Education in the United States of America
Did it fail? Or need more time to succeed?
World sole superpower after the fall of the Soviet Union in late 1991.
World most powerful military.
World largest economy.
Third most populous country with 340 million people.
Second largest higher education system and top destination for globally mobile students.
Despite all these, U.S. faces many challenges. On the global stage, U.S. hegemony has eroded over the past decades.
40 Years After ‘A Nation At Risk’
No Child Left Behind, Every Student Succeeds, Common Core — School Reform Succeeded — and Failed?
Launched in 2009 and now adopted by forty-five states, the Common Core articulates a single set of educational standards in language arts and mathematics. Although the Common Core claims not to tell teachers what or how to teach, school districts must prove to state legislatures or the federal government (via the Race to the Top program) that they are complying with the Common Core. The simplest and most cost-effective way for a school district to do that is to purchase an approved reading or math program.
Bill Gates, Bankroller of the Common Core
David Coleman, Architect of the Common Core
Michael Barber, Pearson Deliverologist
Deliverology is a field guide—or a battle plan—showing education reformers how to push ahead through all resistance and never have second thoughts.
As Michael Barber, Pearson Deliverologist quotes Robert F. Kennedy, “only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.”
The Common Core, according to one critic, is “the product of a push by private foundations acting in the interest of multinational corporations to colonize public education in the United States.”
Efforts to recast education reform in the language of equity, justice, and civil rights.
The standards of the common core are treated as the bare minimum.
Established, high quality, effective textbooks are being thrown out, and replaced with quickly-written books with little to no content.
There is no teaching done inside the book. There is no written lecture on the concept. There is no collection of examples. It only contains a small number of problems, and a lot of white space.
Even though it looks like a workbook with all that empty space, students are not supposed to write in the book. They need to write on their own papers and turn those in. The book ostensibly needs to be kept in good condition for the following year.
The committee members explained it as “Our choices were bad, horrible, and terrible. The state only allowed us to look at three textbooks, and they did not have any others that satisfied the new common core requirements. We went with the least bad option.”
American education system is unlike that in many other countries. Education is primarily the responsibility of individual states and local government, and so there is little standardization in the curriculum. The individual states have great control over what is taught in their schools and over the requirements that a student must meet, and they are also responsible for the funding of schooling.
All children in the United States have access to free public schools. Private schools (religious and non-sectarian) are available, but students must pay tuition to attend them.
About half of U.S. adults (51%) say the country’s public K-12 education system is generally going in the wrong direction. A far smaller share (16%) say it’s going in the right direction, and about a third (32%) are not sure, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in November 2023.
Why do Americans think public K-12 education is going in the wrong direction?
- Schools not spending enough time on core academic subjects, like reading, math, science and social studies (69%)
- Teachers bringing their personal political and social views into the classroom (54%)
- Schools not having the funding and resources they need (52%)
About a quarter (26%) say a major reason is that parents have too much influence in decisions about what schools are teaching.
The teachers themselves seem to not really understand what they are teaching, and just read it blindly from a book.
The books themselves all too often have errors.
Honestly? It’s a way of dumbing the kids down. Common Core is the worst thing to hit the education system in decades. It’s completely stupid and makes no sense whatsoever.
But, see, if you make it unnecessarily difficult, the kids will be confused, they’ll 1) develop a mental block (making all future math even harder to learn); 2) develop emotional resistance to it and, all of a sudden, you have a whole generation of kids that can’t do simple math. They have been “dumbed down” very effectively.
Probably the first thing to realize about the Common Core is that it is not a set of math problems. It is not even a curriculum. It is a set of standards which outline what the children should be able to do at the end of each school year. While it deliberately encourages certain teaching styles and different kinds of problems, it doesn’t actually tell schools how to do any of that.
Because they turn the exciting, exploratory and very human activity of “learning” into a step-by-step bureaucratic nightmare.
Everyone’s attention span is at an all-time low with the addiction of social media.
Covid. Smartphones.
Compulsory education is less than 150 years old. In that time, entire countries have risen and fallen. World economies. Crashes and booms.
Society will move on.
Collapse? No. Decay, yes.
There won’t be a sudden implosion.
Things will gradually decrease.