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Lori Shipman
Bruce Blansett
English 112
11/18/18
I believe the change in the education sector that the government is endorsing will fail. The
downfall of the reform is due to a misdiagnosis of the reason behind the bad school performance.
Therefore, the foundation for the reform approach is unacceptable. There is a neglected but
critically significant constituent of reform and a plethora of issues. There are ways to address those
issues. The ancient leaders of industry and business urged for the “standards and accountability”
schooling development effort. Nevertheless, this education reform is failing. The Democratic and
Republican administrations, Congress and the mainstream media all reinforce the reform message.
The news is that schools in the United States of America are, at best, mediocre and the students
and teachers are to blame. However, the federal government needs to implement rigorous subjectmatter tests plus standards. Similarly, market forces ought to be applied to force the students and
teachers to work on those principles. Positive competition among the students, schools, teachers,
nations, and states shall bring forth the upgrade needed for America to be the best globally.
Premises of the Current Reform Strategy
At the urging of leaders of industry and business, the “standards and accountability"
schooling development effort begun in the late 20th century (Patel, 2017 p.18). The analysis of the
reason behind the poor school performance and the recommendation for its restructuring call for a
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reform scheme that looks direct and coherent. Nevertheless, the reform scheme builds on an
unexamined theory. The scheme advocates for a data-driven policy. Uniform assessments yield
the required data in the form of scores. The scores are effective since the examinations are valid
owing to the laid in standards.
The standards are valid as they relate to school subjects which are modules of the core
curriculum. Lastly, the core curriculum has been in use for over a century and is useful since its
effectiveness remains unchallenged (Patel, 2017 p.18). The analogy compares to an inverted
pyramid, that is, the entire existing improvement effort rests on the conjecture that the current
“core curriculum” sufficiently polishes the students for the current complex, impulsive, tough and
risky state of affairs. The current syllabus is math-science-language-arts-social studies centered
(Patel, 2017 p.18). Indeed, the current era is incomparable to any other in human history. The old
syllabus does not back that assumption which is the key reason for the poor school performance.
The math-science-language arts-social studies syllabus was approved in 1893 and are
highly flawed due to multiple reasons (Henson, 2015 p.64). Firstly, the current core curriculum
feeds unsystematic information to the students at rates that the average student cannot handle.
Secondly, it rubbishes the role of casual social experience, dance, music, art and free play in
intellectual growth. Additionally, the syllabus is very incompetent that it takes up most of the time
for projects, co-ops, internships, apprenticeships, and networking. Fourthly, the core curriculum
disregards critical fields of study and contains zero integrated mechanisms compelling it to adjust
to social change.
Moreover, it offers short shrift to “higher order” psychological processes and creates zero
provision for suggesting and probing questions indispensable to principled growth. The core
curriculum has no agreed-upon principal societal objective nor standards instituting what new
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information is significant and what old information to neglect. Additionally, it does not direct
students progressively over ever-increasing degrees of intellectual complexity and, overloads
learner retention at the cost of logic. Furthermore, the core curriculum stresses symbol
manipulation and reading at the expense of other learning skills. Besides, it relates to the learners'
ages instead of their abilities, interests, and aptitudes. Eventually, the syllabus makes instructor
interchange hard as it subjectively fragments data. Lastly, the curriculum encourages efforts to
measure quality plus other crude methods of evaluation.
In the process of teaching the core curriculum, the institutions typically punish instead of
capitalizing on individual variances and disregards the systemically cohesive nature of
information. It also does not use the first-hand learner experience and needs a great deal of “seat
time passivity” at odds with a simple view. Moreover, the teaching of the syllabus highlights
standardization over creativity, imagination and individual initiative and is hugely costly to direct.
Lastly, the teaching of the core syllabus ignores the repercussions of the current switch from
demanding learner access to limited data, to near-instantaneous pupil access to impressive volumes
of work.
The Common Core State Standards Initiative, Race to the Top and the No Child Left
Behind legislation imply that the syllabus is comprehensive (Henson, 2015 p.66). Nevertheless,
we need to question the effectiveness of the market forces and rivalry in changing the instructor
and student behavior. Therefore, if lousy performance is a system issue, the modules in the syllabus
must be weak and counterproductive as they sustain and encourage the syllabus' current situation
and choke alternatives. The core curriculum shapes people and is the future of a country. Therefore,
it is careless to take the sufficiency of the customary curriculum for granted. All the issues stated
above are serious and need quick remedial action. The efforts at discovering interdisciplinary
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intersections and parallels, changing distribution needs, arranging and re-arranging courses have
not cracked the core’s glitches.
A Proposal
To begin with, practicing old habits is not education reform. Similarly, there is a
connection between the current syllabus and bureaucracy and custom which cannot be altered in
any important way. Therefore, a new method must intertwine with the "core." Additionally, the
new strategies must be imposed bottom up that is, from schools to the federal administrators to
be a success. The state departments and Congress will have to withdraw from centralizing
legislation and initiatives that try to institute or strengthen, either directly or indirectly, a specific
program. Currently, the enemies of meaningful reforms are state subject-matter principles and
corporately generated standardized tests.
