Issues Faced by Education in the 21st Century

Introduction
Over the decades, there has been significant advancement and progression in education. With such progression comes the incessantly mounting necessities for education to guarantee student and teacher engagement and provide learning prospects for the present-day students. This paper examined the prevailing issues faced by education in the 21st Century. Specifically, the paper will extensively examine issues about the use of technology, the role of teacher educators, student needs and abilities, the interrelations between learning and teaching, in addition to how different internal and external factors have an impact on the learning of the present-day K-12 students.
Students' Need to Belong
One of the most major changes necessitated in education is transforming schools into better communities that not only care but also support the students. The term community is employed to imply a sense of belonging for the students, trust in other students, and also safety. The shortcomings in the present moment are that schools as educational establishments, barely pay attention or focus on the socio-emotional necessities of students either independently or as a group (Osterman, 2000). There is a minimal formal emphasis on the effective necessities of students, and the ideologies and practices shaping culture within the schools are ones that cultivate individualism and competition within the institutions instead of collaboration and community. Moreover, the school establishments have organizational guidelines and practices that methodically preclude and hinder the development of community amongst students and directly lead to students facing segregation, estrangement, and division (Osterman, 2000).
Research indicates that relatedness or connection is one of the fundamental psychological needs of any individual's growth and development. This encompasses the necessity of a person having the sense of being worthy of healthiness and wellbeing. Essentially, this necessity for connection takes into account the need to have a sense of community. When an individual is satisfied in terms of these needs, his or her psychological development is positively affected and has a positive experience of health and welfare. However, in the present educational setting, most of the student's needs are not satisfied, and this results in deteriorated levels of motivation, alienation, hampered intellectual development, and poor academic performance (Osterman, 2000).
Internal and External Classroom Factors
There are different internal and external factors such as class size, democratic classrooms, and standardized curriculum that have an impact on learning and education in the present-day K-12 students.
Class Size
Class size continues to be an aspect of significant contention and controversy in education. This is linked to contrasting assumptions and arguments. On the one hand, parents, teachers, and also school principals have the supposition that smaller class sizes provide an educational setting that is more productive compared to larger class sizes. On the other hand, there is the disinclination of government establishments and other policymakers, in addition to scholars, to support the notion that class size is a key determining factor of educational advancement. It is imperative to note that being devoted to smaller class sizes essentially encompasses having more teachers, and this has substantial resource consequences (Blatchford, Goldstein, and Mortimore, 1998).
Class size is an aspect of great concern in education for various reasons. To begin with, class size plays a pivotal role in the formation of educational plans and allocating resources. Larger class sizes necessitate the planning for more students during lessons and also requiring more resources to facilitate such plans (Blatchford, Goldstein, and Mortimore, 1998). Secondly, class size is significant in the experience of both pupils and teachers. A Higher student to teacher ratio exists in big class size. For instance, in a large classroom, the tasks for teachers are more demanding and strenuous because the educator has to address the concerns of each student. In a large class size, this is challenging and can easily take up time allotted for the lesson. Ultimately, this can bring up the problem of lack of effective teaching because the teacher is unable to deal with the educational challenges faced by each student. Third, there is the issue of discriminatory use of research evidence or the lack of it to service certain perspectives and policies on class sizes (Blatchford, Goldstein, and Mortimore, 1998).
Democratic Classrooms
Incessantly, schools have experienced failure in dealing with educational equity. In accordance to research, in the educational setting, there are issues concerned with inequalities in the financing, economic and technological resources, numbers of trained and qualified teachers, teaching quality, and educational results between students with and deprived of the benefits convened by their racial background, gender, class, language, and disability (Um, 2019). Nurturing a classroom community that is authentically democratic and positioning every student as a valued member irrespective of their differences is a major problem in education. This is largely because several students are usually positioned as being less able, not vested in learning, and difficult by different school structures and procedures that are taken for granted. Furthermore, democratic classrooms necessitate every student has the right not just to speak but also to be heard. Some of the prevailing practices that preclude this include the top-down educational practices that may mute students and prevent them from creating their world. Moreover, these practices usually end up preventing the students from giving their points of view that are dissimilar from their educators. This is different from the fact that a democratic classroom should permit and even nurture freedom of speech for every student (Um, 2019).
