, and the burden falls onto the teachers. How do we measure this good work? Why should teachers’ pay be based on their students’ performance when other factors are at play. In this way, unions try to stop this from happening. It creates unnecessary churn in the system and leaves teachers with low job satisfaction. To make a private sector comparison, it would be like if we measured a team’s performance by how another team performed their job. If you have a marketing team and their performance is only measured by how the IT department performs, that isn’t very fair. Performance-based pay only works when the person doing the work gets the rewards from their hard work or suffers due to the lack of hard work. However, making teachers economically dependent on students’ performance with unique issues and problems simply isn’t fair to teachers and ultimately is a disservice to the students.

This has even led to very well-publicized cheating scandals. Two stand out: the cheating scandal in the Washington, D.C. school district under Michelle Rhee, who pioneered bonuses for performing schools, and in Atlanta, where teachers changed test scores so that their students would perform better.   These conditions were created when the success of professional teachers was tied to how the students performed. High-stakes testing sounds nice, but the reality is that education is a human business, which means that solving education involves solving very human problems. Would we rather have teachers focusing on raising all students or focus on making sure they create the numbers the politicians want to see?

No One Gets Fired

It is a well-known story from different people that teachers are notoriously hard to fire. Tenured teachers are nearly impossible to fire, as are tenured professors. On average, it takes 2-5 years to fire a teacher. There is a process for this that usually involves evaluations and documentation of what is wrong with their teaching process. Then, administration is supposed to work to correct these problems before finally deciding if the teacher should be let go. As anyone who hasn’t worked knows, there are many factors to why one can get fired. Many of those are personal or political.

Those who want to make it easier to fire teachers claim that teacher turnover isn’t a bad thing but actually can be a good thing because it will attract people who will go into teaching for money rather than the legendary job security that teaching offers. This would work if teaching were a well-paid professional; it isn’t. Average teacher pay starts at $27,000, and the average tops out at $62,000 for long-term teachers with credentials. Teachers aren’t paid well, especially early career teachers. Part of the compensation is higher job security and a more secure retirement.

The argument that longevity creates lazy teachers who just teach the same thing over and over again and give the same tests over and over again, as Megan Mcardle gave in her 2011 article for The Atlantic, may have some importance, but that surely should be evaluated on an individual level and not as a one set idea. There may be some truth there, but to say that we need to make it easier to get rid of all teachers just to make it easier to get rid of a few is not a fair policy and erodes the teaching profession. E.D. Kain said in a blog post on teacher firings that without the necessary protections, like pensions, job security, tenure, and unions, you’re left with “a difficult job with no job security, mediocre benefits, and relatively low pay.” Teacher pay is often so low in some areas that teachers take 2nd jobs, even during the school year, to make ends meet. The time off in the summer is often only 4-6 weeks that can be dominated by continuing education, school year preparation, and required in-service days.

There is also no easy process to translate teaching skills to other professions. In the private sector, you can get fired and most likely get a job somewhere else where you can try again. In teaching, this will most likely require a move because a teacher would be shut out of an entire school district. There is also no guarantee that they would be able to find a job with comparable pay in the private sector. Why would teachers invest in a profession with limited opportunity (there are only so many schools) when they can get fired on a whim of an overzealous administrator? This is especially true when teaching credentials don’t translate well into other professions.

School Choice

Tying dollars to the student seems like a great idea. Students can take their education dollars and go elsewhere. Does that undermine the overall idea that education should be universal and quality? Does that undermine neighborhood schools?

Market reforms have some appeal for school reformers. Schools often get compared to the auto industry. The United States auto industry kept losing market shares due to their lower-quality vehicles. The comparison seems easy, but education isn’t a consumer product. Although many school voucher proponents would consider education a commodity, the school choice movement has pushed primarily for school vouchers so that the dollars the state spends on a student are tied to the student to spend and use as they please. However, this market reform can leave many students behind. Charter schools have been used as the private sector solution to failing public schools. These schools are tuition-free and funded by the state directly or through vouchers. However, they have problems of their own and surpass the problems seen in the regular public school. Dollars leaving the public school system can be seen as a direct attack on public schools, especially for poor students who are already under pressure and have higher rates of students dropping out. In a society where most states have a right to education codified in law or state constitutions, will school choice leave students who can’t take advantage of this privatization behind?

Charter Schools

One of the most significant innovations with education has been the Charter Schools. These schools are government-funded but do not have to comply with the ordinary regulations that regular public schools must abide by. On the one hand, this has allowed charter schools to innovate education and has also allowed online schools to flourish; however, they are not a panacea. They tend to be less diverse, offer fewer activities (sports, arts), and the teaching staff can be cycled regularly because they are on contract only. Charter schools are located wherever the organization running them locates them, which means that students often must have transportation to the school.

