Sunday, March 30, 2014
US Education Reform
The state of education in America has been sub-par in comparison to other leading nations around the globe. Currently our country's standing in math has slipped to 31st; we're ranked 24th in science, and 21st in reading, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. This pretty bad. Compared from 2009 to 2013 when these statistics were created, we have slipped 6 spots in maths, 4 in science, and 10 in reading. This is significant and troubling. Reading the intro to today's assigned readings from Smarter Than You Think made me recall the current standing of America in education. It's pretty appalling that we are a leading superpower yet we are slowly watching as our education system decays. We have to do something about this because education is the single-handed most important thing we need to excel at in order to continue to improve as a nation. In this reading, I thought the discussed Khan Academy, a "free online site filled with thousands of instructional videos that cover subjects in math, science, and economics" sounds like the type of revolution that our education system needs in order to revamp itself. The book talks about how students that are participating in this online service are already completing ninth grade level work whilst still being in the fifth grade. That's astonishing. I'm a 20 year old who has been through all of high school taking math courses every year yet I could never tell you how to do reverse trigonometry right now. The fact that these kids are learning this kind of stuff at such a young age shows that technology really does have the capability to be used for beneficial purposes. If this style of teaching was adopted, teachers would have the freedom to assign videos to be watched as homework at home. Each student could progress at their own pace, with their teacher available to give each one one-on-one guidance. This has been proven to be a more successful. Smarter Than You Think notes that "if you took a regular classroom kid who was performing in the middle of the pack and gave her one-on-one instruction for a few months, she'd leap to the ninety-eighth percentile." This online method allots for this type of treatment to be implimented much more easily, demonstrating it's benefits even further. I think that America's state of education needs a total revamp and this could be the future to learning.
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I agree with you that technology is a potential solution to the problems in the American education system. As Thompson suggests, programs like Khan academy offer the opportunity for students to excel at their own rates and for teachers to personalize their education. However, I am concerned about students getting distracted. It's hard to allow access to the internet and tell kids, especially younger ones, to ignore all of the distractions that accompany even limited internet access. Even if schools take measures to block certain sites, news means of distraction are always out there to be discovered when technology is deeply embedded in the classroom.
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