Rethinking K-12 Education: Defining a New Model

Education is a central aspect of life. It determines one’s future and socioeconomic status. Since 1980 the tuitions and fees for higher education have increased by over 400 percent, as a result, there has been a high dropout rate. The reason is that students simply can't afford the fees. There are many institutions around the world that give students access to a free college education like Finland, Austria, Norway, Germany, and Sweden. Former President Obama's proposal for free community colleges launches in Tennessee this fall 2018. He was motivated by other state proposals from the past and present, like the 20-year-old state-funded HOPE scholarship program in Georgia, the largest prestigious merit-based scholarship program in the United States, and free-college proposals in Oregon, Mississippi, Chicago, Philadelphia, and the state of Massachusetts.

These proposals are born out of awareness that our students are struggling financially, over the years more students are enrolling and attending college but the bigger concern has arisen that only about 39 percent of students who enter the country’s most accessible institutions graduate within six years. A quarter of those who enroll in the fall doesn't come back in the spring. There are many contributing factors to why students are having difficulties, but I believe that the most important factor for students not succeed, is our K-12 system that has made insufficient improvements in basic learning skills.

It is in K-12 schooling that lay key foundations for future development in every aspect. Unfortunately, recent statistics suggest that K–12 education in the United States is falling short, especially in comparison to other developed countries. We argue that educational technologies hold significant promise for improving K–12 educational outcomes, but insufficient improvements in basic learning skills have been achieved. As a child, I attend elementary and middle school in Mexico I did not think much of the education system until I move to the United States, I started here in the 8th grade some of the recommended classes for middles school I had already taken them the year before in Mexico and as I start high school the math and science was behind at least two years. Schools are not just behind in subjects but also preparing students for the next steps in life being college or work they do not acquire the basics.

Eighty three million adults have a low level of education, and nearly 20 percent of 15-year-olds lack sufficient reading skills and writing skills, according to a report from the European Commission's Rethinking Education initiative. This statement I believe has more truth and a higher percentage of student lacking reading and writing skill since now we live in a digital age where autocorrect and audio books and other apps do most of the heavy lifting, for instance in my 6-year-old class the have program for math that does not show them how to do the work but on how to find answer instance, and during for reading time they use program like ABC mouse where instance of trying to read it is sound out for them using memorization, but then what do those students when they start middle school finding them self with unfamiliar words, they fall behind and continually to fall being in high school, college and eventually in life, adding more to unemployed youth. Young is three times more likely to be unemployed than adults, and almost 42 million of them worldwide are looking for work, according to the International Labor Organization. Furthermore, job vacancies are staying unfilled longer today than they did national crisis, another indication of potential is a mismatch between the new-age skills required by employers and industrial age skills that are still being taught in formal education.

A better early-childhood education can shape the success of the entire education system. Nobel Prize-winning economist and University of Chicago professor James Heckman, who has dedicated much time to researching early childhood, found that children of mothers who graduate from college score much higher on cognitive tests at age 3 than those whose mothers drop out of high school, proof of the advantage for young children of living in rich, stimulating environ¬ments. Interest in education at an early age encourages lifelong learning, which is another key policy objective in many countries. Early childhood programs are also valuable resources for encouraging parents to re-enter the workforce, thereby activating a key resource in the population needed to stimulate economic growth.

In 2015, responding to many of these concerns, Congress overhauled the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). In adopting the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Congress retained the requirements for annual testing in reading and math but gave states much more leeway in deciding what to do with the results. ESSA retains NCLB’s requirement that states test once a year in reading and math (in grades 3–8 and once in high school) and science (once in elementary, middle, and high school). At the same time, ESSA gets Washington mostly out of the business of judging whether schools are failing and wholly out of the business of mandating school-improvement strategies. The challenge is now to decide just what ESSA means in practice, as states explore their options and as the Obama administration seeks to use regulation to impose federal mandates that it couldn’t win in the legislation.

It's been a tumultuous year for America’s schools – one marked by an expanding minority-student population, an increasingly discontent teaching force, a backlash against standardized testing, and shifting understanding of education reform. It’s seen greater attention on areas traditionally dismissed as non-essential: things like early-childhood education, after-school programs, and project-based learning. It’s also seen evolving attitudes toward discipline, with tactics such as restorative justice starting to replace zero-tolerance approaches, including in high-poverty urban districts. Debates over how to address disparities in achievement have been highly politicized. The ed-tech market has continued to grow.

Education is often touted as a means for boosting social mobility and making communities more equal, but inequality in school funding and resources has made that difficult to achieve, especially amid increasing poverty rates. Segregation in districts, both tacit and explicit, is holding scores of children back, and performance on math and reading assessments have remained relatively stagnant. President Obama has just signed into law an act that will replace the widely despised No Child Left Behind, but whether it’ll succeed in its goals – boosting the attainment of disadvantaged students, reducing the amount of testing taking place in schools, promoting classroom innovation, and so on – is far from guaranteed.

Defining a New Vision we know that the world is at a turning point – between the digital age where knowledge, logic, and analysis thrived and the conceptual age where creativity, innovation, and design skills are more strongly valued. "The future belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind: artists, inventors, storytellers – creative and holistic ‘right-brain' thinkers whose abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn't," Pink contends.

As a result, today's focus should be not only on closing the skills gap of the digital age but also on ensuring that students acquire the skills to succeed in the conceptual age, we discuss the following key, all-encompassing factors in achieving this goal new curriculum, measurement

Technology enablers education is delivered how can we take advantage of the possibilities offered by new technologies to build a better education model for the greater good funding education and public speaking, empathy, conflict resolution, constructive criticism, creativity, listening, facilitating flexibility, and team building.

Heckman has empirical evidence that we are not looking at the big picture of human potential. We are focusing on cognitive skills where intelligence can be easily tested. However, the social and economic problems confronting the United States – obesity, dropouts, and rising crime – are directly attributed to low levels of social ability. He studied decades' worth of education data and concluded, in what he calls the Heckman Equation, that the most economically efficient time to develop these skills and abilities is from birth to age five, meaning investment in early-childhood development is more cost-effective than remediation. It is crucial that we make the decision thoughtfully and that we recognize more explicitly than we have all the ways that education drives our progress toward a better life, personally and economically.