Sunday, February 7, 2016

The Two Major Problems with Our Educational System

by Mickey Forgione

      One of the largest social issues in today's society is good education and access to it. In fact, San Antonio Independent School District, or SAISD, has 38 out of 115 rated middle schools that are rated above 5/10, according to greatschools.org. This is a site where parents can rate schools based on a few different values. Throw in all the mucking and muddling over standardized curricula these past couple years and you have yourself a mess. One of the major problems is standardization itself. We all know that everyone is different and no one learns exactly the same way. So why does standardization exist? The answer to that lies in the fact that in 2015, 50.1 million schoolchildren attended public schools. There is only one department to oversee all of this, and they want everything to be in a nice, clean numerical breakdown because, quite simply, neither the schools nor the department of Education have the resources to educate and grade every student's progress individually.. So, in short, standardizing education is like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, but it's the best option we currently have.
       Another issue is inequality in pre-schooling education such as language development or reading skills. According to edweek.org, an informative site about our educational system, 22% of all students attending elementary and secondary school live in poverty. By the time they reach kindergarten, these poorer students have only 1/8 of the language and reading development that their peers do. Sadly, there isn't really much we can do about this, except to offer tutoring and refresher courses. Now that you have seen two of the large issues with our education, you are now empowered to inform others.

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