The most significant concept for prompting substantial reform is not new. Alfred
Whitehead in 1916 claimed the learning institution had to eliminate the severe disconnection of
modules which destroys the productivity of the current curriculum (Henson, 2015 p.68). For
centuries now, academics have been proposing that it is unlikely to make any proper sense of
reality through disseminating it and learning the segments that compose the whole. Since the
instructors are in the sense-making industry, they must fit the subjects in the syllabus together to
create an extensive, rationally coherent, systemically cohesive curriculum.
Efforts to create a systematically cohesive syllabus have generated the use of
interdisciplinary activities, concepts, problems, projects and themes as coordinators of
instruction (Spring, 2017 p.21). These attempts have created a sense of attainment. However, the
efforts are not deep enough to help the pupils make systematically assimilated intellectual
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simulations of reality, that is, models comprehended better that they become conscious directors
to decision making and action.
The most direct strategy and the best method for instructors to learn is by doing, that is,
putting the technique to work (Spring, 2017 p.21). A perfect learning test center is already in
place which is sophisticated, instantly accessible and practical. The strategy adjusts to all
capacity levels and includes all significant ideas in all critical areas of study and could not be
more appropriate. It involves students in every acknowledgeable thought process, obliterates the
synthetic, subjective confines between school topics, motivates originality, and binds the
sciences and the humanities which are different cultures.
The learn by doing approach touches on all the issues of the core curriculum stated in this
discourse and using it is free. For illustrative education purposes, its efficacy can minimize costs
as well as create time for various instructional possibilities that are currently inconceivable
(Collins, Allan, and Richard Halverson, 2018, p. 113). That test center is the institution itself plus
its immediate surroundings. The school gives, on a mentally manageable gauge, all the constituents
of reality. It is a multifaceted physical setting that encompasses different people and exhibits all
critical patterns of human interaction and action, all molded by assumptions, beliefs, and values.
These types of information involve and consolidate all forms of reality plus all current and
upcoming school disciplines fashioned to describe that reality. Furthermore, unlike educational
modules, the constituents of reality are systematically cohesive. When someone interferes with
one component, the entire system changes.
When someone uses these constituents in unison, their practical assessment by pupils
empowers them to create, elaborate, polish and use their all-inclusive models of reality (Bowles,
Samuel, and Herbert Gintis, 2011 p. 35). Both the tutors and students should be accountable for
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making the immediate reality of their school practical. Afterward, they ought to use their handson skills to make the institution a real studying establishment. Consequently, the current education
sector that is paralyzed by a fixed syllabus lacks a principal objective plus direction will become
more creative, adaptive, dynamic and capable of perfectly guiding people as and communal action.
The instructors and pupils will be doing and learning from doing. What both parties will
be asking themselves in their new roles will fast elaborate the effectiveness of sociology, art,
chemistry, history, economics, physics, geography, all other subjects plus other currently ignored
areas of study. For example, they will ask what constitutes a school as per the American Standards?
What is the locality of our school in the globe? How does our school look on Google Earth? What
is the extent and contour of the terrain our school occupies? What should our institution be doing
and why? Who are the people who decide what our school practices? Are the efforts of our school
successful? What is the history of our institution? What are our school's costs of operation? Who
funds the school's activities? How do the grantors feel about supporting the school and why? What
resources are used in the school to facilitate operations? How does our school’s climate control
system operate? Where is the waste we generate taken? What are the repercussions of our waste
disposal system? What is the number of people needed to run the school? What are the daily duties
of the staff? Who are the decision makers in the schools? What authorities make what decisions
and how? How do people feel concerning the establishment? What would these people want to
change concerning the school and why? What is the proper way to assemble the data collected
through all the inquiries we are making? Is that necessary? Why or why not? The more inquiries
pupils and tutors make, the more they will deliberate on to ask.
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The move from making more sense of immediate reality to the world, country, society, and
the community is sufficiently trivial to permit slight governmental wave making. Grade cards
could also stay unaltered.
Conclusion
There is slackness in the hands-on technique that is troublesome and intolerable to many.
Hidden in customary instruction is an ancient supposition that the leaders understand enough
concerning the broad differences in the youth plus their situations, the nature of the future and the
human potential to decide what they ought to learn. Part of that statement is right as the old core
curriculum focuses on homogenizing pupils instead of capitalizing on their dissimilarities.
However, it is possible to build a functional, dynamic, politically neutral, theoretically sound,
philosophically defensible and comprehensive general education. The best and direct way to
accomplish this is to put the course books away, get out of the class setting and try to create more
logic of immediate here-and-now skills. The education system in the present day is edging further
from human history every day. Changing that necessitates altering what educators and learners are
doing, that is, adjusting the curriculum.
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Works Cited
Bowles, Samuel, and Herbert Gintis. Schooling in capitalist America: Educational reform and
the contradictions of economic life. Haymarket Books, 2011.
Collins, Allan, and Richard Halverson. Rethinking education in the age of technology: The
digital revolution and schooling in America. Teachers College Press, 2018.
Henson, Kenneth T. Curriculum planning: Integrating multiculturalism, constructivism, and
education reform. Waveland Press, 2015.
Patel, Jash. "Education Reform in the United States." Sabiduría (2017): 18.
Spring, Joel. Political Agendas for Education: From Make America Great Again to Stronger
Together. Routledge, 2017.