William Donohue
English 1010
2/20/2014

Americas Education: Failing Us? In the United States no one disputes the value of education, but how we should improve it is a topic that many will argue about. Through my reading up on this topic I noticed that every few years, along comes a new idea to save the U.S. education system such as enforcing higher testing standards, opening charter schools, or paying teachers based on their students’ performance. A big new idea was the no student left behind law/ intuitive which wanted to use standards and accountability to raise students grades. Another more recent idea was Race to the top, an Obama Education initiative. But basically with these ideas lots of kids in America are still illiterate. And I feel the main focus of fixing the education system has to be finding the right teachers for the job. I feel it really all boils down to total accountability from all sides of the spectrum from parents asking their child questions when they get home about if they have homework and if they do to sit down and spend some serious time with that child and help go through it and not just give the answers but actually sit down and dive into the material to assure the child is fully understanding the scope of the material. Another side is teachers to me this is where we need to make a new change, I remember when I was in school and you had a few teachers who really were gung ho about teaching and trying to make it cross over to the students in a fun but educational way. Teachers who really took accountability if half of the class failed a test realized maybe is shouldn’t move on to the next topic so fast, but instead go back over what was taught until everyone had a firm grasp on the topics. Then there were the teachers who maybe they really did not want to become a teacher at all or are just a few years from retirement, and you could tell they just didn’t really give a crap. They are basically just as the students are counting down the hours until 3:00pm when they can leave as well. I had a high school teacher who basically just read right out of the textbook, handed out worksheets which when we completed them, we would hand them to a neighbor to grade, and in most cases cheating was involved because people would just circle or change the answer for you partner. These same teachers are the ones who would get frustrated when you would ask a question on a topic and would almost seem aggravated if you asked them for some extra time after class. Teachers are just universally underpaid in America, and I feel like college students who would make great teachers see what’s out there and they possibly