Education is said to be both a national and a global opportunity giver. However despite its purpose education around the world is not equal to all students and learners. Education is no longer equal or sufficient. Most of the time school systems are given little to no resources to the children. What we are facing all over the world is inequalities in our education system and it will continue unless we educate ourselves, and put an end to it. Children around the world aren't receiving the right attention on what they deserve for a proper quality education because of the lack of attention to the problems in our education system. So what makes problems even harder on our systems is that our US constitution doesn't mention anything about specific laws or policies regarding the quality of our education. Consequently every state is able to create its own law and policies when it comes to education. It becomes difficult to recognize what each state has in common as whole when it comes to education systems because diversity between rules and regulations. However, there are certain key elements that each state incorporates in its education system. According to Sir Ken Robinson, world renowned education and creativity expert and recipient of the RSA’s Benjamin Franklin award, our education system was designed and conceived for a different age. This is crucial and vital to know and understand how the economic structure as well as the age of the industrial revolution was a big influence on our current education system. And even before our education system there were assumptions about social structure and capacity of education that wouldn't be suitable for lower structured social classes. Consequently, we have so many students that believe their lack of motivation in school is because they are stupid. We look at what's wrong with these students, not being motivated instead of learning new ways to work with them and motivate them and letting these children explore their creativity instead of learning in a way that does stimulate the elements to let these students truly find out what they are capable of. Instead we teach them their capability is processed through a standardized test. |
Finland's education system was just as bad as our current education system, they decided to take a step back and figure out what they can do to make a better education system. Instead of the harsh and pushy feels of being pressured to be the best of everybody and to be the number one. In Finland, unlike the U.S, they are funded nationally. This means that because it is coming from the country, they are able to control and manage what goes in and out of these schools, as opposed to the U.S where we are funded locally. They also fund based on attendance, and give additional funding for schools that have a higher percentage of immigrant children. whose parents are uneducated or unemployed. Instead of trying to discriminate against students who do not have the background, we should be trying to help them prosper instead of trying to change who they are. Pasi Sahlber, a Finnish education expert and the director of the center for International Mobility and Cooperation in Finland’s Ministry of Education and Culture, said that “In the last decades, U.S. and Finnish education policies have appeared to be moving in opposite directions. While U.S. public schools moved to standardized testing, Finnish schools eschewed nationwide tests to evaluate teachers, students or schools, instead relying on sample-based testing and school principals to identify potential problems.” This importance of this is that, standardized testing, really are a big problem that is holding us back from getting any progress. Instead we are relying on test’s that are an unreliable measure of students performances. One example is a study that was published in 2001, by the Brookings Institution, found that “50-80% of year-over-year test score improvements were temporary and "caused by fluctuations that had nothing to do with long-term changes in learning..." This means that after these test are taken, the knowledge is pretty much useless.
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