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Education:
The Achilles Heel of 21st Century America
By Nishant Jain
05/21/2015

The America created by the idealism of the forefathers has always believed that education
levels the playing field for all of its citizens. Where one is going is more important than where
one came from. It has been believed that education will be one of the corner stones of an
American's life, giving each citizen the ability to pursue the American dream. There are a myriad
of cultural and systemic causes that have led to the decline. This paper presents the thesis:
America has failed to provide adequate and equal education opportunities to all its citizens and
has fallen behind the other countries in the educational achievements of its students. The
American educational standards have fallen in part because of a misguided approach to reform
at a local level, a culture that does not instill passion for learning, and fruitless federal initiatives.
After the presentation of the data to show the decline, the paper will summarize the
historical perspective, then discuss the causes that have been mentioned by the various thinkers.
The paper will then discuss some of the initiatives that were created by the various
administrations to improve America's education. The paper ends on the hopeful note that the
advent and implementation of technology will bring about a sea change, and lift us back to the
forefront of the world.
From a historical perspective, K-12 education in America has never been worse than it is
today. Here are some statistics to prove this assertion. The Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD) administers the Program for International Student
Assessment (PISA), which ranks students in math, science, and reading. In the year 2000, PISA
results placed the US higher than almost every European country. By the year 2009, PISA results
showed American students placed 25th in math, 17th in science, and 14th in reading among
developed countries (Council). Almost every European country scored higher than the U.S.
While other countries over the past 50 years have had increasingly higher college-attainment

rates among students, the U.S has not improved at all. The graph of college attainment among
Americans represents this (ref graph). College rates have stayed at 40% within the U.S., while
Koreas rate, for example, jumped from 10% to 60%. Also, the disparity between the ability of
top American students and top Asian students is truly shocking. An international benchmark
found that the best American students, located in Massachusetts, would only rank 50th percentile
in math relative to other Asian students. (Council). However, not only do these scores reveal that
other countries are improving at a faster rate than us, but they also indicate a slow, if not absent,
improvement of our education system.
Unfortunately, none of these initiatives have had a meaningful or lasting impact. These
efforts have not amassed to much. There is no doubt that American education is suffering. What
are some of the possible causes of this decline?
1. The teachers are not given the respect, control, and compensation that would spur dedication
on their part. They are treated merely as employees. They have to follow the policies laid down
by some bureaucrats sitting in an office and dictating what should happen. This dissuades
spontaneous innovation on the part of the teachers.
Unfortunately, teachers with better credentials are paid more than teachers with lesser
credentials, but better teaching skills and results. On average, teachers with master degrees earn
more than teachers with only bachelor degrees. Rather than base payment and reward on the
skills as a teacher, institutions are basing payment on specialization. This system attracts
teachers who are out of touch with students. On the flip side, teachers in Asia evaluate and train
instructors in a didactic manner. Training programs for these teachers are rigorous and their
success depends on how well they can teach.

2. The number of students in the K-12 system has boomed compared to 30 or 40 years ago. The
enlarging school size results in the loss of cohesiveness within school communities. These larger
schools operate on the basis of the "least common denominator", rather than setting and
achieving high expectations. The majority of resources available to schools are spent on making
the larger community work rather than on offering more learning to the students. One example is
the lack of summer school in most high schools around the country.
3. Shifting demographics of people entering the teaching profession. Many non-teaching jobs,
e.g. in the industry which paid more, were opened to women. Hence many women started to shift
away from teaching.
4. Increasing number of mothers started working outside the home. This meant kids returning to
an empty house from school in the afternoon. With no adult supervision, they were left to their
own devices. They opted for video games and You Tube videos, rather than learning the material
covered in the classroom.
5. With work and personal lives becoming more complex for the adults, they had less time for
their kids in school. Real parent-student interaction was replaced with gestures of caring. For
example, many movies show how a parent went to unusual lengths to get back home to attend
his/her child's piano recital. But they may not otherwise interact with the child much. The
average American household does not foster an environment where students are encouraged
learn. Instead, parents are too caught up with the business of modern life. In contrast, many
families in Asia value education very highly.
6. It became a political and societal trend to devise and implement new "Initiatives" whenever
somebody wanted to express their concern for declining education standards. This resulted in

conflicting policies, expectations, and ultimate failures of such programs. In the process billions
of dollars were spent fruitlessly.
7. Furthermore, these initiatives have focused on keeping students on track to graduate with no
emphasis on achievement. Rather than promote interest in the arts and sciences, these federal
programs ignore quality and, misguidedly, concentrate only on quantity. American students
decreasing test scores are a direct result of this. In Asian and European schools, educators instill
in their pupils passion for important careers; in America, educators only care about the amount
time students spend in school. The U.S. Department of Education has spent billions of dollars at
the state and local level to fund the improvement of education with no effect. The ugly face of
education is found within the schools themselves. Regrettably, no efforts have been made in the
past to fix learning at its most basic level: in the classroom. The federal initiatives of Clinton and
Bush have amounted to nothing.

