Money is NOT the SOLUTION

While researching this blog, I keep coming across articles that blame every problem with public schools on lack of funds. As much as I would love to share their simple solution, WAKE UP AMERICANS’ money is only a fraction of the problem. If you don’t believe me look at Washington D.C, which ranks third in spending per student and yet is arguably the worst school district in the country. According to the Washington Post, “ More than half of the District of Columbia's kids spend their days in "persistently dangerous" schools, with an average of nine violent incidents a day in a system with 135 schools. "Principals reporting dangerous conditions or urgently needed repairs in their buildings wait, on average, 379 days.” WOW, I’ll remember never to send my kids to our National Capital, although it’s probably not that much worse than the majority of public schools in big cities in the U.S. So I’ve touched on a lot of specific things in this blog concerning why the U.S public school system is so bad, but I want to explain a few broader facts. Most importantly, it’s the teaching system and the cultures and values of the people that make up the foundations of every education system.
In this entry, I’m going to focus on the teaching style and then in my next post I will explain how our values and culture shape the school system. There are some fundamental things wrong with teachers in the U.S. compared to teachers in countries that rank higher than us. Now this is not a problem of individual teachers, this is a problem in how and what teachers are being forced to teach students. According to the Washington Post, which I highly agree with,
“The United States focuses more on procedure, and we try to teach many topics fast. Other countries tend to break topics up and go much more in-depth. They work on the concept, not just the procedure...Countries that did well in rankings focused on teaching the ideas and taught a few topics a year. Kids will learn what a fraction really is, not just how to add or subtract them.”
This is a great point, U.S. schools try to condense topics to the point of students only memorizing a few key facts that they then forget ten minutes later, which is basically a waste of time. If we really want students to learn, teachers must focus on a single subject and actually explain the who, what, how, where, when, and even how it relates to the world around them. Although it may seem like less can never mean more in education, but teaching the actual concepts behind a subject will enable students to easily understand the many other topics that somehow relate. This should be common sense, since it was discovered years ago that the brain stores information based on how many connections it can make to already stored information and also the significance of those connections. Our brains are not designed to store random facts and statistics that have no real significance to our past, or present situation. When teachers just recite facts and procedures, as most U.S. schools do, students just memorize, but create no real connections to why the information is significant. As Matias Sueldo, an Argentinean who is now a sophomore at a U.S college explained, “Kids here learn to pass a test, but they don’t learn the concepts. In Argentina, you either know it or you don’t.” Another student pointed out, “Because the only way we measure how well students do is through testing, teachers end up teaching how to take the test, and not necessarily the subject matter...Great, students can take a test, but they don’t know anything.” This is exactly my point, the U.S. teaches students how to get good grades, but not why the information is significant, or how to use the information in the real world. We must change the way teachers are expected to teach, as well as change how teachers grade students in order for our school system to stop falling so far behind.