America’s Struggle in Education
According toNewsweek’srankingof the best/effective countries around the world in terms of learning, Finland is number one in education while the United States is ranked 26th. 26this not so far from one but because it is the United States, well that is pretty far off indeed. So what is going on with the United States’ educational system that it has not madeNewsweekrank it number one? After all, the United States is flaunted as the land of opportunity, the greatest nation to grace our planet Earth.This has interested me because as a child of parents who immigrated to this country so I could have the best education available, I am wondering why the best education is in Finland and not here, in the United States which is almost number one in every other Newsweek category (which will be discussed later). It just cannot be that there is a country full of bad teachers and a country just full of good teachers; there must be something else wrong with the educational system that is causing it to fall behind internationally in education. Can the United States educational system take steps to become ranked number one in the world?
Before researching on ways the United States’ educational system could improve I started of my research off on what the serious problems are causing the U.S. educational system to fall behind. So after looking through articles and scholarly papers of what seemed that might help me give a simple description of what the issues causing the U.S. educational system to fall, I came up with nothing but graphs and statistics that would only help me later on in my research. So I turned to a different medium. This medium was video news reports. I happen to find a great video byCBS Newscalled “Where America Stands: Education”. In this video, reporter Russ Mitchell gives a layout of what challenges the United States of America’s educational system faces. In his layout Mitchell points out three problems: society, material learned and politics. Mitchell interviews Washington, D.C’s, school Chancellor Michelle Rhee in which she talks about how many feel that it is the kids that are not doing a good job when in factit is not the children’s fault but the educational systems fault. Rhee says, “"In society there is not a particularly high regard for education", meaning that in American society there is no driving force that makes kids want to be educated and that it is frowned upon. What Rhee said made me think more about this issue as I never thought about it that way in which obtaining education is not seen equally to all other people, I was viewing it through my eyes and how it was seen in my family. While education can be the least important thing in one household it can be the most important in another’s. While this might necessarily not apply to Finland, many other countries above the Unites States in the Newsweekrankings, Kazakhstan, Poland, and Cuba, are developing nations, where the next generation’s only means of survival is the obtaining of an education. Compare that to the United States, where such social pressures are not felt to the predominantly “privileged” youth. Even when examining education within the American population, there is evidence that suggests that those of higher socioeconomic factors perform better than the less privileged. According to government based finance research performed by Christopher Lubianski and Sarah TheuleLubianski of the University of Illinois schools outperform private schools and are on par with charter schools in math testing. The test used a scientific formula that was able to equalize socioeconomic factors like income, and domestic circumstances. Taken out of a sample of 340,000 fourth and eighth grade students across 13,000 schools, the study concluded that public schools outscored private schools by four points in examinations recognized by the National Assessment of Educational progress. With these sorts of dynamics and the diversity of the United States, this could be a challenging problem to tackle by educators. How does one balance or improve a system in which multiple socioeconomic factors have complex results on how the education system operates with the United States? Does reallocating funding amongst the private school versus public school system alter the dynamic for the better?
The second thing addressed by Mitchell was that the right kind of material is not covered in schools.“Unlike most other countries that have national standards of what to teach, in the U.S., it's a state-by-state decision,” says Mitchell. This complexity and lack of uniformity means that instead of having a national educational standard there is actually a state by state educational standard which that alone is a problem for any country. I began to wonder why that is and why it has never occurred to me that maybe the way kids are learning in New York could be entirely different from the way kids in Ohio are learning. This made me think I already solved the issue. America just needs to have a national education standard, one that every state follows uniformly. However as I continued watching the video my solution to having a national education standard didn’t seem as easy as I thought it would be. Politics was a third problem facing the American educational system says Mitchell. This quickly put a wall around my idea of a national education standard in which politics, on the national stage is already a convoluted mess. It already is bad enough dealing with each state’s political issues. To even try to come together and agree upon a bi-partisan national education standard for the United States would probably be a nightmare. Mitchell states that, “tenure and unions protect even bad teachers, and with limited funds, there's always a budget battle. More money for a successful charter school, for instance, means less for public schools,” bad teachers that can’t get fired and worrying about money just builds up issue on the educational system and with all three things stated by Mitchell, it really doesn’t look as if the educational system can be changed. Contrast this Finland which has a national, egalitarian school system. Much like many other European countries, Finnish citizens pay substantiallyhigher taxes, 28 percent tax rate, than citizens in the United States. However, these taxes cover the free tuition for the universal public schools within the countryas is the case in Holland, Estonia, Belgium, Switzerland, and Poland which all rank higher than the United States. On a student by student basis, only 2100 Euros are spent per capita, compared to 13,500 dollars which equals 9,990 euros, while still being able to provide such amenities as one free meal a day to students up to the age of 16-19 (the entrance of secondary education.) Another advantage that Finland makes good use of is the general population size: average class sizes across all sections of education hover around the mark of twenty per class, leading to more individualized and concentrated learning.
