WHAT IS SCHOOL FOR?

Let’s take back our education system American! Stop cutting the school programs! Put back the shop class that that gave our children an edge. Challenge our leadership to find money elsewhere and make the class rooms smaller put the money back in our schools. Let’s keep the competitive edge on Education and Technology before it’s too LATE!

The focus of programs such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top fail at Systems Thinking. Saying that the main reason children don’t produce good test results is because test and teaching standards are not high enough fails to understand the myriad systemic linkages in that child’s life. I think if we were to look at the children around us who are succeeding at a high level in school, we would check off most of these boxes for each child.

Unless we change societal structural issues that allow more children to achieve these success factors in their lives, we will continue to be disappointed in the declining test results of American children as a whole. The countries around the world that are doing better in the student success area, have figured out ways to create societal programs and cultural norms that support and embrace much larger proportions of their population.

By Early Childhood Education for all children starting at the ages of 0-5, would dramatically alter the educational performance of children. Many test results show that children who have had access to Early Childhood Education far outperform other children, especially when it comes to being able to read well at the right age. This is important because if children are not reading adequately by 4th grade, from then on they steadily fall behind their peers.

The phrase often used is that up till 4th grade, children are learning to read, and after 4th grade, they are reading to learn. If kids can’t adequately read by 4th grade, they can’t learn what we want them to, no matter how difficult the curriculum, teaching, and testing. Moreover, this falling back by these students ends up costing dearly in terms of remedial training, lost class room time, and impact to other students who are further along. Some school districts are in fact finding that they should fund Early Childhood Education themselves for their students because it is ultimately cheaper down the road.

Let’s keep the competitive edge on Education and Technology before it’s too LATE!