The biggest criticism of charter schools, powered by school choice vouchers in most states, is that the dollars leaving the public education system leave the public education system in worse shape. Less money means fewer resources, and fewer resources mean even worse education for the students left behind. Charter schools also tend not to be very diverse. Poor, minority parents often cannot afford or have the time to transport their students themselves to the charter schools. Those parents rely on the familiar yellow school buses to take their kids to school. This leaves charter schools, while tuition-free, to be primarily utilized by parents able to afford transportation to school. This means these schools tend to be less reflective of the neighborhoods where they are located.

The Swedish model also has a different approach. Swedish schools are uniform throughout the country. Parents in Sweden don’t have to pick schools; they simply send their children to the neighborhood school. Charter schools or private schools are illegal in Sweden. This means that children go to school with children from all kinds of backgrounds. In Michael Moore’s film, Where Should We Invade Next?, he implies that this makes children much more sympathetic to people from all backgrounds. Even if the rich kid may be in charge of a major company one day, he will have been exposed to the people that work for them.

Charter schools are also riddled with scandal. At the outset, privatization and school choice seem like good ideas. Why should all parents be forced to send their kids to only one school because of where they live? However, it looks like a losing deal. Network for Public Education, a public school advocacy organization, publishes a list of charter school scandals. In 2018, these ranged from theft to excessive pay for executives to a sex scandal involving students. Public schools certainly are not immune to the latter complaint, but due to oversight and government regulations, theft and excessive pay are some of the few problems that public schools don’t suffer from. Scanning through the local newspaper reported stories, school boards, and even some states have had to step in and close many charter schools for underperforming, lying, discrimination, embezzlement, and teacher turnover. And this is all going on while private corporations are getting funded by the taxpayer of the states and school districts where these schools set up shop. What’s even worse is that these scandals often leave students scrambling to find a new school in the middle of the year. One story in Arizona, the school closed just two months into the school year. Students were forced to change schools.

If privatization is supposed to solve all the ills of the public school system, the early signals seem to indicate that running a private school, even funded with taxpayer dollars, is no easy thing. On the surface, it might seem like “school choice” is a good idea, but the reality is far more difficult. The lack of oversight, regulation and approval of the elected school board is not present, and it seems as if charter schools cannot meet the exact requirements of public schools.

There is also the simple principle of public education. Public education is one of the hallmarks of our modern age. The US has a system where any child can go to a school and be educated. It improves the success of the child in question and improves our democracy. Charter schools seem to stand in the way of that basic principle. If a nationwide school choice program, as advocated by Education Secretary Betsy Devos, were implemented, those who could afford to take their dollars elsewhere would do so, and those who couldn’t be simply left behind. The result would be the worst kind of class segregation this country has seen since Jim Crow. Although the education system requires reform, it is clear that charter schools, at least as they are currently administered, are not the answer.

American Education is Trying to be Everything to Everyone

American education takes a one-size-fits-all approach to education. Everyone takes similar classes and has to fulfill a broad set of requirements. This includes math, reading, writing, science, and often community service. Requirements for health and the arts are also common in some schools.

Students come from a diversity of backgrounds and learning needs. Instead of separating out students based on their needs, we have attempted to put them all into the same class, taught by the same teachers. This is especially difficult for special needs students. While the teacher brings those children along, others can be boring and lose interest. At the same time, those who excel in those classes may also feel the pinch as they cannot move ahead as fast as they would like to move. This puts the burden on students to manage their education when they are at an age that can be difficult. America has burdened its teachers and school system with attempting to do many things and be everything to all students. Most systems cannot do that well.

Another area where teachers are burdened is with students whose first language is not English. These children are usually the parents of immigrants (both legal and illegal) and can also cause difficulty in the class, leaving teachers frustrated and the students left behind.

The education system can be different things to different students, but that requires us to break down the one-size-fits-all approach and begin to tailor education to the student’s needs. This may mean separating out the children whose language skills are not ready for the regular classroom and giving the special needs students the help they need in a setting that helps them learn and grow.

One of the criticisms of international school systems is that these school systems do just that. When you enter South Korea or Sweden classrooms, you will not often find special needs students. They are educated in classrooms separate from regular students and don’t take the same tests. Both of these countries do not have large immigrant populations, and children who are immigrants must have basic language skills before going into the classroom. That is one of the reasons their test scores are higher. Their student populations are far different than the American student body. Both of these countries also boast strong social safety nets that are more robust than the American model. Socio-economic factors are less prescient in these systems. This is one of the reasons America cannot keep up with those vaunted international tests.

Why Does America Score So Low on International Tests.

Reading about education, you’ll hear about two types of international tests that come up: TIMSS and PISA. These are tests administered around the world to test how students are doing. The United States, as a whole, scores in the middle. Some states score higher on their own. Politicians spend a lot of time focusing on why the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth can’t seem to get education right. The reason is simple and yet complex. We educate everyone. We include students that have special needs, no matter how extreme. The US contains students whose English is not their first language. We include students who may have different learning disabilities. The students are all taught together in one classroom, and we have them all take the same test. The US doesn’t track our students in high school as other countries do. While other countries are testing their very best, we are testing the entire population of 50 million school children in this country. In other countries, students not planning on going to college don’t take these tests (depending on when the test is given). They are put on vocational tracks or schools. Only those who academically succeed end up taking these tests, and they score better as a result.