Democratic classrooms are linked to a generally designed teaching method that provides all students with access to learning experience irrespective of their racial, ethnic, cultural, religious, and linguistic backgrounds. The existent issue faced in educating K-12 students is that some students are given privileges based on their conformity to the normal approaches of learning. This sort of privilege afforded to some students and denied to other results in the teachers failing to comprehend the strong suits, weaknesses, wants, and needs of every student (Um, 2019).
Educator Roles
The role of educators and professional development is another issue faced by education in the contemporary setting. There is a lack of proper comprehension regarding who teacher educators are, and what they undertake, the comprehension of their roles, and professional development, in addition to their perception as teacher educators. This takes into account the tensions between the teacher educators' expectations of the teaching position they are hired for and their point of view of their roles, which consist of tasks and activities that go above and beyond teaching. Additional problems faced include the difficulty to undertake and public experiential research, absence of support through a team method, and the lack of professional development prospects (Flores, 2018).
The education field continues to face the problem of the notion of teacher educators being unseen or unacknowledged professionals and their work being invisible. There is a significant necessity to ensure that the work of educators is more obvious and perceptible within institutions to improve the status of their teaching in academia. Moreover, there is a daunting challenge in the form of the intricate, dynamic, and altering nature of educator's professional working frameworks and the conflicts in their practices (Flores, 2018). Research has also demonstrated that an additional issue concerning educator's roles is their professional growth and development being reliant on the interrelation and negotiation of meaning within the professional development world in addition to the impacts of the messages they obtain from students and colleagues (Flores, 2018).
A further problem perceptible in present-day education is the negligible role that teacher educators play in enhancing teacher quality. Undoubtedly, research has demonstrated that good, motivational, and challenging teachers have a positive and substantial impact on student educational attainment compared to others (Liston, Borko, and Whitcomb, 2008). Specifically, teacher quality is perceived as a pivotal policy pedal to diminish the existent educational attainment gaps along the lines of race and economy. Guaranteeing the quality profile of the teacher labor force is pivotal to protracting the democratic undertaking of public schooling to an extraordinary number of students who are more diverse compared to ever before (Liston, Borko, and Whitcomb, 2008).
However, the fundamental issue is that the players involved whose everyday duty is the preparation of quality teachers; the debating terms are distant and eradicated. The preparation of teachers, especially for those based in the university setting, is perceived as part of the issue, which is constantly overlooked. Major players fashioning the policy deliberation and financing initiatives work outside the school setting itself. As a result, teacher educators are experiencing marginalization and are involved in their marginalization. Significantly, teacher educators have a lot to contribute to the development of a systematic approach to quality. The major concern is that their lack of contribution implies that if such conditions prevail, then they will cease being marginalized and end up being irrelevant. What is more, it appears nonsensical to delineate and explicate the aspect of teacher quality devoid of involving teacher educators in the process itself (Liston, Borko, and Whitcomb, 2008).
Flores (2018) further indicates that there is a need for investing in the professional development of educators from a practice, policy, and research point of view. This takes into account the conceptualization of their professional development centered on the projects that they have engaged in, as well as the prevailing research. Also, it is imperative to take into consideration the intricacies that educators face in their professional development. The perspectives of the teachers need to be taken into consideration at all times to come up with an effective process of teaching and learning.
Teacher Education Programs
The actualities of what it takes to be an educator in the prevailing American education system such that all students truly have a chance to learn are just about overwhelming. Within the classroom setting, the majority of beginning teachers will join, and at last, a quarter of the students are underprivileged, and numerous of them lack basic needs such as food, shelter, and also healthcare. Also, the teachers face the challenge that other students have ascertained learning variances, and others speak languages other than English as their primary language. Also, educators face the challenge that some students are from minority ethnic or racial groups hailing from varying educational systems and cultural customs (Darling-Hammond, 2006).
