The Plight of Education in the United States

I am concerned over the plight of education in the United States. I suspect that is because I spent over 15 years working in education; primarily in curriculum development. I had the pleasure of spearheading one of the very first business/industry/government-education collaboration efforts identified in the United States. Because of that, I had the opportunity to do a lot of consultant work with other states as well as with other countries throughout the world. In doing so, I realized how lucky we were to be on the cutting edge. We had developed student mentorships, internships, externships, cooperative education, and apprenticeship programs long before they became popular in mainstream education. Now, however, I look back on those years - - from 1978 until 1993 - - and wonder what happened?

Just this past weekend, the local Virginia Peninsula newspaper "The Daily Press" featured an article that bemoaned the fact that local students were graduating without the minimal skills required to work in the most needed area jobs. Apparently everything that my colleagues and I had spent years building was now gone. Our focus on entry-level competencies and basic learning skills had been replaced with a liberal arts education that unfortunately didn’t offer enough of any one subject to provide students with a marketable skill. The huge network of 750 teacher, guidance counselor, business, industry, government, and parent volunteers that we had built no longer existed.

I wish I could say that this is an unusual turn of events. In truth, it is not. Every few years it seems that education cycles, moving from one focus to another; confusing students, and leaving the workforce without a much needed employee pool. Having dealt with the issues that education faces, I understand their frustration. Everyone wants something different from education; more focus on the arts, more focus on physical education, more focus on foreign language, more focus on the basics, more focus on job-related skills; all of which they think can be taught in a standard school day and year. In reality that is just not possible!