American Culture Toward Education

One does not need to look any farther than school funding to see how Americans do or do not value education. Keeping local financing and often prioritizing things that don’t necessarily help classroom instruction demonstrates that many people would rather have a new football stadium than quality education, which worsens higher education.

James Coleman made an insightful observation that many high school students will recognize. He attended school in the 1940s and 1950s and in 1966 created the Coleman report where he analyzed education and illustrated the problems with American education. However, he did not take the usual tack of talking about teachers, teacher’s unions, or funding. Instead, he talked about culture. He argued that the cultural attitude toward education is broken. As a student, he figured out that the only people that mattered to teachers and administrators were the varsity string football players and cheerleaders. The same people Coleman complained about are also idolized in the media. In many shows, the popular kids are idolized while everyone else looks on and develops an inferiority complex. Also, American society doesn’t value education as other countries do. High school sports make the local news—the math champions, much less often. Even in politics, ignorance and “common values” are more valued than expertise in a field.

Each student needs to feel like someone cares about them and their education. This is doubly so in places where parents, for whatever reason, are not available to lavish that kind of attention on their children. That was the other insightful thing about the Coleman report. His main conclusion was that family and neighborhood

matter much more than how much money or resources that are put into schools. When poverty abounds in neighborhoods, it profoundly affects children. Learning can only take place when basic needs are provided. When those basic needs are not adequately taken care of, education will suffer. Some children aren’t going to have sufficient time to do homework or even stay in school. When a society elevates sports and other visible achievements over the value of education, kids will quickly figure out that they will do what society values most to get attention and accolades. To fix education, then American society and what it values must change.

This is especially so in minority communities. When athletes, entertainers, and celebrities make money, get out of terrible situations, and appear on TV, that reflects societal values. Many children will try for that sort of attention, and this often starts in high school. Much less is made of highly successful scientists like Mae C. Jemison (the first black woman in space) or Katherine Johnson (the woman behind the orbital calculations that allowed the United States to land on the moon), or even someone like Ronald McNair (died in the Challenger disaster). Those people don’t appear on TV, they don’t wear expensive clothes, and they certainly don’t get contracts for hundreds of millions of dollars. They do not get a Nike sponsorship, and they won’t be seen on TV.

Education is about human development. Education helps everyone stand on the shoulders of giants and create new and exciting breakthroughs that can improve our lives. Education allows the creation of great works of literature or film, but it also is what makes society function. The problem is that these achievements aren’t as valued nearly as the more visible achievements of people in sports and entertainment. Even during the research for this book, I checked the names of the scientists above, and Google suggested that I was looking for singers, rappers, or athletes before scientists. That merely reflects what people search for on Google, but it’s a sad proxy for what people value in society.

One of the reasons other nations perform better is that they value education. In South Korea, educators are considered “nation builders.” Their teachers are supported and well-paid. Education is not a waste of money; it is an investment in the future. It builds the nation. In America, we just don’t value education the same way. Students are not stupid. They can sense this, and they simply drop out for those with weak or non-existent support structures.

Why Students Drop Out

Students from a poor background are 2.4 times more likely to drop out of high school than students from wealthier backgrounds. According to America’s Promise, students cite boredom as the second reason they drop out right behind failing too many classes.

Being a student is no easy thing, especially in the American system, where we send students to school for 7-8 hours a day and then pile on hours of homework afterward. This means that many students can be working on their education for 10-15 hours a day. That doesn’t include other responsibilities they may be required to take on. Research has shown that childhood brains work better on more sleep and that teens stay up due to physiology, entirely out of step with how the school day is structured.

When we look at other schools, like schools in Sweden, the starting age is higher; they usually start school at age 7. They spend less time in school, and homework is virtually non-existent. The curricula are not focused on tests but instead focused on the students’ interests. In Michael Moore’s film “Where Do We Invade Next?,” he visited Swedish schools and saw students making guitars, playing outside, and in an interview with teachers, they said flat out, America should drop standardized tests. Would we see fewer kids dropping out of school due to failing classes and boredom if we adopted this sort of school format? At this point, it’s worth a try. There are also significant economic factors. For poorer students, they may want to better their situation or better their family’s situation. Dropping out and getting a job sometimes seem like a better choice than continuing to suffer adverse economic circumstances. We cannot solve these problems by simply putting more money into schools and teachers. These societal problems must be solved by fixing the greater societal system.

Reforming American Education

America’s schools can’t make up for a dysfunctional economy and socio-economic disadvantages. Children arrive at school dependent on where they came from at home. If their home doesn’t have educated parents or have many books for them to read and explore, they arrive at school much less prepared than students from a wealthier background. By high school, if children have other home problems, like needing to work or taking care of younger siblings, it can lead to less time to invest in academics.