A more specific example of a body of politics that may have adversely affected the effectiveness of the United States of America’s education system is the piece of legislation known as the “No Child Left Behind Act” (NCLB). The subtext read of the bill stated:“An act to close the achievement gap with accountability, flexibility, and choice, so that no child is left behind.”Instituted in 2002 right after George W. Bush began his tenure as the President of the United States, the bill was widely accepted by both political parties. NCLB was drafted to set measurable goals that would lead students to obtaining certain skills if these educational institutions were to receive federal funds. The legislation did not mandate national standards, but instead allowed individual states to set benchmarks for student performance. The one mandate that the legislation obligated was that all students would reach the level of “proficient” by the year 2014 in the subjects of math and reading. The end result was to see improvement in test results as well as greater accountability to schools. Over its course of existence, over one hundred billion dollars has been apportioned towards the project. However, in recent times, the bill’s effect on the nation’s educational system has been questioned. Statistics conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & Press show that only 30 percent of parents have seen visible changes that have made their child’s school “better.” One problem that has been seen as a major flaw of NCLB has been the concept of “teaching to the test.” While the bill does a good job of making an all-inclusive promise to meet standards set by states’ education board, the problem is these standards that are being met have been lowered in order to inflate results. So the sequence events is as follows: a)lower standards to include students who aren’t achieving at “acceptable” levels b)teach these students limited content in order to coincide with the limited standards that have been set (“to the test”) c) have a larger student body pass under the weakened mandates and report these results as improvements. According to a 2009 study done by the New York Times in the article "Federal Researchers Find Lower Standards in Schools", nearly a third of the states, 15 to be exact, have lowered their respective standards in order to meet artificial quotas. NCLB evaluates the subjects of reading and math at the fourth and eighth grade levels. Of the fifteen states, three: Maine, Oklahoma and Wyoming lowered test standards for both grade levels as well as both subject matters. Conversely, only eight states increased their rating standards. Louis Fabrizio, director of the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction has a very applicable quote, as taken from theabove mentioned New York Times article:
“When you set standards, do you want to show success under N.C.L.B. by having higher percentages of students at proficiency, in which case you’ll set lower standards? Or do you want to do the right thing for kids, by setting them higher so they’re comparable with our global competitors?”
In essence the document has seemed to do more harm than good. While in the onset it seemed like a positive step in collectively bringing education to a higher standard as well as a higher population. However, the No Child Left Behind Act has ,at least as of right now, turned out to be another failure by the government to take an effective step in reaming competitive in the global environment and raising education standards in the states.
In the next part of my research I wanted to know what makes Finland’s education so good that it has caused it to be ranked number one in the world. In the article, “What makes education in Finland that good? 10 reform principles behind thesuccess” by Bert Maes, Maes goes through , as the article states, 10 reform principles that makes educational system effective and gives brief descriptions of each one, bolding key methods that stand out in each reform principle.Two of their methods stood out the most for me; one was that there are no mandatory tests or exams except for their nationwide National Matriculation Examination which is given to students at the end of their upper-secondary school which is when they are between the ages of 17-19. This shocked me because tests and exams are what drive schools in the United States because most of the money that schools receive is based on how students do on nationwide examinations given yearly. Maes points this out and says, “Teachers have more real freedom in time planning when they do not need have to focus on annual tests or exams,” which I think would please a lot of American teachers if they also had this opportunity because throughout my years in high school I would always get two or three teachers who would begin the first day of school along the lines of , “I am here so you can be successful inthe ______exam”also known as, again, “teaching to the test”.The American system’s emphasis on testing and the resulting constraints on time lead to less understanding on the side of the students. This leads to more memorization than understanding, which has adverse effects on the learning process. Instead of learning skills that would assist long-term in the workforce, students were absorbing information at surface letter in order to merely get an “A” grade. In research done by Harvard professor Dr. Eric Mazur, he wanted to challenge students to retain the content of his class, but in a manner that would benefit them long-term. Titled “Understanding or memorization: Are we teaching the right thing?”Mazur included a less rigid lesson plan, allowing students to more freely interact with their instructor. Mazur also decided to deviate from redundant computations and avoided inundating students with facts and number filled problems. Instead, Mazur implemented group learning/peer work, an aspect of education very common in Finland as well as an emphasis on comprehension as opposed to execution. Mazur believed that students would enjoy learning as well as benefit more, if they understood the concepts they were being taught, instead of being fed the mechanical operations needed to get “the right answer.” Mazur’s experiment proved his theory to be correct. From his small sample size, he saw not only an impressive 17 percent improvement in students’ average grade, 40 percent of Mazur’s students scored higher on the quantitative sections .If teachers were given more flexibility and allowed to explore the content in greater depth with their students, more desirable results would as opposed to only teaching to meet time constraints.
