The SOLUTION to Our Education Crisis
We Can Do It, America!
Our children are the most valuable resource we have. There is nothing – NOTHING – more important than protecting them and making sure they get the best education possible.
The best hope we have for our future is to create a culture of accomplishment in our schools that equals the optimism and ambition of this nation. We must create a learning environment that encourages children to succeed and convinces every child that success is possible – a place that makes us believe again.
To start, we should start with these five things:
1. Admit We Have a Serious Problem.
Our educational system has failed. Not might fail, not is failing – it has failed. Not every school and not everywhere, but when taken in its entirety, our kids are learning insufficiently to thrive in the increasingly competitive and complex world around them.
2. Recognize That Politics is Making Our Problem Significantly Worse.
The politicizing of American education can no longer be tolerated in any form or fashion. It’s abundantly clear that education reform must be tackled outside of self-serving political maneuvering and entrenched bureaucracy. The arsenic of politics is never more apparent than with education policy, which is deeply troubling given that the stakes are never higher and the victims never more helpless. Through our chronic indifference and inaction as a nation, we have allowed our children to be sacrificed on the altar of selfish greed.
At a time when many of our children’s futures are in jeopardy, our politicians treat their primary lifeline as a political football, tossing the challenges of education policy around like they are holding explosive dynamite. Republicans choke at the faintest hint of anything remotely resembling a social safety net, while Democrats would never dream of compromising their own personal ATM machine, otherwise known as the teachers unions. No more.
3. Accept the Fact that Our Politicians Educational Efforts Have Been Frighteningly Inadequate for Decades.
For decades, in the face of devastating evidence, the White House and U.S. Congress have consistently refused to challenge failed policies or champion innovative ones.
For example, in 2010 the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released an impact study on the effectiveness of the Head Start program, which was established in 1965 as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. According to HHS, “the Head Start program promotes school readiness for children from birth to age 5 in low-income families through services that support early learning and development, health, and family well-being. The program is rooted in urban, suburban, and rural communities throughout the nation.”
The results of the 2010 study were alarming. Although “providing access to Head Start had a positive impact on children’s preschool experiences” and “access to Head Start had positive impacts on several aspects of children’s school readiness during their time in the program,” the “advantages children gained during their Head Start years yielded only a few statistically significant differences in outcomes at the end of 1st grade for the sample as a whole.”
*** An Important Note: ***
While we believe we have no choice but to honestly assess our current programs, we want to separate our overall verdict of the Head Start program from the many amazing people who work within it. We have spent time in many of these classrooms around the nation and have found most of the Head Start employees to have huge hearts for our children and to be tireless in their dedication to them. In our minds, by not making the difficult changes necessary for them to succeed, we are failing them as much as anyone. We say these things in support of them, not as criticism of them.
***
Two years later, a follow-up HHS report said this: “There were initial positive impacts from having access to Head Start, but by the end of 3rd grade there were very few impacts found for either cohort in any of the four domains of cognitive, social-emotional, health and parenting practices. The few impacts that were found did not show a clear pattern of favorable or unfavorable impacts for children.” The report continued, “No significant impacts were found for math skills, pre-writing, children’s promotion, or teacher report of children’s school accomplishments or abilities in any year.”
This analysis was disheartening, but more disturbing was the reaction of the Obama Administration and the U.S. Congress – which both decided to just throw more money at the problem.
Despite the discouraging evidence, Congress authorized $8.2 billion for Head Start in 2011, almost a billion more than they allocated in 2010. Combined, from 1970 to 2000, the budgets for Title I and Head Start grew in inflation-adjusted dollars from $1.7 billion to $13.8 billion. The combined budget for 2010 for both was $21.7 billion.
“Head Start remains a key part of the Obama Administration’s strategic focus on early learning,” said HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius at the time. “Still, for Head Start to achieve its full potential, we must improve its quality and promote high standards across all early childhood programs.”
Ya think? Ms. Sebelius, with all due respect, that was the understatement of the year. When you made that statement, Head Start had already had 47 years and nine presidents to prove its effectiveness.
In April 2019 – almost ten years after that devastating HHS impact study – researchers from Brown University released a study that replicated and extended Harvard professor David Deming’s 2009 evaluation of Head Start’s life-cycle skill formation impacts (in 2009, Professor Deming’s study found that attending a Head Start program had lasting positive impacts into early childhood). The researchers from Brown found that after “extending the measurement interval for Deming’s adulthood outcomes, we found no statistically significant impacts on earnings and mixed evidence of impacts on other adult outcomes. Applying Deming’s sibling comparison framework to more recent birth cohorts born to CNSLY mothers (mothers who participated in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Children and Young Adults) revealed mostly negative Head Start impacts. Combining all cohorts shows generally null impacts on school-age and early adulthood outcomes.”
