The Pros And Cons Of The American Educational System

So, how did the American Educational System end up like this? Funding for schools comes mostly from two places: state taxes and local property taxes (Gjaja 3). The money collected from that helps fund schools with replacing old books, repairing classrooms, or an entire makeover of the school. State and local taxes are what keeps schools functioning. It has its positives and negatives to it, for sure. For example, when a city agrees to pay more in taxes for a year to help replace broken down computer labs in an elementary school, the community bonds and it positively affects the learning environment. On the other hand, when the economy hits a recession, local and state taxes drop significantly and schools are hit hard with that (School

Specifically, “less than ten percent [of school funds] comes from the federal government” (School Funding). That percentage is mostly because of “rising student debt and lack of improved student performance” (School Funding 1). Still, the U.S. government tries to support their educational system. Even though the help that the states receive from the federal government isn’t that great of help. The US government created new policies, regulations and administrative roles to help underfunded schools (School Funding 2). Those new additions negatively impact schools in a multitude of ways. With those new positions and policies placed within schools, less money was being directed to the students and more of it was directed to the new positions they had to fill by federal law. In addition to the new regulations, most of the funding that the U.S. government sends is used for teacher salaries and benefits. Consequently, if schools don’t have many teachers, then they don’t have to pay so much for their salaries. Sadly, this is the common solution: transferring teachers to new schools so that the original school can take the money they would have spent on the teacher and use it towards the students more directly (Sargrad 2). Not only is this harmful towards teachers, but it also affects the students. The money that schools get from the U.S. government, as one can tell, comes with many strings

But if you look at the funding within the Department of Education itself and how well it’s supported, you can see that there’s obviously a problem. The Department of Education only gets about an eighth of the budget that the Department of Defense gets (School Funding 2). Even with that small budget, many republicans think that it should be a state issue and that the government shouldn’t even have a Department of Defense (School Funding). Surprisingly, when Republican George W. Bush became president, he created the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act in 2001 (Battenfield 1). It looked like it was going to create solutions to the blatant problem of underfunded schools. Unfortunately, it fell short on many accounts. It had many good intentions, yet the problem was too big for this Act to handle. The NCLB act provided a lot of funding to schools, but not in the parts that needed to be funded. It created a lot of standards for schools to complete and pass if they wanted to have funding. Meaning this act created more disadvantages to low income area schools than what was already there (School