Speaking of content, Mazur’s research on effective teaching methods would be especially important in the fields of math and science, in which the United States struggles. The New York Times ranks the United States ranks 27th out of the 29 wealthy nations in the world, behind not only Finland, but emerging economic powers China, and Japan. The United States overall ranks a dismal 48th amongst developing/developed countries in the fields of math and science. Math is one of the areas that have been targeted by the No Child Left Behind Act and an improvement in the field of science will lead to better production of technology which will boost the U.S.’s economy. The increase in aptitude of techy savvy students would lead to more homegrown breakthroughs and less reliance on the east for revolutionary technologies. The positive correlation between economy and education is one of the criteria for ranking an effective education system thus more emphasis and better results in math and science would lead to such desirable results.
The second method that stood out was that in Finland the government works as one when it comes to education and share’s a common goal. Maes says that, “In many countries the opposing-parties usually polarize debates and public opinion”. This is especially true in the United States with local elections every November where television, radio and internet ads tell you that a certain issue will cut funding to schools so don’t vote on it. However, on the flipside, another issue that puts more cops on the street will cut funding to schools, which would adversely affect your child’s education. How does one strike that balance? That can be a tough decision for many parents who want their kids to be safe and also want their school to have the money needed so their child can succeed in the world.
The other issue that is easily overlooked by many is what criteriaNewsweekused in ranking education in countries. There is no better place to look for that answer then fromNewsweek‘s website where it laid out a brief explanation on how they determined the education rankings. Itwasa “combined universal score on TIMSS (trends in international math/science studies) and/ or PISA (program of international students assessment) tests using Eric Hanushek's normalization methodology”. Eric Hanushek’s normalizationmethodology is I basically a dataof countriesand how good education affects things like economic growthand incomegrowth in those countries. This is particularly evident in the United States in terms of cross continental students in higher education. Many students who do benefit from America’s 26th ranked education system are taking the knowledge and skills developed in American institutions and returning to their respective countries. Basically, the concept is the converse of the brain drain. UC Berkeley News conducted a study on international students and how they viewed the United States’ standing in the modern globalized economy. According to UC Berkeley’s report, 37.5, 54.9, 51.4 percent of international students from India, Europe, and China respectively do not expect the United States to offer any further opportunities to them outside of education. This is based on their perception of another contributing factor to the education system; the economy. Another problem that is semi-connected to this issue is the concept of outsourcing and lack of skilled technical workers. Many large corporations within the United States have jobs in conjunction with technology done overseas. Why you might ask? One obvious reason is cheaper labor, but another reason is that there is a lack of American graduates skilled in the fields of engineering, information technology, programming, and computer science. In Bassem Khafagi’s scholarly journal “Influence of International Students on the United States Educational System and Professional Practice”, he explores how even within the United States, American students fall behind in the fields of math, science, and technology. Khafgai’s article focuses on the discipline of engineering. According to his research done in the early 1990’s, fifty-five percent of graduate students at the college level whom majored in the fields of engineering were international students. Also, sixty-eight percent of teacher assistantships and forty-nine percent of research assistantships were also held by international students. Khafagi’ stated in his work that, “some analysts feel that reliance on foreign technology and technologists will prove much more devastating than reliance on foreign oil.” In many ways Khafagi was forecasting the climate we occupy today. Furthering the point on technology, just recently, in a January article in the Denver Business Journal, American universities saw the first rise of graduates in the fields of computer related sciences in ten years. This hole in the education system has meant that America’s higher learning systems were not directly pumping revenue into the American economy, instead relying on innovation and technological advancements from overseas. On the bright side, if current trends continue, there is hope, and for the sake of the next generation it must hop on the technological bandwagon; by 2018, four million jobs are projected to open up in the field of computer occupations in the United States. Expanding the content of the system will also eliminate a fraction of businesses outsourcing, making it more affordable to do such jobs within the states’ borders.