These damaging assessments of Head Start weren’t even a speed bump for the Trump I and Biden administrations, or the U.S. Congress. For FY2019, Congress appropriated $10 billion for programs under the Head Start Act; $10.6 billion for FY2020, plus an additional $750 million under the CARES Act; $10.7 billion for FY2021; $11 million for FY2022; $12 million for FY2023; $12.27 billion for FY2024; and $12.5 billion for FY2025.
Although we have researched deep and wide, we've seen no president or legislator demand Head Start officials present a plan for improving their outcomes. Nada. They just keep handing them money so they can assure their constituents that they “support early education.”
This, even though lackluster performance is far from the only problem that plagues Head Start. In December 2024, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a disastrous report outlining significant fiscal mismanagement at the program, as well as severe instances of neglect and negligence that put children’s well-being at risk.
For the report, the GAO analyzed Head Start programs that were operating under interim management (when a Head Start program loses its federal grant due to poor performance, interim managers are appointed by the Office of Head Start (OHS) to run the program until a new grant recipient can be placed). The GAO found that “OHS skipped crucial monitoring steps and did not enforce certain standards for programs under interim management for at least the last five school years. For example, it did not monitor half of the 28 programs due for monitoring between January 2020 and June 2024, leaving it unaware of documented and potential child safety incidents and other concerns. Further, OHS had neither assessed classroom quality nor monitored finances for all programs under interim management, both of which are required under the Head Start Act.”
“Lastly, OHS officials stated that they had never enforced enrollment standards or required Head Start funds to be returned for children not served. In the 2022-2023 school year, GAO found that fewer than half of the nearly 4,000 Head Start seats available in programs under interim management were filled.”
These programs spent 72 percent of the total amount of taxpayer-funded grants, even though their enrollment was just 47 percent. The incompetence and irresponsibility involved in how that money was spent is preposterous. For example, one manager “agreed to pay rent that was more than four times what the current grant recipient paid for classroom space in the local area” while, at another site, “one local staff person described carefully scrutinizing invoices and urging the interim manager’s staff to contest charges. This staff person said they insisted that the program solicit additional bids rather than accept the landlord’s quote for food service, which the staff person said ultimately saved the program nearly a million dollars per year.” Meanwhile, the programs “frequently ran out of diapers, baby wipes, soap, and other essentials,” which forced teachers to “purchase these items with their own money.”
But money is inconsequential compared to the negligence the analysis uncovered. One former center director described, for instance, “witnessing a teacher grab a child by the hood of their coat and slam them to the ground. The former center director said that the interim program director instructed them to not report the incident or fire the teacher.” At another site, a former local center director said that “the interim manager instructed her not to inform parents that environmental testing had revealed mold in two classrooms, even though children and staff had developed respiratory symptoms, and one child had a known allergy to mold.”
4. Be Bold & Understand That the Entire Paradigm Must Change.
There is no question that early childhood education is a critical factor in our children’s brain development, love of lifelong learning and academic performance, social and emotional growth, and overall health and wellbeing, so why do we continually put their futures at risk by passively accepting miserable outcomes?
We'll ask the question again: Why do we, time after time and issue after issue, keep going back to failed policies and political philosophies that DO NOT work? Answer: Because that’s the easy thing to do.
The hard part of education reform is addressing what we teach in programs like Head Start and schools across the nation, how we teach it, and how we measure our progress. This is a much scarier proposition for school administrators and politicians because it requires some serious soul searching and some significant changes.
People talk about “reform” all the time, but the definition of reform doesn’t lend itself to a delicate approach. The truest definition of reform is “to put an end to an evil by enforcing or introducing a better method or course of action.”
To achieve a monumental turnaround, we can no longer expect half-measures and incremental ideas to work in systems that have collapsed; rather, we must embrace an unprecedented full and fundamental restructuring. It’s way past time that we move to crisis mode and thoroughly alter the way we approach the education of our children to prevent an all-out disaster.
Doing nothing more than continuing to throw money at failed programs is not going to cut it anymore. According to the OECD, we spend more money per student on education (elementary school through higher education) – $20,387 – than every OECD country besides Luxembourg, Norway and Austria. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that total spending for public K-12 education in FY2023 totaled $947 billion from all sources – around $16,526 per student.
