Thursday, December 10, 2015

Letter of Education to Secretary Duncan

Carter G. Woodson, the author of The Mis-Education of the Negro, created an
underlining motif regarding the flaws of the American education system. Woodson
wrote, The imparting of information is not education, (20). Endless testing and
meaningless assignments, all meant to measure from a 1 size fits all standpoint on
learning will lead to the destruction of our students and the future of America. Grades
and assessments in modern education are failing the students, stripping them of
creativity and the ability to challenge themselves through their interests. In turn, schools
develop curricula designed to filter out the students who fail to meet the cookie cutter
expectations of our public education system.
Albert Einstein once said, The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but
imagination. One of the smartest men to ever walk this earth understood the meaning
of education in one sentence, a sentence that revolved around creativity and new ideas.
For our education system to be successful it also has to be creative. The system that
has been induced upon students for decades has created a mainstream desire for
students to drop out of high school. Ever year 1.3 million students drop out of high
school, adding up to a whopping . This system, racked full of assessments and grades
is what is killing our nation. Ever time this country has transitioned into intelligence
being knowledge rather than it being creativity.
Grades have created an environment for students to take the easy way out of classes.
In the classroom students have begun to focus more on the fabricated idea of
progression of numbers and statistics regarding their learning, in result, it causes them
focus less on what is being presented to them academically. When students start to
focus more on grades and measurement of learning to pass a class, they tend to aim for
the most efficient way to do that, through underachieving. They only commit to what is
expected of them. In the article, The Case Against Grades, they author states,Two
educational psychologists pointed out that an overemphasis on assessment can
actually undermine the pursuit of excellence (Maehr and Midgley, 1996, p. 7)(Alfie
Kohn, Paragraph 13). This clearly conveys from a scholarly standpoint using science
and evidence, that the education filled with rigorous grades and assessments is what is
failing our country. Students are the future of america, and as we stockpile them with
assignments meant only to measure their capacity for focus and application rather than
Wikipedia describes grades as, the process of applying standardized measurements of
varying levels of achievement in a course. The standards that are being used in the
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Thursday, December 10, 2015

American education system have caused students to focus more on grades, rather than
the content that is being presented. In the article, Grades Vs. Learning, author, Jen
Rubino states, There is a difference between the grade received in a course and the
amount of learning that took place in the course. Grades do not increase the
determination to learn nor, present the actual impact of the content introduced to
students. Because students take in so much content and new ideas that cant be
measured from a single letter grade in a acquired class, it causes letter grades to be
inaccurate. Through this it can also be seen that the entire existence of grades through
the past few decades has caused our students to become uneducated. Students
futures tend to always ride on the back of grades, they tend to focus more on measuring
themselves than the amount of content consumed and retained. This leads to
incompetent adults meandering around in their lives, which in terms caused the flawed
education system that we have today, not only through a lack of effort, but from a lack of
real world knowledge that schools do not provide.
Education has become a clouded area of in the future of America. The increased use of
grades in public school systems have created repercussions such as a loss of creativity
and critical thinking that our country was founded on. We are declining in test scores,
and students are losing interest in content as their creativity is being diminished. The
remaining students that the school system failed to ween off tend to take the easiest
route accessible to them, in order to earn an adequate grades, this causes them to have
more motivation towards obtaining a measurement of their time spent in class, rather
than focus on the learning opportunities being presented around them. Through the lack
of inspiration and motivation to learn and innovate, the cookie cutter expectations of
our educations system are failing and the American students, making our nations
overall intelligence inadequate for the cultural race on Earth.