Education is meant to be this great leveling force where students can go to school, get an education, and achieve better than their parents. As immigrants arrived in the 19th Century, one of the biggest things they wanted was to send their children to school to achieve academics. With this new education, they could advance in their new country rather than be shunted to vocational programs where they would end up as poor as their parents. German immigrants in 1895 protested the New York City schools who tried to force their children to go into vocational training rather than academic programming. They had higher designs on the future of their children. This attitude that education should be aspirational has continued to be an important part of American education.

There have been some major movements in reforming American education. Throughout the history of American education, there have been various attempts to do

It better or make sweeping changes in the promise of saving students. School vouchers, charter schools, and even the advent of state education boards in the early 20th Century have all made grand promises about education. However, one more recent performer has stood out for her sweeping reforms of one of the largest and troubled education systems in the United States.

During her three-year tenure as Chancellor of the D.C. public schools, Michelle Rhee became a national figure. D.C. public schools are some of the worst in the nation. The D.C. system is diverse, with a high concentration of minority students. The D.C. schools also tend to serve underprivileged communities. She pioneered teacher evaluations based on test scores in her tenure, and she fired ineffective teachers and staff. She cleaned out principals and changed the central office. She boasted tremendous test scores and dramatic increases powered by bonuses to schools and faculty who created the changes during her tenure. A frontline investigation found that there may have been irregularities with the answers on the city-wide standardized test. There was evidence that teachers were changing answers for students to win bonuses for themselves and save their jobs. Despite the problems, her teacher evaluation method of incentivizing teachers to get their students to perform on tests was hailed as the future of education. Indeed, her testing-based, performance-oriented reforms have become the norm in American schools.

At the time, she was hailed as an important reformer and someone who could change how Americans are educated in the most difficult circumstances. Her reforms did not go over well with teachers, and the teacher’s union worked hard to oust her political patron and elected someone who would save their jobs. By 2010, she was out as Chancellor and founded a national organization, Students First, from which she retired in 2014. Trump briefly considered her for education secretary until she pulled her name from the running.

One of the major ways education is affected is the student’s economic background. In The Democratic Dilemma of American Education, there was little mentioned about poverty and class. This stands in contrast to the journalistic focus on class and other research that tests for the parents’ income. One of the secrets of the American education system is that rich kids do well and poor kids just don’t, and there are few theories and few policies that are ready to address this problem.

To fix American education, it’s going to take money, but that money probably has nothing to do with textbooks, computers, or teachers. Those things do need more funding, but it has to do with society. Giving all children access to breakfast and lunch (progressive policy ideas) is a great place to start. But working on issues like universal healthcare and increases in wages and job security also factors into the equation. When students come from stable homes where their needs are taken care of, they will perform better in school.

Education has many players, teachers through unions, the public, parents, and students. Because the government has taken on the responsibility and provides funding, education discussions frequently end up in the halls of state legislatures, which is subject to the political winds of the time. Education seems to have been a victim of our political system. Although states may have that right, courts have been resistant to guarantee a federal constitutional right to education.

When it comes to education, the education system can’t save everyone. In One Nation Under Taught, the numbers aren’t encouraging. The book focuses on education and education policy and how American students can and should be advancing in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields. The book even proposes that through STEM-based education reforms, America could add 1 million new people into STEM fields which would have a broad-based economic effect. The book focuses on the education system’s lack of focus on the STEM fields, which will define the 21st century. Adding 1 million new people into the labor force with STEM degrees won’t solve the broader economic problem.

STEM has its gaps anyway, and it does not begin to address the large-scale economic headwinds we face through automation and economic changes of being involved in a truly global economy. To help students be competitive, schools must prepare them to compete on a truly global scale. Trying to force all students into STEM won’t merely leave students behind, it’s not quite what the American economy really needs, and it doesn’t address the real needs of students. The reality is that many students are ill-suited for fields in STEM. Although more could be done to encourage STEM education, America still needs all sorts of workers in various fields.

Empowering Teachers

How can we put power in the teacher’s hands? By giving schools a little bit of democracy. Teachers could elect principals and school board members from among themselves. Schools could also become more democratic by giving power to students. In the many TED talks, I watched in preparation for this essay, a talk from Massachusetts stood out. These democratic schools have less structure and fewer rules. The students vote on teachers, classes and determine their pathway through their education based on their interests. Those schools look a lot more like the Swedish schools mentioned earlier. These students aren’t bored and finding ways to drop out. These students are engaged.

Education needs to respond to the needs of everyone, and that means better preparation in STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math), and it also means that students need real preparation in critical thinking and can talk to a variety of people and solve problems.

How to Get Better Teachers

Hiring new teachers can be done at the behest of the board, but the hiring committees should include teachers and parents. Each teacher could prepare a packet for the hiring committee, and then the committee can consider each candidate in turn. All the teachers should be up for review every five years to review their performance across various metrics, including parent and student happiness, test scores, improvement of students, the technology used, methods used, long-term student success rates, and reviews.

