If you’ve been following my work, you know how enthusiastic I am about overhauling the United States’ educational system. We could have the most acceptable educational system if we wanted to. The issue, in my opinion, is that we end up getting in our way in our quest to attain this. Politics, racism, and corporate greed have all been allowed to determine educational systems, and our students have suffered. In this article, I’d want to talk about three challenges in education that may be solved if we put in more effort.

Teacher Caliber. We could assure that a trained teacher taught every child in the United States if we genuinely wanted to.

First, we must guarantee that instruction appeals to the finest and brightest high school students. This may be accomplished by doubling teacher compensation and halving class sizes.

Second, we must ensure that teacher preparation programs adequately prepare pre-service teachers for the classroom and that they can work with a variety of students. Teacher education programs that don’t pass the muster (excuse the pun) should be held or shut down.

Finally, teachers who make it into the classroom should be prepared for success. Teachers having less than three years of experience should not be placed in schools or courses with our most vulnerable students. When they are, many of them fail and leave the field while their students underperform. Although some instructors may be up to the task, most are not.

Anti-Intellectualism. Learners in the United States are less concerned with education than their peers in other nations. It’s as though the great majority of our students lack a passion for studying, and many only go to school because they are forced to. We need to devise a systematic strategy to combat the academic disengagement spread throughout our country like cancer.

Rather than blaming issues beyond our control, teachers should concentrate on those in their control. The education system in the U.S. has to be redesigned to encourage increased learner participation. Gamification, virtual reality, customized learning, adaptive learning, and other strategies must be fully integrated into the structure of our classrooms. Why? Because these techniques have been shown to boost learner engagement significantly.

Accountability. The accountability movement that began with NCLB (No Child Left Behind) must be revived. I am not advocating for the reinstatement of NCLB, which was a form of accountability on steroids that required teachers to meet unrealistic standards. Even though it was a faulty education strategy, it had a good heart.

I propose a shift back to the zeitgeist of the accountability age when teachers were held accountable for their students’ progress. Using value-added measurements, in my opinion, would be a valuable method to assess instructor achievement. We may look at student accomplishment realistically rather than in a vacuum by concentrating on learner progress, which was a premise of NCLB.

In this method, we may assess a teacher’s success by looking at how a student’s academic achievement has improved while they were in charge. We compare learners’ current year standardized test scores to their prior year’s scores. Because the teacher may alter classroom grades, we must employ standardized test scores.

What are your thoughts? Do you agree with the items on my list? What are the reasons why you agreed or why not?