Furthermore, not only is the sort of practice necessitated to educate students with a variety of learning necessitated an exceedingly intricate, intense knowledge responsibility, schools in the United States hardly support this sort of practice. Specifically, these schools provide lesser prospects for teachers to gain proper insight and knowledge of their students in the long run and also substantially less time for teachers to spend working in tandem with their colleagues to come up with a proper curriculum, lesson plans, teaching approaches, and tactics, and also assessment of student work. There is a poor relationship between the American school setting and the demand for proper teaching and learning (Darling-Hammond, 2006). Imperatively, to teach to achieve success in this undertaking, schools have to design and implement programs that transform the sorts of settings in which beginners learn to teach and further on becoming teachers.
School Reform and Accountability
Frequent assessments of school reform are pivotal to examining the quality and reliability of the evidence on initiatives and the usefulness and efficacy of methods and approaches that are fundamental to the assessments. According to Chatterji (2002), reform endeavors in individual school establishments and greater organizational systems were substantially out-of-focus and non-systemic. Also, research determinations have been substantially non-systemic in terms of design. They have, as a result, failed to aid individual schools, school systems, and state systems, in the development of strategic paths that are in line with the mission of school reforms. Chatterji (2002) further indicates that although the state undertook plans and actions complied with the endeavor of Goals 2020, there seemed to be somewhat of minimal constancy or unity in terms of how reforms permeated down to districts, school establishments and further down to the classroom.
Moreover, there was a lack of clear and beneficial policy instructions for practitioners in the areas of teaching and financing. Teacher education was deemed to be trailing behind. Systems of accountability with major stakes for school in terms of their report cards and individual students, regarding requirements for graduation, were already in position. Regardless of its efficiency, the educational research community seemed to be lagging behind reform lawmakers and legislators, both locally and nationwide (Chatterji, 2002).
Student Response Systems
Educators in higher education establishments have been coming up with a promising method that employs classroom innovations to encourage student participation and involvement in huge lecture classes and to heighten the awareness of teachers regarding the students; understanding of scientific ideas. When the teacher poses a question within a lecture hall, all higher education students give a response to the question over the network (Penuel et al., 2007). Notably, each of the responses given by the students is unspecified and is instantaneously accumulated and displayed for both the students and the teacher. Therefore, this makes the thinking of the students to be perceptible. Imperatively, owing to such response technology, educators can assimilate such inquisitions with widespread and instantaneous answers from all students into teaching or instruction and utilize the technology for an assortment of purposes. Some of them include prompting the fundamental ideas of the students, decision making on the teacher instructions, sampling students regarding their interests and preferences, and also formative assessment (Penuel et al., 2007).
Conclusion
Albeit there has been remarkable and significant development in education in the past number of decades, there are common issues that are faced in education in the present day. This essay ascertains different factors influencing the learning of K-12 students today. First, there is a need for students to belong. Currently, there is less focus on cultivating school cultures that embrace collaboration and community instead of individualism and competition. Secondly, there are internal and external classroom factors that influence education today. One of them is the massive class sizes that make it challenging for teachers to cater to the academic needs of every student. There is also the issue of top-down educational practices that hamper democratic classrooms that place students to be valued members regardless of their variances. Educator roles is another major issue for present-day education. Teacher educators are unnoticed and unrecognized professions, and their valuable work is overlooked. Furthermore, educators are given an insignificant role in defining and improving teacher quality, yet they are the parties responsible for everyday teaching.
Moreover, students' response systems and school reform and accountability are other issues hampering education. Innovations are necessitated to ensure that students can be seen, and their responses during the classroom are taken into consideration. All of these issues need to be extensively reviewed and addressed to improve education for K-12 students.
References
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Darling-Hammond, L. (2006). Constructing 21st-century teacher education. Journal of teacher education, 57(3), 300-314.
Flores, M. A. (2018). Tensions and possibilities in teacher educators' roles and professional development. European Journal of Teacher Education, 41(1): 1, 1-3. DOI: 10.1080/02619768.2018.1402984
Liston, D., Borko, H., & Whitcomb, J. (2008). The teacher educator's role in enhancing teacher quality. Journal of Teacher Education 59 (2): 111 – 116.
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