How come our (USA) educational system is such a failure?

In all fairness, it fails some students but not all. Our educational system is overburdened with too many jobs to do. We want it to be all things to all people and we are in the habit of charging public schools with attempting to correct the ills of society as we see them. When an institution has too many objectives, it is not surprising that they fail to meet some of their goals.

If we could pare down the list of goals & objectives of our schools to a shorter list of manageable goals, then the public schools might do a better job at a shorter list of goals. We expect our schools to do too many things and the result sometimes is that they do none of them very well.

It’s no wonder that there is a perception that our schools are failing.

because kids don’t want to learn and have fun instead. Believe me I just graduated and more then half of my class gpa was below 3.0! I mean seriously. We are offered books here, unlike many other countries and even though we pay taxes if we had to pay for school that would be a lot more. I think it has to do with parents involvement. I mean my parents don’t know what my major is or what

I am going to do. I went to high school for 4 years and they have never even seen inside of the school. They don’t look at my report cards and I don’t even have to lie because they don’t care. if all parents are like that which most are because of work and the busy lives then no wonder we are failing the school system. here we have many luxuries in school that kids don’t have in Pakistan. There our class room did not have air condition. We had to pay to go to school and for the books and everything, not to mention uniforms and such other things. Also we had to sit on the ground to learn but the people who continue there education in Pakistan are very learned but here a lot of people don’t even go to college.

This question is assuming that there is a cross the board failure: there isn’t.

Schools get their money not nationally but by district – a system that is sometimes done by county, sometimes by arbitrary lines set up by the state, sometimes by city, etc. Not all regions value (or can afford to value) their education equally, resulting in not allotting enough money to cover access to technology, proper supplies, and a decent teacher’s salary to encourage well qualified individuals to teach in that district. States often get national mandates (such as the No Child Left Behind Act), but very little actual national support in order to meet these mandates. The ineffective and unreasonable No Child Left Behind Act aside, this lack of national support financially means that poorer districts get screwed while wealthy ones prosper.

Case in point, I graduated from Fairfax County Public Schools, which is one of the top public school systems in the nation. Many of my teachers had masters degrees, I had access to every AP class imaginable not to mention an excellent dual enrollment program. My first year of college was a breeze compared to the education I received at FCPS (I was also in all Honors and AP Classes).

The school I transferred into FCPS from was a poor rural district in Northern Maine that had one computer lab of 20 outdated computers, language teachers that couldn’t speak their languages, teachers who had been teaching for twenty years and were just putting in hours towards their retirement, and an administrative attitude that was unsupportive towards those going on to higher education – they were just happy if you didn’t drop out before you graduated.

Even within the district of FCPS there are discrepancies. If a value and priority of education was not encouraged within a student’s home life (for one reason or another, often financially or culturally) and culture, they would not get the full benefit of all the resources available to us and would get a very different education from my own.

In short, I would say that the US educational system is a failure for two primary reasons. The first is that our country is so afraid of socialism – and the people to whom the vote is catered to are so afraid that they’d loose whatever advantage they’ve gained by living in the suburbs – we cannot bring ourselves to nationalize education and make it truly equal. Not only equal, but hopefully with enough funding and proper management to make it great (can you imagine what the educational system could do with the money spent in one day on the Iraq War?).

The other reason, implied by that above, is that our society simply doesn’t value education as much as it should.

Because there is no accountability for that failure. I think that there is a grotesque lack of capitalism in our school system. Schools are so bent on making everyone equal that they neglect basic skills.

This does not challenge the bright students at all. Excellence is not rewarded. They also need to engage more students in trade skills and vocational tracks when they struggle with regular academic rigor. Not everybody is cut out for lifelong study, and these students need to be identified and allowed to learn something that engages them, or you will never keep them in school.

For that matter, you have teachers teaching students who cannot relay what they are teaching into a real-world, practical explanation for high schoolers–because they simply have not experienced it for themselves. Teachers are often lifelong students, having graduated from high school, entered college, and returned to the school system, never working in the private sector. They have rarely been under the pressure to produce something tangible as you would have to perform in a regular business. Thus, there is no urgency to demand more out of the students. Excuses are made for students because the students don’t have parental support, discipline, etc. but nobody dares criticize a teacher just because they don’t make any $$. I think that’s bull.

You can have truly tremendous teachers who believe that every student can learn and then stay on top of that kid and drag them up to their learning capacity, and then there are crummy teachers. These are the teachers that throw up their hands and say, “Well, he just doesn’t want to do his work”. Or they discipline so inconsistently and unfairly that they have no credibility with the students. They regurgitate last year’s lesson plans and dress so unprofessionally that they can’t figure out why they don’t automatically command the respect they think they should have to maintain classroom control.

Let’s not forget the milquetoast administrators that are terrified of saying no and having a parent run to the superintendant. Or the wuss superintendant that doesn’t back up the authority of the school. Or the administrator that undermines the authority of the teacher by repeatedly sending a student back to class having suffered no consequences for misbehaving and disrupting the other students.

You know what they say…”A dead fish rots from the head first”…

You can’t generalize like that. I have taught in a horrible school district where learning rarely happened and no one cared…and up the road 10 miles is one that is ranked in the top 100 in the country. There are so many factors in our schools and educational system that you can’t judge based on media or one specific school.

Because the family unit (i.e. the involvement of parents in their child’s education) has become nonexistent..

Parents (not all, but many) see schools as simply a place to drop their kids off so that they (the parents) can have some time away from them…To the parents, schools are simply viewed as babysitting services…..

cause kids rather have fun, and we have the money, and image to keep us entertained….