what are three areas in education that are important and need adressing today?

Answer 1

imho, the most important issue facing education is measurement. [wife is a Professor of Education and supervises dissertations].

second most important, imho, is that education and especially American education suffers badly from the 'not invented here' syndrome. [NIH means that since we didn't invent it, it can't possibly be worth anything so no one will discuss it or even look at the possibility that ...]

Related story: engineers and business people are very big on quality improvement through rigorous study and statistics. Their reson for this is obvious -- Toyota is outselling General Motors worldwide in large part because the Toyota is perceived to be of higher quality and more reliable than almost any GM vehicle. Higher quality, in saturated markets, sells product at a higher ratio of price to cost than lower quality (commodity) product.

W Edwards Deming, Ph.D., and the 'father of Japanese quality', was fond of commenting that to achieve high and improving quality it is NECESSARY to measure that quality in such a way that multiple observers will all agree on what quality has been achieved. {otherwise, you get a shouting match over their opinions.}

So here's my outside the profession take on why my two issues:

education doesn't measure the output quality of its product in any reliable, reproducible way; especially in America (the closest thing we have to uniform national examinations are the two major college entrance exams). This leads inevitably to shouting matches between egos over whose methods are best instead of dedicated improvement in methods for particular situations based on sound and provable results.

to compound that, American educators have NIH syndrome. Methods invented elsewhere and existing for decades haven't even been studied properly in American education. [Think Montessori and Steiner schools -- it is obvious that they produce great results for some children --- but how can you predict which children?]

The farther afield one moves from 'education' and 'America' the worse the NIH syndrome becomes. Psychologist invents methods which seem to address a significant proportion of children labelled in one category of 'special needs'?? Not studied by American educators even though the psychologist is American. Not studied means it never enters the University curriculum and thus that another generation of teachers discovers the methods haphazardly if at all.

[And then Universities wonder why schools dismiss the value of their education degrees. Doh??!!]

***
Imho, my first two are enough to prevent serious progress in education without a third area that needs addressing.

If forced to suggest one, I propose parental school choice.

When the vast majority of parents and students are locked into sending their kid to the local government school because of financial issues, how can the system possibly sponsor the thousands of experiments that will be required to begin making more progress?

Thomas Edison reputedly performed over 10,000 experiments to find a suitable design for the first commercial light bulb. It has been improved tremendously since by other people thinking other thoughts.

Without experimentation on a grand scale, backed by reproducible measurement, how will education ever improve significantly?

It appears that there are hundreds or thousands of operative variables in producing a quality educational outcome. Each variable may account for only a small part of the total variation AND it is obvious that some combinations of some variables almost always lead to poor results -- or we wouldn't have chronicly bad schools in economically depressed areas [populated mostly by minority children, btw].

The grandest possible experiment in parental school choice would seem to be 'vouchers for all'. Despite having at least 52 different legal jurisdictions [states, etc.] there have been no cases of 'vouchers for all' being tried anywhere.

I find it very depressing that the nation which proclaims itself the 'home of the free' offers no freedom to the vast majority of parents and students. You'll go to the government school we choose and have the teacher we select who will use the methods he or she thinks best ... not the ones you might freely select.

sounds suspiciously like state socialism to me.

have fun [I did ... thx for the opportunity]

:-)

Answer 2

NCLB-in my school, we had a discussion about which kids we were going to leave behind in order to get our 70% passing, the official stance of the school was to leave that 30% behind. That's what we needed to do to meet the standards.

Critical Thinking-students do not know how to hink for themselves. Teachers at a young age give them answers, and that is what they expect. They get very frusterated at anything open-ended or that is not in their book. This will hurt them once they get out of a school system.

Teacher Pay-This one is entirely selfish. I want more money for doing what I would do anyways...

Answer 3

Depends on what you wanna do. For most people, yes, having a college education is important.

Answer 4

THE FIRST IMPORTANT of educating a child is to know the HOLY BIBLE so that child will never depart on the WORD that has been taught to HIM.
The second is to teach the child HOw to pray by heart not the repetitious prayer?
The third areas in education that are important is applying what you have learned in the SCRIPTURE.

Answer 5

Mathematics, reading, and writing; proper English that is.

Answer 6

reading
math
technology