Malala Yousafzai, at the Forbes Under 30 Summit in Philadelphia, shared with the world the message she had conveyed to President Obama while meeting with him in the Oval Office: if you send drones and guns to fight wars on foreign soil, you’ll arm the world and make it ready for war; if you send books instead, you’ll educate it.
It’s no surprise that this unique 17-year-old was the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize this year, after being shot in the head for advocating women’s education in her community. Since her rise to fame, Malala has fought for the rights of women and declared her intent to be a Prime Minister of Pakistan, in order to influence education policy through politics. However, this article is not about Malala, so much as it is about the theme of her message: educating the world, but doing so in an effective manner.
In the United States, the government structure allows for states to control education. Whatever is not listed in the central or state constitution is at the interpretive discretion of the state’s legislative, executive, and judicial departments. California’s system, for example, operates in a completely different manner from New York’s. As a result, there was a rather interesting encounter during a Spring 2013 English teachers’ conference in Vermont. An advanced placement literature and composition teacher from New York mentioned the word “scantron,” to the astonishment of his colleagues and subsequently himself. Barely anyone had heard of the word, and he couldn’t figure out how they gave their examinations.
The Department of Education seems to be in an equally matched state of confusion regarding its priorities. If one were to visit the department’s website and look at the bar that dominates top of the page, one would first see the item with which the education system is most concerned—student loans. No, it is not the quality of the education given to the future generations, but how they’ll pay for it that tops the priority list. The actual research and data appears last on the list. If one were to venture that far, under “What’s New” one would find a survey for Teacher Attrition and Mobility from 2012-2013, followed by reports on staffing surveys, credit transfer and an archive of under-viewed data.
As of 2014, Florida and Texas are the only two states commended by the Center for American Progress for providing regular productivity evaluations of their schools and districts. This ghastly number might be the first hint as to why our education system decidedly goes nowhere—without evaluation, how is one to figure out what is wrong on a district-wide, let alone state-wide level? These are the practices that call, not necessarily for a new education system, but for new processes within the established practice. Periodic evaluation of student performance based on units covered, the school’s overall performance on statewide testing, and the creation of a specialized committee for each state, mandated and supervised by the Department of Education, would be an appropriate place to start.
Cover image by woodleywonderworks via Flickr. Some rights reserved.
There is plenty of evalution of our nation’s school systems–both at a federal level, thanks to NCLB, and at the state and district level. Evaluation and productivity data are not the same thing–a careful review of the CAP research reveals that it is a lack of information on funding/financing of public education, due to poor budgeting and/or accounting practices, that makes evaluating productivity difficult. As for the federal data you feel is lacking, I found there was plenty of information readily accessible (see, for example: http://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/landing.jhtml?src=pn and the Civil Rights Data Collection: http://ocrdata.ed.gov/, which is particularly useful when examining racial disparities in education).
I do agree that the DoE’s website organization is a representation of the unfortunate state of our country’s funding for higher education. It would seem funding quality education is a huge problem across the board, for not only higher education but K-12 schools as well.