Clearly our problems cannot be solved with money alone. That’s why it’s time we make substantial and sustaining improvements in the way we educate our children and boldly approach the challenges from a completely new perspective, making our resolution both wide and deep for every child.
Year after year our progress remains painfully slow because we cling to one or two topics at a time and obsess on them to the exclusion of everything else. We keep searching in vain for the one magical solution to our education predicament: Is the answer increased funding, teacher quality or merit pay? Does the answer exist in higher standards, smaller class size, shorter summer breaks, early childhood learning or charter schools?
Unfortunately, the widespread assumption that these complex issues exist in isolation from one another has undermined our ability to address any of them. The problems we face in education are linked in intricate ways, and our solutions must be developed comprehensively as opposed to compartmentally.
5. Shift Our Focus from One-For-All Education to a More Personalized Approach & Redefine What “Intelligence” Means.
The truth is this: It doesn’t matter how much money you spend or how many early education programs you modify, or how many qualified teachers you recruit or how many charter schools you open. Every effort toward education reform will fail without a complete overhaul of our misguided curriculum; a change in how it is presented; a reevaluation of what we value in education; and how we define what success actually means. We will also continue to fail if we have zero understanding how our kids think.
In his book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, renowned Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner suggests there is a collection of intelligences that exists in each of us. Because everyone exhibits these intelligences on various levels, everyone has a distinctive cognitive profile. Gardner initially identified seven intelligences: verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal and intrapersonal (Gardner later concluded naturalist intelligence should be added to the list and insinuated two others may be worthy of inclusion: spiritual intelligence and existential intelligence).
According to Dr. Gardner, the child who masters math is not necessarily more intelligent overall than the child who struggles with it; rather, s/he is stronger in that particular intelligence.
We love this guy. The conventional American method of assessing what is and is not “intelligent” is absurd. Emily remembers that, when it was time to take her Assessment of Intelligence class for her psychology degree, she was stunned when her professor passed out these black briefcases that held the standard psychometric “instruments” she would use to test her patient’s “level” of intelligence. The contents inside the briefcase were an absolute joke. Are we really so simple in this country that we think intelligence and individual capabilities can be evaluated by items that fit into a 10” x 15” piece of luggage? Traditional IQ tests and our current educational assessment tests fail miserably to adequately assess the wide array of aptitude each human being distinctly exhibits.
Okay, so many of us here may be a little defensive on this point, but we know from firsthand experience that this is true. Once, a couple of us read a SAT prep question – “If there are 8 x 1012 hydrogen molecules in a volume of 4 x 104 cubic centimeters, what is the average number of hydrogen molecules per cubic centimeter?” – and immediately went into the fetal position.
Many of us consistently received horrendous scores on these tests and quite frankly we're still ticked off about it. Maybe we can’t tell you within three seconds how much faster Train A got to the station than Train B, but we always knew we were smart in a unique way. We never understood why we had to suffer through advanced equations in high school when we could be writing short stories, studying history, or learning a foreign language.
Advanced math was not many of our thing back then and it’s not many of our thing now. In fact, many of us vividly remember sitting in Algebra thinking we might actually die before the bell rang. Just as we suspected, and as we told our math teachers and parents many times, there isn’t one math challenge we're confronted with today that requires more than what a calculator will fix. We're certainly not pulling out a protractor and determining the circumference of a freak’n circle on the daily.
This we can say with certainty: If we would not have been grounded for months by our parents, we would have cut Algebra II every day. And, if we hadn’t been born with supercharged superegos, our consistent inability – fueled by a complete lack of interest – to grasp difficult mathematical concepts would have completely depleted our confidence.
Most of our kids experience this feeling every single school day. Our across-the-board approach to curriculum is a fossilized tactic and an enormous contributor to our kids being bored and unprepared. Those who have interests in careers that don’t require advanced science or math sit in class questioning what the heck any of this has to do with their futures. And, if they happen to have parents who will not ground them for months, they get bored, disenchanted, and simply leave.
We have reached a point where much of what happens in our schools doesn’t resemble education at all. Putting aside the discipline issues for a second – which are completely out of control, by the way – somewhere down the line we forfeited vital knowledge for trivial test scores. A high school sophomore once told us that most of her school day in the Spring semester revolves around memorizing test questions and learning testing strategies.
Ugh.
Hell on earth is to sit in an uncomfortable chair, memorizing material that you know has zero relevance to your life’s ambition. High-stakes testing has reduced American education to nothing more than a regurgitation of facts that will be forgotten the minute the bell rings.
