Education: What’s next?

John F. Kennedy once said, “All of us do not have equal talent, but all of us should have an equal opportunity to develop our talent”.  The system of higher education in the United States should, ideally, rest upon this principle: the idea that learning provides a haven to both discover and develop skills and that no impediment, fiscal or otherwise, should obstruct one’s place in the public school system where these valuable skills are cultivated, and ultimately filtered into the jobs market. At a time in which our means are being tested and our resources stretched thin, the integrity of this system must be defended through programs that seek to create accessibility and equality in education. During his first term in office, President Obama has signed several pieces of legislation that seek to ease the financial burdens of higher education on families and young professionals. In 2010, the passage of the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA) set the benchmark for the administration’s goal of ensuring that by the year 2020, the United States will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world (The White House). Included in the legislation are sweeping financial reforms, including the creation of student loan program based exclusively on direct loans, a more generous Pell grant program, and reforms to the Income Based Repayment program.

The pages of history of the United States are full of changes imposed from outside on the education system, but these changes are largely ineffective if the status quo is still accepted within the system.  The inherent failure method of government enacting all changes on the education system is most evident in the failed No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), passed with bipartisan Congressional support and signed into law by former President George W. Bush in 2001. The legislation sought to narrow the achievement gap between minority students and their classmates, by requiring federally funded schools to administer yearly standardized testing to students, the results which would be used to measure the school’s progress and quality. While testing measured basic proficiency in subjects such as reading and math, progress was also based upon graduation rates for high schools and attendance rates for middle and elementary schools (“Fact Sheet on the Major”). The schools that failed to meet the proficiency standards for consecutive years faced a loss of federal funding and possible closure. While the idea of creating uniform standards for school systems across the nation might seem beneficial, such policies do not consider differing needs that must be met for individual students and educators. The law measures student aptitude on the basis of reading and math standardized testing, and does not account for students that might be talented in other academic areas, such as foreign language and science. Additionally, schools became pressurized into diverting funding from other academic programs in order to ensure that enough focus is placed upon the subjects that require testing. And ultimately, the law served to create further disparities in educational achievement from state to state because the provisions were enforce through unfunded mandates, by which states must appropriate their own funding to carry out federal legislation. Subsequently, wealthier states are then able to provide the necessary resources to meet the standards, and therefore remain eligible to receive federal education funding, while poorer schools, unable to provide the monetary resources to meet the required standards, lose federal funding. By this reinforcing mechanism, the achievement gap grows, rather than narrowing.

So the question becomes: if the supposed improvements that are imposed upon our education turn out to be detrimental to students and educators, where should the changes come from? There is no doubt that the status quo is not sufficient, and statistics glaringly speak to this harsh reality. Internationally, United States students lag behind in terms of basic education skills, including math, literacy, and science. Among industrialized nations, the United States ranks twelfth in the percentage of adults between the ages of 25 and 34 with a college degree, and unfortunately, this is due in part of exorbitantly high tuition costs and a lack of availability of financial aid during trying economic times. This presents a dual challenge, the first being to make education more readily available, and the second being to change the education system in way that would encourage students to want to perform well for reasons beyond meeting the academic requirements that society deems acceptable. The former is an issue that, unfortunately, must be addressed through government measures and structural reform. The latter, however, is a change that involves significantly less bureaucracy.

At the present moment, the process of evaluation that is employed in the U.S. education system creates an environment in which students are held accountable based on standards that are artificially imposed by society. The fact is that the coveted A’s and 4.0 GPA’s that students so closely covet are simply ink on a piece of paper.  The education system is based on a “one size fits all approach”, the expectation being that students will enter it at the pre-elementary school level, and improve over the years so that by the time they are ready to enter the workforce, all students that complete an education have the same skill set and are able to perform at the same level. There are two flaws in this logic, the first being that one student may have a vastly different skill set than another student, and the second being that the imposition of a set of achievement standards only encourages students to meet those standards, without exploring the educational experiences that may lay beyond them.  These two issues, in conjunction with one another, create a group of young adults that may be considered working professionals by the grading scale, but may actually be far from their full potential.

In an age where the federal government sits in constant gridlock, and state and local governments are ensnared in debt and infrastructure problems, the reality is that any changes that need to be made to the education system, with the exceptional of fiscal appropriations, will most likely be pushed to the bottom of the legislative agenda. This, however, is not necessarily a bad thing. These much-needed reforms need to begin from the bottom up, perhaps through a grassroots movement. This is arguably the most effective way to secure such changes, as students, teachers, professors, and staff are the individuals that experience the workings of the system every day.  As class sizes continue to grow, there is little time for educators to develop an understanding of the individual needs of their students.  Large classes force educators to employ ways of evaluating students that are easy to grade, such as multiple -choice exams. While some students excel at these types of tests, others do not, yet their grade and because society will ultimately evaluate their proficiency based on grades, this becomes an unfair and perhaps inaccurate reflection of the student’s abilities. Moreover, the use of multiple choice tests as the preferred testing medium requires students to simply recall the information presented to them by the teacher or professor, and does little to necessitate critical thinking, as an essay or presentation might. For this reason, students should have the option to choose the way in which they are assessed, so that their abilities may be best reflected in their work. Though it may be argued that this would upset the uniformity of the education system, the effect would actually be quite the opposite, because students would not be slighted by evaluations that fail to reflect their abilities.

Beyond the general process of evaluation, the traditional 4.0 grading scale should be replaced by a more subjective, non-numerical grading scale. Similar to the pass/fail option that is presented with limited availability, the proposed system would designate marks for High Pass (HP), Pass (P), and No Credit (NC).  The use of the High Pass mark would encourage students to surpass the basic requirements of courses in order to receive the better mark, while also helping them to feel comfortable with taking the “intellectual risks” that are associated with a full education. This grading system would maintain the simplicity of grade documentation through transcripts, as the current system so readily allows. In addition to the transcript, the new system would include a qualitative component in the form of a portfolio or compilation of the student’s most esteemed academic works.  By eliminating the numerical grading scale, universities and employers would have a more comprehensive means by which to evaluate their candidates.

Ultimately, the journey of an individual’s education is one that is wrought with emotion: stress, excitement, enthusiasm, and at times, frustration. Through this project, I hope to gather information from students and educators about the feedbacks at play between their emotions and the impact that they feel from our current education system. Through the compilation of this information and the inclusion of my research, I will create a policy proposal that ties together the need for innovation in education, and the negative implications that the current system effects upon them.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/‌2011/‌08/‌08/‌education/‌08educ.html?_r=1&hpw

http://www2.ed.gov/‌nclb/‌overview/‌intro/‌factsheet.html

“Effective Teaching: A Workshop.”- By Richard Felder and Rebecca Brent

http://www.whitehouse.gov/‌issues/‌education/‌higher-education

http://it.stlawu.edu/~lrediehs/grading_files/grading-hp.htm