¶ … America, having the perfect schools has long been thought to be the panacea of all our nation's social troubles. If only we could teach our children to master America's social values while still in school, we could produce a population of perfect engineers for our future society. Injustice, racism, poverty, and all the other social illnesses of America would be cured by this new generation of progressive thinkers. The quality of our nation's education system needs to be improved, and President Bush's education reform plan will do just that.
It is obvious that the so-called "progressive" educational approach has failed. The academic knowledge of our children has fallen in comparison to other industrial nations. In an attempt to stem our nation's slide in educational rankings, government expenditures for education have risen dramatically. Every year, billions of taxpayer dollars are poured into the U.S. education system. The government seems to believe that all it has to do is increase this amount year after year, and this will automatically translate into increased learning for our children. This is a very noble cause; however, it doesn't seem to be working, as we haven't seen the upward improvements that ought to have reflected the extra billions poured into our schools. To rectify the situation, President Bush has come up with his own educational reform plan. The quality of our nation's education system needs to be improved, and President Bush's education reform plan will do just that.
John Dewey first introduced progressive education in the early 1900s through the 1930s. In the 1960s and 1970s, progressive education reemerged onto the American scene (Frase and Streshly 3-4). However, progressive education not only did not fix our nation's social problems, but it hurt our academic achievement, and America's test scores began to fall. The government then dramatically increased the funding of our nation's schools. This, conversely, has not brought our test grades back to the level...
Bush's main goals has been to reform our nation's education system. His plan outlines a half-a-dozen substantial changes in the U.S. education system, and because of the increased national awareness that something must be changed, analysts believe Bush will get most of the major points in his plan through Congress.
The urgency of this issue is that our children are consistently scoring low in comparison to other industrial nations, and America's citizens are getting weary of this problem. As Herbert Walberg, a research professor of education at the University of Illinois puts it, "We have more money than any of the other affluent countries in the world, and yet we have poor performance. It's not a question of getting more money; it's a question of doing things differently and spending money for things that work rather than on things that don't work" (Jones 6).
America's Kindergarten through 12th grade schools are lagging behind most of the industrial nations in the world. America, the richest nation in the world, cannot seem to keep up with international education standards. The United States has the highest GDP (gross domestic product) in the world, and its GDP per capita is the second highest (web.hhs.se/personal/suzuki/o-English/UnitedStates.html1). The U.S. also spends more money as a percentage of the GDP than the average of the other developed countries reported on (nces.ed.gov//pubs2002/digest2001/ch6.asp 5). This translates into more money per student then most other countries, and education is the government's second largest activity (Samuelson B6). Therefore, money is obviously not the problem.
The problem is the United States' educational teaching methods. Due to the so-called progressive education reform, U.S. schools have backed away from the traditional education focus of core subjects, like mathematics, reading, and the sciences. As E.D Hirsch says in…
