The Flaw in American Education

A student I know recently approached a teacher to ask about the basis for her policy that, in order to receive credit for any activity from the textbook, one must copy down the questions as well as adding their answers. Her response?

"If I just let you write down answers, it will only take you like ten minutes, and you need to be doing more work than that."

For those curious as to the flaw in the American education system which limits American performance despite the second highest educational spending rate per student in the OECD, look no further.

American education has an accountability problem. The prevailing idea among society is that students can avoid failure by working harder, which absolves teachers of any accountability for student failure—instead, they simply assign the blame to their students. According to a 2016 survey, only ten percent of teachers consider instruction as the main cause of student failure, while 75 percent attribute failure to problems regarding motivation, preparedness, study skills, and student attitudes.

Beliefs like those ones largely justify the idea of combatting student problems by assigning more work, which, in many cases, results in a phenomenon where students are forced to spend time completing work which often offers little help with the relevant material, leaving them with less available time to study however they see fit. The National Parent/Teacher Association recommends around ten minutes per night per grade level, but elementary school students receive up to three times that recommendation.

As a result, many students' motivation begins to dwindle, particularly in households where parents do not value education to the extent of other parents. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, low-income students are less likely to see parental involvement in their education, which negatively impacts student performance. Elementary school children, faced with hours of homework and parents who fail to ensure that their children recognize education as a means of success, naturally begin to take the work less seriously or avoid it entirely. As many students perceive such behavior as "cool" and "more fun" than schoolwork, social pressures only exacerbate the issue. As a result, students begin to take school as a whole less seriously, worsening overall student performance and, in districts which link student performance to funding, limiting the school's access to the resources necessary to improve the quality of education. Even as students begin to realize that education is a pathway to success, they often lack the study skills which they otherwise would have developed during elementary school, and lack the resources to catch up again.

Meanwhile, for those students who feel pressure to perfect their work, stress levels become significantly higher, and opportunities for academic enrichment—or sleep—are sacrificed.

Many school districts start high schools at 7:00 AM, yet high schoolers are biologically inclined towards sleeping late. Many school districts believe that this is a necessary cost in order to ensure that students can seek employment opportunities, and to avoid the costs of extra buses, though some have successfully managed to adopt policies enforcing later school start times. Sleep deprivation can result in irritability, poor academic performance, and an increased propensity toward illicit drug usage. Teachers' approach to combatting student failure by assigning more work, regardless of the work's actual value, only adds to this damaging equation.

As a result, many have proposed that homework be eliminated altogether, at least at young ages. This approach is inherently flawed, and at odds with a Duke University study that found a positive correlation between homework and student performance, when the homework is assigned in reasonable quantities. Though a correlation does not imply causation, there is no evidence to suggest that any students are benefited from a lack of any homework. For low-income students without significant parental involvement in their education, homework is one method of guaranteeing that students are reviewing and practicing material.

One controversial measure which proponents believe may help is school choice, which allows students to exit the cycle of poor performance resulting in lower funding that perpetuates the issue. However, while this solution is valuable to those whose parents are willing and able to send their children to better schools, alone, it does not address the crux of the issue, which may well exist even at high-performing schools. Magnet programs also provide students with more rigorous opportunities and often help raise test scores within their schools, allowing for more funding. Still, though these magnet programs avoid the problem of parental or student apathy to education, the problem of unnecessary homework is only magnified in these programs, where teachers often fail to distinguish between rigorous work and high quantities of work.

Under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2004, states risk the loss of federal funding if they do not allocate funds based on school test scores. Though this does incentivize good performance, a school which is able to attain high test scores is not in dire need of more funds, as it has shown potential to achieve high scores with its current funding. While the opposite policy would remove the school's incentive to improve, a blanket policy to decide how funds are allocated is, overall, a bad idea. States should allocate funding to counties based on quantity of students and their ability to pay. Individual school districts should then analyze school funding needs on a case-by-case basis.

For example, if one particular underperforming school begins to see improvements, the school district may see it fit to expand its funding beyond normal levels under current policy, in order to help grant the resources to spur these improvements. I sincerely doubt that any Washington, D.C. politician has the answer to the funding problem for every single school, and relegating the process to an elected school board will guarantee that funding take place based on individual school needs.

But, perhaps more fundamentally, if a teacher's performance from students is consistently poor, the school district should not simply hold students accountable. Furthermore, teachers need to consider which aspects of their assignments are truly beneficial for students, as opposed to simply keeping students occupied. The aforementioned teacher, for example, easily recognized her policy of forcing students to copy down material from the textbook prior to the exercises as "busy work", and though the same cannot be said for all teachers who assign work within this category, being able to recognize this is simply a part of being an effective teacher, and one which has not received proper emphasis.

A culture change is necessary among teachers, and holding teachers accountable for abnormally poor student performance is an easy first step on the road to targeting the root of several problems hindering America's educational performance from reaching its appropriate level based on the educational expenditure.