A significant number of skeptics in the United States are of the opinion that the most significant issue confronting public education now is an inadequate concentration on the achievement of desired outcomes. The argument contends that students are not set to reach high standards and that the learning experience is given more weight than analyzing education’s outcomes in groups that make policy decisions.

To the degree that it applies, this is a legitimate argument. It is possible to advance it by an essential step. Not only do we struggle to hold individual learners answerable for poor results, but we have also struggled to keep the whole government-controlled education system answerable for its achievement since at least World War II.

This is a problem because poor performance in the classroom can have a ripple effect on the entire community. Failure characterizes the system of public education. So why wouldn’t individual learners model their work after what it shows?

Miracle Cures

The history of attempts to change the public education system in the United States is littered with half-hearted initiatives, almost comedic misdiagnosis of education issues, blame-shifting, and farce. Everyone considers themselves an expert, even though the vast majority of them have, of course, been negatively affected by the same system they seek to change.

A pretense of debate often underscores a surprising general agreement on the much-touted “miracle cure” of the decade at any given time during the process of school reforms. This “miracle cure” could be school standardization or liberal education as well as preschool programs or digitalizing the classroom, and it is expected to address the issues that plague the education system in the United States.

These miracle cures never live up to the hype. However, rather than modifying their method of attack, policymakers merely double down in vain hope that the most recent trend would be an exception to the pattern of failure shown by its predecessors.

Some naysayers maintain that proposed changes to the public school system are doomed to failure because they are watered down or undermined by education lobbyists, which consist of teacher groups, administrators, and politicians in their pockets. However, in many situations, blaming the collapse of reform on subversion does little more than clear the reform of blame. The vast majority of suggestions put up to improve education are either pointless or counterproductive. They were doomed to fail regardless of whether or not organized political interests fought against them.

Many right-wingers are of the opinion that the current state of public education in the United States is in a poor state because of changes in cultural and social norms, the majority of which began in the 1960s. These cultural and social shifts are thought to be responsible for the destruction of school management, the moral foundation for education, and a wide consensus on what subjects should be taught.

Certainly, there is some validity to this idea; nevertheless, it does not explain why pupils in the United States do not have the communicative and cognitive abilities necessary to thrive in college or the real world today.

Deeply Rooted

In addition, many people who think in terms of free markets believe that introducing market competition into the public school system will help alleviate many of the educational issues that plague the United States. This argument has some merit, but it overlooks the role that government policies (other than the distribution of students to schools) play in limiting students’ success in their academic endeavors.

It is impossible for a school to effectively impart the necessary skills, expertise, and outlook to its students when govt policy persists in enforcing rigid staff rules, bureaucratic nonsense, regulatory requirements, and an executive order to use schooling to engineer political or social outcomes. This is true regardless of whether or not the students decide to be enrolled in the school.

Last but not least, school reform discourse frequently ignores the critical role that individual decisions play in determining academic performance. This includes decisions made by students, guardians, business owners, and educators. Education and the acquisition of new information are not two things that can be compelled. If children are allowed by their parents to watch television instead of doing their schoolwork, the school’s efforts to provide them with chances will not ensure their success. We give insufficient credit to the function of policy-making when we assume that any collection of ideas for educational reform may produce an educated populace by some miracle cure. Education calls for initiative, a quality that is famously difficult to instill in others or teach them.