However, all this teacher oversight must go both ways. Teachers should write a short report on their school every year to the board, what’s going right and what’s going wrong. Those should be turned into action items for the new year. These should be publicly available. This would make education more responsive to more people and cater to what the teachers and parents are looking for from education.

The most significant factor in hiring and retaining is fairly straightforward: pay the teachers more. Make sure that their compensation is on-par with the private sector. Attract the professionals and others who might be looking for a change in the middle of their careers. Continue the advancements made from Race to the Top with innovative ways for people to get a teaching credential. For example, professionals with degrees could begin in the school by assisting and observing their classwork to become a teacher. Programs like Teach for America show that teacher preparation can’t be a fast process (they try to do it in 8 weeks), but it is a skill that takes development.

The Federal Role in Education

The federal government should create minimum education standards much as states governments do. The fact that religious concepts are openly taught as fact in school is a crime against secular education and against the advancement of science in schools. The federal government should enforce and fund minimum school building standards that include libraries, science labs, media labs, and basic school supplies for every child. Every child should be issued a simple laptop for online schooling lessons.

The poverty gap also needs repair as well. As some nations in Europe do, the federal government should give each child, no strings attached, $500 per month as a school allowance. The parents would receive the money until high school, and then after that, it would go directly to the child in question. That would amount to $225 billion per school year. That might seem like a large number. To compare, that’s nearly ¼ of the defense budget. That program would be as extensive a program as Social Security or Medicare. The federal government should also ensure that healthy, good food is available to all students during the school day. Having counseling and mental health services available could be another important way to serve students better, especially in troubled areas. If schools are going to serve a social service center, they should be funded.

Schools Have Changed

America is a changing country. By the middle of the 21st Century, if not sooner, we will be a majority-minority country, and this is already reflected in our schools where white students represent just 49% of students (2017 number). That’s down from 80% in 1968. Teachers and administrators face schools with a diverse student population and all the needs that those students may require. Despite overcrowded schools, the average class size has decreased in primary schools from 26-21 since 1987. Modern schools tend to focus on math and science and more unique needs. However, this is going to leave some students behind.

Try as teachers might, not all students will excel in math and science. Some students will express their talent in a variety of other areas. Schools should focus on programs that can create success for them, too. There are too many people living their lives thinking that they can’t do certain things because they did poorly in school. Their true talent was simply not identified and fostered. Schools need to do what is necessary for students to succeed individually. This includes students learning English and students who wish to become doctors and high-level scientists. Policymakers, teachers, and administrators need to work with the schools and the students they have, not the students and schools that they wish they had. By not forcing everyone into the same box, American education can create success for all students and truly not leave any child behind.

How to Fix Schools

There are some great methods from other nations that we can take and implement in American schools. We can begin by reintroducing the arts and physical education. Due to the burden of standardized testing, anything not measured on a test, like arts and physical education, has been eliminated in many schools. That does not encourage well-rounded human beings or great participants in democracy. Blending together STEM and the Arts creates what some people call a STEAM curriculum that includes important teaching and instruction in the arts and humanities.

We can expose students to complex concepts earlier and give them a chance to guide their learning from a menu of subjects. Students can work with their parents to decide their paths based on their interests. This also includes breaking up the structured grades system and allowing students of different ages and abilities to mix in one environment together. Providing facilities for students to work alone or in groups would make education more flexible and attentive to the student’s needs.

However, this is no excuse not to have high standards and work hard on their education. However, it should and could be driven by the parents and the interests of the student. Instead of measuring everything with a test, schools should focus more on each student’s individual achievement. This would ensure that students will stay all the way through, and each state should have a plan to reduce drop-out rates to zero.

Another way to reduce dropout rates is to rethink high school entirely. Rather than expecting all students to do well in heavy academic subjects, schools need to provide a variety of high school options that may or may not include STEM or STEAM. A student may be a brilliant caretaker; they should be able to explore that option through a shorter high school career. A high school student can take a two-year vocational track or a longer three-year academic track in Denmark. Students should feel free to choose either. By doing this, we can allow students to graduate earlier with job skills for them to enter the market right away. By allowing some students to enter the workforce earlier and with a diploma, we can solve some of the reasons why students drop out, like boredom and the need to make money. It would even pay to work with America’s robust community college system to create pathways for students to take those classes to give them the credentials that they need to succeed in life, not just take a test really well. This would be a chance to really invest in professions, trades, and actual skills for real jobs. That way, anyone who leaves high school will either be ready for an academic pathway in college or have the skills to have a career in the real world.

Another major reform to bolster this new high school system would be high school entrance and exit exams. Based on these tests, each student can use that information to pick the best path for them. These tests should not just be multiple choices on a scantron sheet. It should include student statements about whatever plans they might have thought about or even just potential interests. A personal interview with each student and their parents would also be powerful. Each student would then enter their high school career with a clearer idea of their path, where they want to improve, or what interest they might pursue.

