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Education Reform

Our current educational system is not working. Under our current system we are failing our students. By failing our students we are failing ourselves and our future as an incredible nation. In a recent study our system ranked 10th out of the worlds’ top 10 school systems. One of the major contributing factors is our quality of teachers within the system. Many of the teachers in our system would not make the cut in the top rated school system. The top 5 rated systems all have a very complex and thorough teacher acceptance system, which centers on finding the most qualified teachers and filtering out those who lack the necessary skills to teach effectively. These top ranked schools along with having a better acceptance system have much better continual training programs. The average teacher salary in the higher ranked systems is much greater than the current average salary of our teachers.
Looking at the way the top 5 ranked schools systems operate can teach us many things about how we could improve our system. With the negative perception, and rightfully justified, parents have started to look for other means or alternatives of education for their children. High-performing school systems, though strikingly different in construct and context, maintained a strong focus on improving instruction because of its direct impact upon student achievement. To improve instruction, as studied by Barbour and Mourshed (2007) these high-performing school systems consistently do three things well: They get the right people to become teachers (the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers). They develop these people into effective instructors (the only way to improve outcomes is to improve instruction). They put in place systems and targeted support to ensure that every child is able to benefit from excellent instruction (the only way for the system to reach the highest performance is to raise the standard of every student). Following this study or...