8. Emphasis on Math, Science, language and civics skills was replaced with the new age
concerns for humanism, feelings, political correctness, etc. In other words these concerns were
not simply added on, but replaced the expectations of achievement in the basic curriculum.
9. The political process was allowed to completely overpower the field of education. Funding of
education became a tug of war. For example Proposition 13 underfunded education in the largest
state in the union, California. It was then followed by a backlash of over funding by the
politicians who wanted to curry favor with the concerned parents.

10. Lack of a cohesive, non-wavering, national commitment to the best in education. When "less
government" became the dominant philosophy on the national level, education was among the
worst to suffer.
11. Income, and therefore resource, disparity among the races and geographical locations became
accentuated over the last 30-40 years.
12. Explosion in the number of students going thru the school systems.
13. Quite often, schools spend more money on sports than on academics, a practice unheard of in
other countries. Sports and other extra-curricular activities were assigned equal importance as
scholarly achievement in the U.S. When the Universities started competing for the athletically
and otherwise talented youths, the schools started spending inordinate amounts of their budgets
on sports, theater, music, etc. The U.S spends the most money on students than any other country
ranked by PISA (Ripley). . Polish students outrank American students in math and science, yet
Poland spends less than half of what the U.S. spends per student. Coincidentally, many Polish
school systems do not allocate resources towards sports (Ripley). Similarly, the professional
teams offered the promise of making millions to youths who were already disenchanted with
their class work. Sports became the dominant culture in the nation's schools. The sports
celebrities were the new role models for the young in America. Important decisions, like how
early school opens and closes, were made with sports in mind. The school libraries became
destitute so that the locker rooms could be well stocked. To many Asian high-schoolers coming
to the U.S., the emphasis on sports is a big shock to them
14. The Departments of education at the federal and the state levels became conduits for dollar
distribution, rather than watchmen safe guarding the interests of the young students.

15. Lack of clear career pathway for students to follow to fill the skilled jobs at a variety of
industry. There has been no corresponding increase in providing the students guidance. As a
result, many of them end up picking low skilled, non-productive careers.
The college-attainment rates mentioned above were a product of the GI bill of the 1940s,
whose initial impact has long since worn off. (Klein). The advances made in the first half of the
20th century, such as a larger middle class and making high school universal, have diminished.
(Klein).
What efforts have been made by the US to shore up the inadequate system? President
Lyndon Johnson created the Head Start program almost 50 years ago. His focus was on low
income children. He reasoned that by focusing on them, the program would help alleviate the
chronic disparity in opportunity experienced by these children. The core idea was: improve the
life standard of the disadvantaged children even before they become a student at a school.
President Johnson said, "Five- and 6-year-old children are inheritors of poverty's curse, and not
its creators. Unless we act, these children will pass it on to the next generation, like a family
birthmark. This is one of the constructive, and one of the most sensible, and also one of the most
exciting programs that this nation has ever undertaken" (Klein). Since its inception, this program
has helped millions of children and their families. The US Department of Health and Human
Services reported that the Head Start Program resulted in improvement in vocabulary, spelling,
and word recognition in the children during the time they were in the program.
However, another study found that these gains in the Head Start graduates started to fade
by the time they reached the 3rd grade. It became clear that the program was not successful in a
permanent change in the outlook for these children. On the other hand, a study by Harvard

University's David Deming found that kids who attended Head Start were more likely than their
siblings who didn't to graduate high school and go to college. Nevertheless, it became a
consensus with time that the Head Start program needed revamping. Recently, President Obama
announced new measures to improve the accountability of the program.
There is a wide difference in the educational opportunities and achievements of the white
students and the students of color, according to an analysis published by the US News and World
Report (UNEWS). It found two parallel systems of education in the United States: one for the
white students and the other for the non-whites. They are separate and unequal. Increasing
disparity of per capita funding of schools puts some students at a massive disadvantage to others.
While schools in poor neighborhoods are actually being funded less and less, schools in rich
areas tend to attract more money and higher paid, more experienced teachers. (pg 48) Since the
percentage and the actual number of non-white students is projected to increase significantly in
the coming years, the gap between the systems will ultimately further destabilize the whole
education scene, and consequently the economic status of the country.
According to the US News report, Educational expectations are lower for black children,
according to Child Trends, a non-profit and non-partisan research center that tracks data about
children. Black parents, most of whom are less educated than their white counterparts, dont
expect their children to attain as much education as white parents expect. Lower expectations
become self-fulfilling prophecies, contributing to lower expectations from the student, lesspositive attitudes toward school, fewer out-of-school learning opportunities and less parent-child
communication about school. The bar graph in the Appendix shows clearly the gap in the
educational achievements between whites and blacks.