Common Core was a great first step to having a common minimum standard for education in this country. Although it has been criticized for being too focused on testing and the content has been pilloried online, the federal government can and should institute minimum standards of education that all states must abide by. The federal government also needs to ensure that buildings and teachers meet minimum standards as well. Congress can decide what those minimums should be, but any student in any state or community should be able to go to their school with confidence that there is national oversight over their education and that their education will be of a fundamental quality no matter where they come from or how rich or poor their background.

Ultimately, children are a product of society and what that society values. If the community values education and creates chances for success, students will have better opportunities, and education will improve. It is really up to policymakers and society at large to break apart broken funding models, broken testing methods, and other problems and treat students as people who are valuable and important. When students feel like people care about them and what they are doing is worthwhile, that creates a container for success that can reach even the poorest student.

Higher Education

The United States sports one of the best post-secondary systems in the world. The United States achieved this educational feat because of a government program. In 1862, Congress passed the Morrill Land-Grant Acts. These laws directed states to create one state college for agricultural and mechanical arts in each state. Congress declared that the 16th section of each township be used for a state school. The US has a tremendous legacy of public education because of this. Many Eastern states already had universities and colleges. Out of those institutions spawned some of the world’s best research and teaching institutions. This has also led to the best technology and advances in science to happen within the United States. The American university system has powered the 21st century the world over. This system is also attractive to parents and students from around the world. Parents the world over send their children to be educated in American universities and with good reason. The quality of teaching is high, and the opportunities available to students from top schools rival almost no other schools and are on par with the most prestigious schools in Europe. The US has a history of education for the common good. This has done amazing things for the US, from medical advances to defense and the space program. Regardless of the quality available, the cost of American higher education is in sharp focus. The most educated generation in American history struggles with student loan debt, mostly due to the rising cost of higher education.

The United States higher education doesn’t have the structural problems that K-12 has because it’s primarily funded through tuition. In the recent past, states supported higher education, and some states, like California, made their state universities free to students. However, the higher education system has a funding problem. Tuition is a good way to fund these institutions; however, the students bearing the cost has led many students to take out loans to fund their education, and that has burdened a generation with tens of thousands of dollars in debt at the time of their lives when they are least able to pay it, especially given the present economic conditions.

Because schools are now funded through tuition and the colleges must take on ever-greater responsibility for their funding, tuition rates have skyrocketed over the past 30 years. Quality education only matters if you can access it. Those tasked with building the best and brightest of tomorrow aren’t even paid well anymore for all the money entering into the college system.

Professors Are Almost Slave Wage Labor

While the price of higher education has increased, professors’ salaries have not increased. The number of adjuncts has increased over the past ten years and their pay, because they are adjuncts on contract, is notoriously low. Tenure track jobs are at an all-time low. Many adjuncts will stay on contract for years instead of enjoying professors’ job security and pay from years past. Professors are pressured to teach, counsel students, and research. The pressure to publish, especially at a research

university is ever-present. One of the things that the higher education system shares with the K-12 system is the desire for education to translate to real work and real jobs and evaluation and accountability. The pressure is now on professors to not only publish research but also to make their lectures interesting for students and keep them engaged as well. Professors must meet students where they are and help them succeed, often in complex subjects. Much of the burdens that K-12 teachers face are now reaching professors.

Education is an investment, and it is a long-term one. Many of the economic investments in higher education don’t pay off for several years as graduates start and achieve within their career fields. This has created a desire to move higher education away from liberal education that seeks to develop well-rounded people and more toward vocational programs that create better and more efficient workers. The debate between creating democratically active citizens and good workers has reached higher education. However, the discussion isn’t quite the same as its K-12 counterpart.

The Sports Problem

One of my criticisms of higher education stems from the focus on sports programs. According to the NCAA, 2.9 billion dollars are provided to Division 1 and 2 athletes. The NCAA promotes that their students are student-athletes and the academic achievement that their students achieve while playing the sport they want to play. However, the true-crime of the collegiate sports system is the amount of money spent on athletes worth the investment, especially when it comes at a cost to academic programs. Billions of dollars are expended yearly on sports athletic programs. This represents a transfer of wealth away from research, professor salaries, and scholarships for others who do not participate in sports.

For many states, the college football coach or basketball coach is the highest-paid state employee, exceeding the salaries of many governors and other high-level state officials. Is this a wise investment for our education system that is desperate for more money for professors, capital projects, and scholarships for those that can’t throw a ball or run quickly?

Instead of spending money on ever-larger football stadiums or ever-more expensive athletic programs, colleges need to return to their top job: educating students to create educated, well-rounded, and competent professionals, citizens, and leaders of tomorrow. Sports can be an important part of this puzzle. It should not be the end goal. Many colleges are not known for their academics or the scientific discoveries that they produce. They are known for producing the professional athletes of tomorrow. Is this the best we can expect from the world’s best university system?

Reforming Higher Education

The criticism of higher education is markedly different than the problems with K-12 education. Many of these problems stem from the fact that college students are essentially adults, free to make their own decisions about their lives. College students are still young and still need plenty of support to succeed within a university system that is often “sink or swim.”

