National Crisis Essays - Education Reform, Standards-based Education

National Crisis National Crisis Our society is being forced to deal with uneducated, illiterate high school graduates. You may ask how is a high school graduate so ill prepared for the world. Have you ever been to a store where a young person, maybe a high school student is the sales associate and the register shuts down right before you receive your change? Did you notice the look of panic on their face because they were not sure how much change you were supposed to receive? It is because of the national crisis, social promotion that can be accredited to this dependency on everything except their educated brains. We as educated people must help find a way to save our children from wasting their academic careers due to social promotion. Truly embracing the idea that all children can learn and making sure that all children do, requires that we all take responsibility for ending social promotion. (www.ed.gov) If we accept and aim to prove that all people are capable of learning lifes basic necessities we will start b reaking down the wall of stupidity social promotion has built. Social promotion, the national crisis, is the promotion of students to the next grade level without mastery of their current curriculum. (www.ncrel.org) More than half of teachers surveyed in a recent poll stated that they had promoted unprepared students in the last school year, often because they see no alternative. (www.ed.gov) If a teacher sees no option for a student other than failing or socially promoting them, the teacher generally promotes them, because it goes over easier with in society and authority. This is essentially depleting the educational standards of our country. Standards are lowered as students are continually cheated of the material necessary to independently survive in the real world. The realization that I was cheated by social promotion finally came about my senior year of high school. As far back as I can remember I have had problems with math, but I passed every year up until I met Coach Taylor. He was a nonconformist in nearly every sense of the word. He definitely did not jump on the bandwagon of socially promoting students. I learned the hard way about the true aftermath of social promotion that year. I was held accountable for things I didn't know. Therefore, I was fairly distraught to discover I wouldn't be graduating with all my friends. I'd be alone in summer school and when I received my diploma in the mail. Not only was I cheated of skills, I was cheated of the excitement and memories of walking across the stage as everyone applauded. I now am still suffering for my undeserved promotion as I take remedial high school math in college. Students are not the only victims of social promotion. Schools, teachers and businesses are also indirectly cheated by this national crisis. Students who are below level because of social promotion lack the ability to perform menial daily tasks. 340,000 high school graduates a year do not have enough knowledge to balance a checkbook or write a letter to a credit card company regarding a billing error. (www.ed.gov) Social promotion sends a message to students that little is expected from them, that they have little worth, and that they do not warrant the time and effort it would take to help them be successful in school. (www.ed.gov) One third of students being below the basic level of proficiency (www.ed.gov) forces teachers to cheat the on level students of new material. Teachers must re-teach old lessons or skip over portions of current lesson plans because some students don't know or weren't exposed to the necessary material to comprehend new lessons. When teachers re-teach becaus e they care about the students' successful education, it creates a repetitive cycle of social promotion. This cycle is put into motion because the current teacher has not met their original lesson plans. The student is again unprepared for the next grade level. Due to unprepared students, schools rank low on standardized tests, which creates a bad reputation nationally. Parents looking into schools for their children don't want to purposely send their child to a low ranking school. Businesses lack confidence in an applicant holding only a