Current Event Essay Sample: Politicizing The American Education System
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A Politicized Education System:
The Three Problems Facing American Education
American education is failing. The state of education in the country is serious that it attracted the attention of President Donald Trump. In a recent interview – Can President Trump Reform Education in America? – Fox News sought to unravel the three ferocious woes that haunt the American education system, leading to "mediocre” performance relative to other developed countries, for instance, Singapore and Germany. Three issues made headlines: underperforming K-12, politicized universities, and enormous student debt burden. These challenges create a new pattern that culminates into the school-to-poverty pipeline, demanding drastic policy and systemic changes to disrupt.
One of the major issues that plague the U.S. education system in 2018 is underperforming K-12. A proposed solution is to ignite the spirit of competition by enabling not just the affluent to benefit from school choice. Indeed, this is a plausible approach, since it can empower parents living far from the major cities to choose better schools for their kids regardless of distance. However, concerns also abound that prevalent school choices only increase variance in school quality, further exacerbating the condition of the poor children and sparking another wave of racial and socioeconomic segregation (Betts and Loveless 9). Clearly, the choice is a powerful solution for poor K-12 performance, but there is room for more drastic steps such as closing worst-performing schools and moving learners to better ones and addressing the major factor for poor performance that lies beyond school choice: poverty (Berninger and Morphy par. 1).
Another major issue is politicized universities. As detailed in the news item, it registers as a huge concern that campuses hardly entertain radically divergent opinions, and that group thinking is a mainstay in one of the places that should harbor the nation’s distinguished intellectuals, established or in the making. Other researchers have echoed similar concerns just as emphatically (Haynes par. 2). The fate of the voice of dissent has been pure intolerance accentuated in flagrant disapproval and expulsion, just to name a few. The intolerance that is nurtured in schools not only undermines the quality of education but also infiltrates such tendencies into the country’s political arena.
The third challenge is student debt that has recently spiraled out of control. Student debt has hit 1.5 trillion, the highest record in history, surpassing credit cards and auto loans (Fox News). It is believed that students graduate with huge loan burdens that ultimately imprison them for decades, partly because the universities have gone rogue, raising tuition fees that render federal spending on education abysmally inadequate, and because the economy cannot yield high-paying jobs fast enough to absorb graduates. Accordingly, America has excelled in putting up a system that indebts its own citizens right from childhood sometimes into old age.
As an academic, it is often baffling to think of the risks students and their families take only to plunge back into indigence. From the discussion of the challenges bogging the U.S. academic sphere, a pattern is construable: the country’s education system has a peculiar way of inhibiting progress across all levels – in K-12, lack of choice racially and socioeconomically segregated, the politicized higher learning limits personal growth just before initiating one into a real-world of years of servitude. Undoubtedly, there is a need for drastic policy and systemic changes to disrupt this school-to-poverty pipeline, because education should empower, not aggravate the economic inequality.
Works Cited
Berninger, Virginia W., and Paul Morphy. "Strategies for Underperforming Schools." Http://www.apa.org, American Psychology Association, Jan. 2016. Accessed 22 Nov. 2018.
Betts, Julian R., and Tom Loveless. "School choice, equity, and efficiency." Getting choice right (2005).
Fox News. "Can President Trump Reform Education in America?" YouTube, 2 Jan. 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MxLR7VjNLg. Accessed 22 Nov. 2018.
Haynes, Carole H. "The Politicization of American Universities." Education News | Global Leader Education News and Commentary, EducationViews.org, 2 Dec. 2015. Accessed 22 Nov. 2018.