A few of these proposed problems include:

• High dropout rates
• Cost
• Lack of real on-the-job skills
• Lack of privatization
• Accreditation

America has one of the best university systems in the world. It functions fairly well; however, much like its K-12 companion, dropout rates are somewhat higher. When I attended the University of Northern Colorado, I sat in on a panel that announced our freshmen dropout rate: 50%. That was in 2008. Most of the freshmen were lost between the first and second semesters. This means that first-year students would arrive on our campus, take classes for a few months, and then simply drop out. UNCO was a 2nd tier school in a state with two big research institutions that often pulled the best students in before our smaller school had a chance to attract them. That said, solving the high dropout rate was a high priority for the administration.

Over the past 20 years or so, the push for many students has been to go to college. One of the goals for Race to the Top was to provide education to get kids ready for college. College preparation came into sharp focus in the Nation At Risk report in 1983. Much of the emphasis on education was getting students prepared for tomorrow’s jobs, which usually meant some form of post-secondary education. However, as we’ve seen since the Great Recession, that push may have been a mistake. This push created a generation of people armed with a Bachelor’s degree (or higher), but for whom underemployment has been a story for decades. While some people would blame that on too many people getting “meaningless degrees in the humanities,” anecdotal reports show that even lawyers and business administration majors are also having trouble.

Some of the most popular reforms include reducing costs or making college entirely free. Others have promoted the idea of 3 year Bachelor degrees and an increased focus on private colleges. However, the focus on private colleges deserves attention. In the aftermath of the Great Recession, private colleges were in sharp focus due to various scandals, including lying about graduation and employment rates of graduates. Many people had paid thousands of dollars by student loans to get these

degrees that turned out to be useless. Many of the school’s reputations were so bad that employers saw that particular education credential and simply threw out resumes believing that the graduate must not be competent with that nature of instruction. Large chains, like Corinthian Colleges, ended up being sued and closed their doors. Some borrowers are eligible for loan forgiveness due to the lies. Much like charter schools, privatization has had mixed results.

However, the cost factor is a significant criticism. College tuition in the 1960s and 1970s was notoriously cheap. Some states, like California, offered free university education. Since the 1980s, college tuition has skyrocketed. Since the Great Recession, tuition at four-year public colleges has risen by $2,670 and $7,390 at private schools. The farther back you go, the worse the picture gets. What has caused this crisis of cost? Two factors are at play. One, the availability of student loans and high caps for federally backed lending purposes. Another factor is the erosion of state funding for higher education. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, even just since the Great Recession, there is still a 9 billion dollar shortfall. Historically, the picture gets even worse. Part of the responsibility of the increased cost of tuition has to do with decisions made in state capitals throughout the nation. Universities have since shifted the burden of large institutions onto students. Universities are also competing for students. This has driven schools to increase their facilities and their opportunities, especially in popular fields where the potential for high-earning graduates exists. This has a tremendous cost, and it often comes with partnerships with businesses or at the expense of less glamorous programs.

However, most young adults go to college to get a leg up in the job market. Many jobs, especially in our information-driven world, require degrees. While many jobs most likely don’t need those skills, that is the reality of chasing job seekers. There is also the carrot of the $1 million in extra earnings that most college graduates earn in their lifetime. However, there are many barriers to college success, and they are familiar to the reader. Many college students cannot hold down jobs and keep up with the ever-demanding classwork. This means that many students have extreme food insecurity, and some stories have surfaced of students living in their cars because that is their only affordable housing option. This makes college completion, especially for working-class students, difficult.

Since the Great Recession, many people have complained that graduates don’t have “workforce ready job skills.” While this criticism is valid, college was never designed to provide job-ready skills. It was designed to deliver critical thinking and intelligent workers to companies who then would train them. However, as companies have raised the standards for entry-level jobs and reduced employee investment, employers complain they can’t find the people they need. The people are there; they simply need the right kind of training. When companies train their workers, it pays off for them and society as a whole. Employers need to return to a model where they teach and promote from within, rather than simply looking for someone who already has all the skills they might require. However, this may need some subsidization from

The government to make this a reality. There is also another way to solve this problem, and that is some sort of post-college skills training for specific jobs in partnership with businesses that would be ready to hire these newly skilled workers. To make this fair, they would need to extend this to all graduates from all majors, just not the majors they like.

Accreditation has been described as an evil cartel that restricts new entrants into the college market. Accreditation started as a consumer protection measure to expose diploma mills and other dishonest educational institutions. Accreditation agencies are often staffed by the same regional institutions they accredit. This is an area where competition could be increased. The accreditation system is valuable for protecting students from diploma mills; however, this is an area where the government could again do some great good by providing oversight and restricting who can sit on the boards of those agencies. A federal accreditation system may eliminate this problem.