Once formal schooling begins, more black children are held back in most grades
compared to white students. Accounting for all grades , black children are three times more
likely to be held back than white students.
They are also more likely to drop out before completing high school.
Continuing with the historical perspective on attempts at education reform, President
Clintons initiatives included a proposal of greater accountability within schools and school
districts, and a new blueprint for how congress should spend its $15 billion on academics. His
plan also called for shutting down failing schools, and raising the quality of existing institutions
through the creation of more rigorous subject matter and skills tests for teachers. (old cnn). His
administration also established Goals 2000, which helped states establish standards of excellence
for all children. Also, a class size reduction initiative was started. He also initiated Gear Up for
college preparation, and established HOPE Scholarships.
In 2001, the Bush administration passed the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLBA). The
NCLBA was a reiteration of Lyndon Johnsons Elementary and Secondary Education Act of
1965 (ESEA), which held schools responsible for the performance of their students. The NCLBA
and ESEAs primary goal was to narrow the gap between rich and poor schools by federally
funding underprivileged ones. The states were supposed to develop their own standards, rather
than follow a federal standard, and test their students yearly to measure if they met the standards.
The schools that did not show adequate yearly progress were to be labeled publicly as such. Most
analysts assign a mixed record of success to this law. The NPR reported that the US Senate
recently began to rewrite this law to revive it (NP).

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Today, the Obama administrations Race to the Top program aims to create reform within schools
by granting $4 billion to educators. States compete for these funds by improving their school
systems.
Today, the Common Core curriculum aims to set standards of education in every
American school. Created by the National Governors Association (NGA), the common core
curriculum was incentivized by Bushs NCLBA, which required some states to administer exams
to all students and collect data on their performance. The common cores outline of educational
standards was developed in 2009 and released to the states in 2010. Since then, more common
core curriculum has been developed, including software and digital tests for students. By
imposing these standards, the common cores main design is to ensure that all schools systems,
however poor or rich, teach, at the least, a common denominator of math, sciences, and reading.
The core curriculum outlines what students should have mastered by the end of each grade level.
However, the common core is a hotly debated idea. The development of the standards was not a
transparent process; neither teaching professionals nor the public were involved their creation.
As a result, many claimed that the program was a violation of states rights to determine the path
of education of their respective students, and rejected the curriculum. Actually, this kind of
opposition to curriculum programs was nothing unheard of. In the 1990s, George H.W Bushs
proposal of national history curriculum standards was struck down by a 99 to 1 vote from the
senate.
This essay first discussed the evidence in support of the thesis that the education
performance in the US has declined. The other countries are doing much better. After a historical
perspective, the various possible reasons for the decline were discussed. There is no one overarching cause which can be quickly corrected. The history of the various initiatives undertaken

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by the US administrations was discussed in detail. The current on-going initiative called the corecurriculum was discussed last.
The advent of new technology, which can connect students anywhere, is expected to have
a significant impact on the US education in the coming years. It will allow students even in the
rural / poor parts of the country to learn from the best teachers in the country. The books will be
available online. The path to a career will become clearer. Hopefully, technology will help in
lifting standards and performance around the country.

