America has for a very long time been known as one of the best places in the world to receive an education. Foreigners far and wide have traveled here in hopes of gaining and education from an American university, which they believe to offer better curriculum and just overall help to educate them more.

However, a disturbing pattern has developed in recent years that shows that American schools, and the American educational system in general is failing.
Our country’s declining educational system is based solely around one issue, standardized testing. In our attempt to make all education uniform, we have actually dumbed it down.

Under former President George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” program, all students are required to pass certain tests which are supposed to gauge their level of comprehension of the curriculum that the government requires all students to know.

These tests have created a vacuum that forces teachers to teach around a test, rather than teach their students what they believe they should know about the subject.

Most teachers are underpaid, and the last thing that they need is to be on a schedule that requires them to basically summarize topics in order to go over everything required of them. This forces teachers to just skim the top of issues and subjects rather than allowing them to delve deeply into the material they believe is vitally important to their subject.

Does the government really find teachers so incompetent that they cannot trust them to teach their students effectively without the threat of reprisal?

Limiting a teachers options and freedoms of what they can and cannot teach has proven an annoyance for more than just a few teachers over the past years.

What’s more, these Standards of Learning are easy. So easy in fact that I don’t think I even know more than two or three people that have failed one, and I myself have received a perfect on three of them. I guess America’s standards have progressively gotten lower.

There is no uniqueness left in the educational system, as it has all been sucked out by an attempt to make sure that everybody knows the same curriculum and know it at the same pace. This, although on the surface seems to offer a reasonable position on education, arguing that everybody needs to be on the same level, is ineffective.