Solving the dropout problem and the resulting untenable debt that goes with it requires some similar solutions for K-12 education. College students need identical support as they did when they were in the K-12 system. This means extending social programs for students and providing resources to ensure that all students have access to food and shelter during their studies. This can be accomplished by expanding grant programs and possibly creating a new program for the lowest-income students. Universities also need to pay closer attention to students on the edge of dropping out. Resources, via counseling and advice, should be extended for those who are failing classes, withdrawing from classes, or simply aren’t having any success in their college career.

None of these reforms should come at the cost of losing the humanities and liberal education as we have known it. Since the Great Recession, the humanities have come under fire as simply useless. That is far from the case. The last thing higher education needs is to create programs where students only take classes that they are interested into the detriment of other subjects. The whole purpose of a college education is to get a broad-based sense of knowledge, and I fear that in all our discussions around college and post-secondary education, the humanities will be lost in the shuffle.

Fewer People Going to College

The best way to reform higher education is to change who goes. Many students don’t need to go to college. Our push for college has reduced the meaning of a bachelor to practically nothing. Most people would be better served by pursuing other forms of study. This is where job training through the community college system could be a game-changer for many young adults. Then, they could pick up great classes with great skills that translate into better jobs for the future. It is long past time to take stock of who is going to college and if that truly is the best option for them. This is another area where the European system has an advantage.

Online Education Is Not the Answer

The internet has changed many parts of our lives, and education is one area where technology proponents have great hope. Rather than sit through boring lectures from a professor, these innovators envision people learning skills that they need from MOOCs (massive open online courses) from experts all around the world from the comfort of anywhere. However, this does not consider the wonderful opportunities that universities provide for the communities where they are and the massive number of jobs that these schools offer to skilled and unskilled workers alike. Universities are repositories of knowledge and research. They are not merely places for people to learn skills for jobs. This attitude that education is only for economic benefit is worrying because it defies the basic idea of education; it makes for better people in the long run.

Despite all the criticisms, the college system works incredibly well, as, with many institutions in America, it just needs a few tweaks to make it work better for everyone. Obviously, returning the funding levels of the pre-Reagan era would reduce the costs for working parents and reduce the debt load. Proposals like Senator Bernie Sanders’ idea for free college have begun a national conversation about the value of education. Education is a pathway to a better society. If we want that society, we must value education at all levels and put our prodigious wealth and resources toward that end. America is a nation at risk, a nation at risk of losing its edge because the cost barrier is too high, and students from poorer backgrounds cannot afford college or live while they are studying. Education is the pathway to a better America, but for that pathway to work, it needs to be available to everyone who chooses to pursue it, and it needs to be high quality. If we support students, then we keep the nation.

To Solve Schools, you Have to Solve America

In the research for this essay, one fact stood out: schools are deeply affected by other public policy problems.

These include:

• Schools are on the front-lines of America’s social problems
• Racism
• Classism
• Income inequality
• Taxation
• What it means to be an American

Because schools have a tradition of being the primary force in creating the melting pot, every social problem that we have affects education, and schools are tasked with dealing with those problems. This even extends to college, where students face budding adulthood. Colleges have to learn how to deal with students who may not have health insurance, have mental health issues, or students with children who are still trying to achieve their education.

As much as governments continue to “fund education,” we also need to fund students. America needs to provide social resources for them to learn in a positive environment and help them overcome barriers to education. Students bring all the problems of their lives to the classroom. This puts America’s schools on the frontlines of our social issues. Integrating schools doesn’t matter if society is fundamentally racist. America cannot have equal access to education if we do not have equally funded education. High test scores cannot happen for students without solving food insecurity and poverty. Policies like universal childcare and leveling out income inequality through a basic income or other social services are the only way to make it easy for students to come to class: ready to learn.

Fully funding schools makes sure that buildings are kept up, and textbooks are up to date with the latest information. Although corporations might make a splash with the newest school, they have chosen to help with new tech or other help; this does not replace the simple act of making sure every school throughout the country has the same resources and meets the minimum standards. This does not replace the ability of schools to make sure that children have food, clothing, and school supplies. Charity cannot always provide for these things. If education is important, it is up to society to create the right conditions for success.

Without supporting teachers and students, we aren’t addressing the real problems with our education system. It is a minor miracle that any child is able to achieve in American schools, considering the system that they are asked to learn within. America has 3.2 million people educating 50 million children with various needs, problems, and issues. They have not supported the way they need to be, and they lack the necessary resources to make a truly great education possible.

However, another part of that is directly addressing the problems we have as a society. For students to thrive, we need to create a society that is inclusive of all and addresses our lackluster social safety net. We can truly get to the root of what is wrong with public education by addressing these problems. Education isn’t broken; the society it exists in is broken. To fix one problem, we must address many other problems. Some of them are difficult, and some are hard, but through intelligent public policy, wise legislation, and bipartisanship, society can improve, and better schools will result. Education is not a basic problem. It is incredibly complicated. Research for this essay revealed that from the first Google search. Education is a by-product, not the solution. When society is going well, education will improve at the same time.