Education

20 or so years ago, the Department of Education (DoE) was formed with the sole purpose of improving the education system in America. Since the founding of this department, we have seen no improvements in the quality of education, and it seems like they are just trying to standardize education. They give watered down tests to determine how well a school is teaching their students, when in a practical sense you cannot gauge a true education with a standardized test.

I personally do not understand the obsession with grade point averages and standardizing education. America was one of the most powerful nations and one of the brightest without a standardized education. With such varied educations, we had different strengths from one another, learned different things, and the wealth of knowledge a group would be able to bring to a table would be greater then having a strong foundation in the basics. Teachers use to be able to teach you math at a pace that you could understand. Now we have taken most of the control out of the teachers hands when it comes to what content they are teaching their students.

In the aspect of grading, most teachers take the scores of the tests you have taken, and average them to give you a grade. This shouldn't be how we do our grading system. The grading system isn't reflective of the goal of the entire system. We want our students to learn the content. Traditional tests only prove that they have the ability to cram a lot of information into their short term memory. This i personally feel is a less then optimal skill. What we really want is for our students to understand a concept, and be able to teach it to someone else because of their depth of understanding of the content. Traditional grades punish you for not knowing something earlier and can leave a student in a position that it is too late to get that A.

A more productive system would be to evaluate students through an orally communicated test, to see how much they understand, and give them a grade of where they are. This also tells the teacher where their students could use some reinforcement and get a better view then what is on the paper. The following test keeps all the previous information and adds onto it. If the student improved his grade, then the previous grade is no longer representative of what the student knows, and should be disregarded. If it is a lower grade, then average the grade and repeat till the final. If the student is able to ace the final test, he deserves the A because he has shown that he knows the content at the point of completion of the class. In the end, we just want our students to learn, the grade is just an indicator of how well they did in that class. Some students are slow learners, but may get a better understanding then those that are quick to a concept or memorize.

So to overview my rant. The DoE is a waste of money, which could be better spent in our education systems directly through local distribution of that tax money, standardizing the school system is counterproductive if we want the best educated students and most competitive workers and the grading system we currently have isn't a good representation of a child's knowledge or learning.