Pros And Cons Of Improving The American School System

The world of education is constantly changing: federal laws come and go like fashion trends. From the surface, it seems as if the American school system is making strides each year towards creating the best learning environment possible for young Americans. In reality, the world of education is going in circles, trying to find success by making slight alterations to the same techniques that have never worked before. There is plenty of literature on the subject: educators, politicians, and community members all have opinions on what will improve the current system. Some say that schools are doing their jobs, either not recognizing or believing that the widespread hatred of school is reason enough to call for change. The following paragraphs

Lyndsey Layton (2013) points out that the risks involved -- teacher compensation and job security -- led to cheating, tightening of the curriculum, and stress in young children. If children weren’t experiencing stress so early, perhaps the culture of stress that surrounds American society -- particularly teenagers -- wouldn’t exist. The American Psychological Association (2014) has released a study that shows teen stress levels are often higher than that of adults. While this is certainly an alarming claim, standardized testing alone can’t be blamed for the stress culture that encircles students. Layton (2013) provides a quote from a Pearson lobbyist who believes, “If a test is done right...there is no more efficient, less expensive, no simpler way to get a snapshot of whether students are effectively learning.” A Pittsburgh public school superintendent claims that the tests are valuable to her district, and that anti testing advocates are “overstating the impact of standardized tests.” Nel Noddings(2006) refutes this claim in her book Critical Lessons: What our Schools Should Teach: “Even if test scores were to rise...the material would be mostly forgotten after the test”(p.). Noddings is pointing out what testing advocates don’t like to admit. The only thing these tests are measuring is how well schools are

In his book about success, Malcolm Gladwell (2008) makes two different cases for how the world’s perception of education is skewed. The first case is that children enter into Kindergarten either with a sizeable advantage over their peers, or with a disadvantage, because of cut-off dates. A young child’s mind grows so rapidly that a student who is ten-twelve months older than another is certain to be more competent. Elizabeth Dhuey says that Kindergarten and first grade teachers often confuse maturity with ability. “They put the older kids in the advanced stream, where they learn better skills; and the next year, because they are in the higher groups, they do even better; and the next year; the same thing happens, and they do it even better again”(p. 29). Gladwell points out that parents probably believe the disadvantage their child faces in Kindergarten will go away. “But it doesn’t...the small initial advantage that the child born in the early part of the year has over the child born at the end of the year persists. It locks children into patterns of achievement and underachievement, encouragement and discouragement, that stretch on and on for years(p. 28)”. The second case Gladwell makes is about summer vacation and how detrimental it is to student’s -- particularly poor students -- education. Middle class parents usually believe in concerted cultivation: “an attempt to actively