This is the main reason our kids do so badly on the PISA assessment. Real-world problem solving, deep deliberation, and critical thinking are out – right and wrong answers to questions that out-of-touch administrators deem important are in. This approach is beyond lazy and completely strangles the construction of knowledge. What a wasted opportunity and what a waste of everyone’s time.
Obviously, there are certain basic math skills everyone needs to master, like arithmetic, multiplication, division, decimals, fractions, ratios, percentages, probability, exponents, and how to calculate volume and surface areas. AND the benefit to studying math isn’t just that you learn how to do math. Rather, studying math is a great way for people to learn how to formulate complex thought.
But the fact remains that we have advanced in the preparation for a chosen few but have still not learned how to properly empower those who continue to be left behind. As a four-year college education increasingly become the be-all and end-all in America, we started to completely miss the immense value of high-quality vocational schools, junior colleges, on-the-job training, and apprenticeships – which are often the best ways to train (and retrain) for many of today’s jobs.
When asked near the end of his life what schools should emphasize in the teaching process, Albert Einstein said, “Accumulation of material should not stifle the student’s independence.”
Children don’t develop in a straight line. Therefore, our focus must shift from blanket education to a more personalized approach. Embracing individualized learning styles enables children to learn the most advantageous way possible for their aptitude. Kids will be far more engaged if they study material that reflects their individual skills, interests and aspirations – in other words, material relevant to their futures. When students are exposed to meaningful material, they will be able (and much more willing) to tackle more rigorous, academically challenging curriculum.
It may seem that this approach would take a tremendous amount of additional money, time and effort, but that’s not true. Switzerland’s educational system provides an excellent example. Switzerland has created a system that embraces innovative thinking and open learning, ensuring their position among the global elite in education.
A key element of the Swiss system is the student’s ability to choose their educational path according to their abilities and interests. The initial decision is made early, but students can alter their course if they choose. To begin, students attend primary and lower secondary school, which provide a basic general education as well as encourages a balanced relationship with social, personal, and technical abilities. Then, the students enter the upper secondary level, which offers a “dual” vocational education and training system. If the vocational path is chosen, students can enhance their education by learning both in school and within a workplace setting. Over 70 percent of Swiss students choose to participate in this Vocational Education and Training (VET) program.
A report called Gold Standard: The Swiss Vocational Education and Training System from the Center on International Education Benchmarking explains that the VET program “prepares a broad cross-section of students including high achievers for careers in a range of occupations – high-tech, human service, health, as well as traditional trades and crafts, so white-collar as well as blue-collar.”
The report also describes how, in Switzerland, the entire country takes ownership of the educational process: “The Swiss VET system is well supported by employers who see it as their obligation to help prepare young people for productive and meaningful employment. Apprenticeships also make economic sense for employers, providing them with an incentive to continue to participate in the system.”
“The apprenticeships provide hands-on and applied learning opportunities, giving students real work responsibilities with plenty of coaching and adult support. Small and large companies, state of the art factories, insurance agencies, banks, hospitals, retail stores, and childcare centers host 16- to 19-year-old apprentices who serve customers, work on complex machines, carry out basic medical procedures, and advise investors – in short, they do everything an entry level employee would do, albeit under the wings of credentialed trainers within the company.”
The final step for Swiss students is the Tertiary level, or higher education, where students again choose between technical or vocational schools, or higher university degrees which include universities of art and music as well as universities of teacher education.
Finland has a truly unified school system, where kids stay at the same school until they are sixteen. Then, Finnish education is also divided into two systems – vocational and academic. There are special programs where adults receive additional training, all students learn to speak English, free hot meals are provided to all students, and free health and psychological services are offered to all students.
Teachers in Finland have wide professional discretion and autonomy and have the freedom to teach how they want. The only external testing is done solely on a sampling basis and is designed to provide information on the functioning of the overall school system. Therefore, it is the teachers’ responsibility to regularly assess their students using national assessment guidelines. Students are expected to take an active role in their learning, and, in upper grades, even design their own individualized programs.
The Preamble of Finland’s National Core Curriculum for Basic Education says: “The learning environment must support the pupil’s growth and learning. It must be physically, psychologically, and socially safe, and must support the pupil’s health. The objective is to increase pupils’ curiosity and motivation to learn, and to promote their activeness, self-direction, and creativity by offering interesting challenges and problems. The learning environment must guide pupils in setting their own objectives and evaluating their own actions. The pupils must be given the chance to participate in the creation and development of their own learning environment.”
Finland has the third best education system in the world, according to NJ MED’s 2024 World Best Education Systems. It’s surely no coincidence that according to the United Nations’ World Happiness Report, Finland is also the happiest place on earth.