Fourteen years of public education are completed by me. I went from Pre-school straight on through to my senior year of high school. Every day it was the same thing. I would wake up, get on the bus, and head to school. I would go through the day with no problems, easily get though my work, and constantly wonder what the point was. Looking around me all those years I caught the impression that I wasn’t the only one with these feelings. I often encountered the same bored, glazed over eyes from a majority of my classmates. The American public school system disempowers the students of the system because of a lack of passion from the students, standardized testing, and unnecessary courses.
I have come to find, through my experiences in sports, that if someone is not passionate about the sport, then they will not try to do well in the sport. They will not practice hard and rarely care if they succeed or fail. I think the same principle applies to the U.S. public school system. The students that apply themselves will often succeed in their efforts. They will push themselves to do the homework and push themselves into the advanced classes. The students that don’t care simply won’t succeed. They will not do homework, sleep in class, and not apply themselves. So who is to blame? How about the teachers? Or perhaps we could blame the students themselves? No, the system is wrong. There needs to be changes made to the whole public school system to stimulate and motivate every single student. According to College Board.com, of the estimated 2.7 million students that graduated college in 2006, a mere fifteen percent were enrolled in and passed advanced level courses, roughly 406,000 students (Advanced Placement). These are the students that apply themselves and are motivated enough to take these courses. Where does this motivation come from? It can come from external sources such as parents or athletics, or it can be internal such as dreams of graduate school or the simple desire to be in the top ten percent of their class. So what about the other eighty-five percent? They lacked the motivation, and therefore got the minimal amount of their education. How can we motivate the unmotivated? Offer rewards for good grades and advanced classes. No finals, periods off, and extended lunches may be a few ways to get the motivation level higher.
Also according to College Board.com, college dropout rates are rising and the big cause of this is the gap between high school graduation standards and college course requirements (Advanced Placement). The public school system is not teaching kids to think for themselves. Standardized testing has made sure of that. Standardized tests are used to judge how well a school is doing academically. Better tests equals more money for the school. These tests are not a good way of judging comprehension of material in a classroom. Instead of giving money based on test scores, the government should give schools money based on dropout and graduation rates. The more students that stay in school and complete their high school education, the more money the school should get. A number of students, including myself, have issues with taking tests, such as anxiety, lack of confidence, and completely forgetting material that is mastered causing mixed and wrong results of a student’s knowledge. Because of this money for good test results, students don’t learn material that they need to learn. They are taught how to take these standardized tests. I remember in my years in school that we would set apart entire class periods to “practice” taking TAAS or TAKS. Not the material that the test included, but test taking skills such as, underlining important aspects of a passage, eliminating answers and how to bubble in a scantron properly. I understand that getting money for schools is important, but I also believe that kids should learn, for example, about how an eco system works for a class period and not spend that entire period on learning how to bubble in an answer.
The public school system is more of a hindrance than a help. Students are required to fulfill state requirements that have little to do with furthering their education. Fine Art and foreign language are the first that come to my mind. Unless pursing a college degree or a career or if a student wants to take one of these classes in pursuit of their own knowledge in one of these subjects, they should not be required. I understand the purpose behind them, to broaden the mind and expose the kids to cultures other than the ones that they are used to, but the kids taking them are not aware of that. They are bored and not applying their minds to the cultural aspect. They are more worried about what they are going to eat at lunch and what the weekend holds.
Michael Moore quoted Julie Walker in Idiot Nation saying, “The knowledge students acquire in school is not going to serve them throughout their lifetimes…It will be their ability to navigate information that will matter” (Moore). This holds true in the American public school system. Schools are more concerned with the pursuit of high standardized test scores to get more money than trying to give an education to every student. So getting rid of the standardized test, learning to motivate students, and taking out unnecessary courses are three simple ways to completely revolutionize and optimize the public school systems of America.
Works Cited
"Advanced Placement Proves Gateway to College Success." College Board.
25 Jan. 2005. 12 Sept. 2007
Moore, Michael. "Idiot Nation." Rereading America. Ed. Gary Colombo. Boston, New York: Bedford/St.Martins, 2007. 141.
