education crisis, saw it on oprah Options

[marzipan]

i saw this thing on oprah about how badly some schools in the US are doing. they say the US isn't even in the top 20 when it comes to education or something. for example: they asked a bunch of people what the first 5 presidents in the US were. a chinese girl got them all right. george washington, john adams, thomas jefferson, james madison, james monroe....and then they asked some americans. some guessed abraham lincoln and most of them had no clue. i couldn't believe it! they live in america and don't even know the 1st president. bill gates and his wife are working to fix this educational crisis. what are your opinions on it?

(i think this should be in debate)

[*mipadi*]

Having spent a couple years in college, I am inclined to agree that, for the most part, the public school system in the United States is not as good as it could be, for several reasons:

1. Standardized tests. Much of the educational resources go towards teaching students to do well on standardized tests. As a result, students' attentions are focused on rote memorization, not acquiring actual skills (e.g. problem-solving or truly understanding a concept). Standardized tests reward those who can spit back information in a standard way—not necessarily the same people who are "outside the box" thinkers, which is the type of thinking that thrives in the real world.
2. Exceptional students are not encouraged to learn. Emphasis is placed on catching failing students up to their peers, but in public high schools, exceptional students are not encouraged to be lifelong learners—once they get older, at least. For example, in my school, I was in the gifted program. From first to fifth grade, I had a special class every week for half a day. We learned lots of cool stuff I never learned in school: Fibonacci numbers, Pascal triangles, roots, Venn diagrams, the Dark Ages and the Renaissance, how to make movies, stuff about art and literature, and so forth. It was a lot of fun, and I was really encouraged to learn about things on my own. Every year each of us did a big research project that was actually fun because we got to do whatever we wanted. We also had an "Invention Convention" where we invented a new gadget, and a problem-solving night.
   
   Of course, that ended when I got to middle school. Suddenly, it seemed like no one cared if I learned. I wasn't really encouraged to excel. By high school, everything was so easy for me that I ended up never doing any work, which put me at a disadvantage in college. I blame a lot of it on the fact that the school didn't do a lot to encourage me to learn on my own, yet no one ever told me that I wasn't applying myself hard enough. I had a 4.0 GPA—how was I supposed to know I was being lazy? Plus I was a high school kid. I wanted to hang out with friends. And since I was doing well in school, how was I to know I was putting myself at a great disadvantage?
3. No Child Left Behind. This is sort of a combination of 1 and 2. No Child Left Behind focuses on poor students, while largely ignoring exceptional ones. It also places great stress on teachers to teach for tests, rather than to teach for life (and lifelong learning). It looks good in politics, but absolutely fails in the real world.

I went to a public high school, and graduated 7th in a class of 140. I go to a nice private school where a large percentage of students went to private schools or prep schools for high school. Honestly, I often feel like the "dumb kid" compared to them, and largely feel its because of the lackluster secondary education I received.

The US educational system is not terrible, not in the least, but there are a few key areas where it could stand to improve.