A Primer on Education

One in four high school students in America don't graduate - one in three among black and Hispanic populations. Reading, math, and science achievement scores for American public school students rank average to below average compared to OECD nations, with little improvement since 2000. These facts, and a host of others, point to what many agree is an education system in crisis.

There is less agreement, though, on the causes of the crisis, and still less on the solutions. The usual suspects in these discussions are the following:

Standards and Accountability

In this view, schools need to set higher expectations of students, and tolerate nothing less. Clearly defined standards in each subject area, along with performance benchmarks students must meet to show mastery, should be laid out by grade level, and "vertically aligned" in a seamless progression from grade to grade. If students can't meet the standards, they should be held back. Standardized tests measuring yearly progress should be given to each student, and any teacher - and any school - whose students don't do well on these tests should be held accountable. Teacher training should focus on teaching to meet the standards, and the "core classes" - reading, math, and science - should be expanded, while elective classes and extra-curricular activities should be reduced.

The standards and accountability movement is essentially the approach of the No Child Left Behind act. It has passionate advocates, and equally impassioned detractors. See Top Five Controversies for more.

Student-Centered Pedagogy

This movement finds fault with the approach to teaching and learning embraced in many traditional schools. It argues that students perform poorly and drop out because classroom instruction has no relevance to them, and so fails to engage them. It argues that the traditional lecture, rote memorization of facts, skill-and-drill exercises, and de-contextualized content typical of so many classrooms are remnants of the "factory school" approach of the last two centuries, and are no longer adequate for the 21st century, digitally globalized Information Age.

The student-centered school calls for embracing innovative pedagogy that develops student ability to think critically, to solve problems, to exercise creativity. Arguing that one standard cannot apply to the vast array of individual student ability and interest levels, it calls for differentiated instruction that takes these individual differences into account. It places a higher emphasis on group work, aiming to develop in students the skills of teamwork, collaboration, and social intelligence necessary in the real world. Instead of report cards with letter grades based on factual mastery only, it calls for assessments based on observation of discrete traits of each student’s work and social habits, as well as on portfolios of student work. Narrative reports would replace letter grades to give a fuller picture of each student's strengths, weaknesses, and gains.

The student-centered camp also calls for a re-thinking of traditional "core subjects," each separated from the other, and calls for more inter-disciplinary and thematic inquiry. Science, math, history, and literature, in this view, should all connect in student studies, as they always have in reality.

School Choice

The school choice movement argues that parents whose children attend under-performing schools should have the choice to use vouchers, funded by tax dollars, to send their children to any school they desire - public (including charter), private, or religious. Vouchers should be pegged to the amount of money a district spends per student, and competing schools should be forced to set their tuition at this rate to make school choice affordable for low- and middle-income parents. Charter schools, public-funded but independent of public school policy in curriculum, administration, and staffing, should be encouraged in order to promote experimentation in educational models. Corporations and other for-profit bodies should be encouraged to enter the school choice market in order to put competitive pressures on traditional public schools to improve.

The school choice movement is a hotbed of contention. For more, see the Five Biggest Controversies page.

Funding Reform

According to this view, schools fail due to inequities in funding. Schools in affluent areas perform better than schools in poor areas because richer areas have more funds to spend on the teachers and resources necessary for successful learning. To improve failing schools in poor rural and urban areas, sources of funding beyond property taxes - the most common source of school revenues - must be found to redress this imbalance. Higher funding in these poor schools would enable them to: attract, retain, and train higher quality teachers; provide more access to advanced classes such Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate programs, which are currently not available in poor schools to the degree they are in affluent ones; and repair crumbling schools, upgrade their libraries and lab equipment, and modernize their technology infrastructure with broadband access and computers.

Proponents of funding reform strongly oppose the School Choice movement as an assault on the foundations of universal public education for all. For more on this, see the Top Five Controversies page.

So what's the best way to change schools? Inform yourself, be willing to think outside the box, and above all, be active with feet, voice, or wallet on local and national levels. The future's a horrible thing to leave in other people's hands.