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Annotated Works Collected


Bettinger, Eric, and Rachel Baker. "NBER Working Paper Series." THE EFFECTS OF
STUDENT COACHING IN COLLEGE (2011): n. pag. National Bureau of Economic
Research. NBER, Mar. 2011. Web. 29 Mar. 2015.
Although this source is very long, some segments from the introduction and beginning
paragraphs offer facts and statistical data about students and the effect different majors
have on them. This source doesn't seem biased at all, but instead takes a detached,
analytic approach to the trends of student success in higher education. Since the paper
is written for the National Bureau of Economic Research, it is safe to assume that the
authors, their data, and their claims are credible. Certainly, I will only use a fraction of
the information in this source, as the rest is somewhat arcane and extraneous to my
topic.
Clayton, Judith-Scott. "The Dark Side of Choice in Higher Education." NYTimes. New York
Times, 25 Mar. 2011. Web. 29 Mar. 2015.
This article is useful and interesting in that it combines studies, data, and experiments
from other sources to come to a conclusion: too many choices in education hurt
students and ultimately the country. Not only can I use the factual information
presented in the article, but the author's connections are also useful. The main
discussion in the article is about ever increasingly cumbersome decision college-bound
students have to make about what they want to study. When given too much choice,
the article explains, students tend to feel lost and disinterested. As its title suggests, the
article is biased against having much choice in education, especially in high school.
The author is a writer for the New York Times, and has properly cited where she
obtained her information.

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Heisler, Todd. "Blaming Parents for Poor Schools." Nytimes. New York Times, 9 Feb. 2014.
Web. 29 Mar. 2015.
This debate column hosts a series of assertions by professors, teachers, and other first
hand accounts of the effect teachers have on students and their education. While some
argue that people's stinging criticism has shifted, mistakenly, from policy to parents,
others argue that parents should take the blame for lower test scores. Although the
general background offered by the NYTimes mediator is unbiased, the writings of the
individuals themselves is heavily biased. This source is useful to me not only because
it offers primary source material on both sides of the argument, but it also gives good
background info on the issue.
NYTimes. "No Child Left Behind Act." News. New York Times, 2011. Web. 29 Mar. 2015.
This timeline outlines the development and effects of the No Child Left Behind Act, a
continuation and recertification of the ESEA, or Elementary and Secondary Education
Act of 1965. This source is very helpful because just like the debate column of
Blaming Parents for Poor Schools, the author includes a variety of passages that
coincide with the timeline events. The passages offer a lot of fact-based material that I
can use. The author is trustworthy, as he is a writer for the New York Times, and most
of the passages he includes are also from New York Times.
Oblinger, Diana G., and Sean C. Rush. "Chapter 1: The Learning Revolution." The Learning
Revolution. Bolton, MA: Anker, 1997. N. pag. Print.
This first chapter is written by two individuals who are associated with educational
organizations, such as EDUCASE. Also, the rest of the book is written by numerous
other people with PhDs in sociology and economics. Therefore, it is safe to assume

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that this book is a trustworthy source. This chapter is more of a general thesis, but also
offers some facts and statistics about the standards of schooling in America compared
to other industries that have evolved. It gives reasons as to why policy in the U.S. is
not conducive to an educational revolution. Although I wont use much of this
material in my main arguments, this will help me develop my point of view, and
perhaps I can quote some of it at the beginning or end of my paper.
Ripley, Amanda. "The Case Against High-School Sports." The Atlantic. Atlantic Media
Company, 18 Sept. 2013. Web. 29 Mar. 2015.
This article was written by a writer for The Atlantic and is an op-ed, as its title suggest.
This is valuable to me not only because it supports one of my main arguments, but also
offer some interesting points and lots of statistical data. The article mostly talks about
the overabundance of sports in American school systems compared to that of other
Asian and European countries. Sports, the article claims, sucks up way to much
funding compared to other activities. On average, more money is spent on a football
player than is spent on a math student. This source will definitely be useful for me.
Stevenson, Harold W. "Why Asian Students Still Outdistance Americans." Educational
Leadership:The Challenge of Higher Standards:Why Asian Students Still Outdistance
Americans. ASCD, n.d. Web. 29 Mar. 2015.
The author of this article has written several other books on modern education, and is a
professor of psychology at the Center for Human Growth and Development at the
University of Michigan. He outlines the general function and purpose of schools, and
then explains how schools in America, and the culture in America, operate differently
than in Asian countries. The author then offers some facts about how American

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students perform significantly lower than Asian ones. This source is valuable not only
for its concrete arguments, but also for the numerous statistics contained throughout.
Council on Foreign Relations. U.S. Education Reform and National Security. Rep. no. Task
Report No. 68. 68th ed. New York: n.p., 2012. U.S. Education Reform and National Security.
The Council on Foreign Relations, 2012. Web. 17 May 2015.
This is source is a report written by a task force for the Council on Foreign Relations.
This is very useful because it outlines how failing education will affect the U.S., specifically on
national security. The experts also present a variety of statistics and graphs, all of which I can
probably use to prove my reasoning. I trust this source, as it is related to government
proceedings.

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Appendix

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3.

4.

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5.

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6.

7.

8.

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Fix: citations, works collected, appendix

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