I only wish that I could be proud of our education system.
We live in an ever-changing world and in the recent years it has been changing even more quickly. It is believed that in 2010 the amount of new technical information is doubling roughly every 72 hours. With the speed at which things are changing the human capital is increasingly more valuable in this knowledge economy. We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist, using technologies that haven’t been invented, in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet. (Shift Happens, Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod, 2009) Because of the nature of this progress the way we teach must be changed. We can no longer use Ford’s factory model of taking all the things you need to learn while in school and dividing it equally between the 12 years of public education. (Darling-Hammond, 2010, p. 4) The goal of education needs to focus more on teaching students to use what they know in inventive ways and become problem solvers.
This is exactly what the leading countries are doing. Countries all over the world have realized that the old model of education was not working. In Finland they got rid of a tracking system that was really only helping make the smartest smarter realizing that all students need a good education for the economy to flourish. “A recent OECD report found that for very year the average schooling level of the population is raised, there is a corresponding increase of 3.7% in long-term economic growth.” (Darling-Hammond, 2010, p. 16) This means that all students need access to a good education for a country to be able to compete economically. Not only have countries changed who is allowed a quality education they have also realized that the way we teach has to be changed. “High-achieving nations teach about half as many topics each year as American schools do.” (Darling-Hammond, 2010, p. 13) With fewer topics being taught within a school year students and teachers are able to get more in-depth and form a better understanding of the topics they do study, The number of new topics is different in the high-achieving countries as is the way that the concepts are being taught and used. For example, Nan Chiau Primary School has adopted an active learning model that leverages experiential learning [which] allows students to experience the lessons, investigate, and create new knowledge.” As Linda Darling-Hammond says on page 4 of her book, “Education can no longer be productively focused primarily on the transmission of pieces of information that, once memorized, comprise a stable storehouse of knowledge. Instead, schools must teach disciplinary knowledge in ways that focus on central concepts and help students learn how to think critically and learn from themselves, so that they can use knowledge in new situations and manage the demands of a changing information, technologies, jobs, and social conditions.”
America is essentially digging it’s own economic grave by not investing in education. The lack of education is linked to crime and welfare dependency. “Some states are said to predict the number of prison beds they will need in a decade based on 3rd grade reading scores.” (Darling-Hammond, 2010, p. 24) I simply do not understand why knowing that education makes that big of a difference does not give politicians the urgency to invest in education. Why would states not invest the $10,000 now in education, something beneficial to society, rather than have to spend $30,000 on that same student to keep them in jail. Because the job market is more educationally demanding now than ever before the costs of failing in school is bigger than ever. If students do not perform well in school and not get the education they need they will become part of the growing underclass and as Linda Darling-Hammond puts it on page 23 of her book these people will “be cut off from productive engagement in society,” thereby being a debt rather than an asset. It is said that, “if we continue these trends, by 2012 America will have 7 million jobs in science and technology fields, ‘green’ industry, and other fields that cannot be filled by United States workers who have been adequately educated for them.” (Darling-Hammond, 2010, p. 3) If we do not change our education system we will make our human capital obsolete, weakening our economy, and our country. “The current generation of young Americans may be the first to be less well educated and less upwardly mobile than the one before.” (Darling-Hammond, 2010, p. 14)
American schools in general are not able to compete on a global scale, but the vast disparities within the United States education system are frightening. The amount of money a school or district spends per student determines the quality of the teachers they have, the quality of the resources available to them, and the quality of their overall education. The sad truth is that the students who need the most support such as the poor and minorities are the students that get the least amount spent on them. “The wealthiest school districts in the United States spend nearly 10 times more than the poorest.” (Darling-Hammond, 2010, p. 12) On top of having less money to start with those funds are stretched to cover things like health-care, food, and after-school programs. The fact is that as Linda Darling-Hammond says, “equal dollars cannot produce equal opportunity,” just because equal money is spent does not mean that students are getting an equal education. High-poverty schools need more resources to help their students succeed. A large part of the problem in these areas is the high turnover rate of teachers and the “u-turns in education policy” that are constantly disrupting the consistency students need in order to achieve well. (Darling-Hammond, 2010, p. 14)
To summarize Darling-Hammond's first chapter of The Flat World and Education our education system is broken and is in need of some major repairs. As she puts it on page 3, “we cannot just bail ourselves out of the crisis we must teach our way out.” As a country we need to change the way we teach our students helping them to be critical thinkers, self-learners and problem solvers. In doing so we are investing in our human capital. We must change the way we fund our schools, the way it is now in most places the rich students get a rich education and the poor students get a poor education, but in order to help our country and economy flourish all students need a good education. The bottom line is that if we want America to be able to compete in a global marketplace we have to urgently fix our education system.
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