Is Progress being Made in Education in America Today?

Shell we find out which progress is being made today in our educational system in America in nowadays? Considering that US government invested in education $1.3T. Can we say that student`s learning outcomes have improved?

Several years ago Education Testing Service released the report –“America’s Perfect Storm”. According to this report there are 3 forces that would conspire to weaken America’s ability to fulfill higher-paying, knowledge-associated jobs in the US and to compete in the growing global economy.

First of these forces is “Substantial disparities in skill levels” among US student and adult populations. The gap between our most and our least skilled is the highest of any of the OECD countries.

The introduction of the Common Core State Standards and Common Core-aligned testing is an attempt to build student’s higher-order thinking skills, give them practice with informational content of the type they’ll face in the work-world. Tutoring and homeschooling have proliferated due to these reasons, as well.

Second force is “Seismic economic changes” – the profound restructuring of the US workplace driven by technological innovation and globalization; the disparity of the fortunes of CEOs versus workers. A recession that damaged the middle-management labor market, rising automation, and expanding globalization have leaded to the result – 48% of college grads in the US are now working in jobs that don’t require a degree. Many middle-class jobs were either replaced by technology or outsourced to lower-cost labor providers.

And, the last one is “Sweeping demographic shifts”. The US population was expected to grow 20%, fueled largely by immigration within 2007 and 2030. But many of the immigrants lack high-school diplomas and many of them do not speak English well or at all. How will they work in the US? At the same time none of the growth foreseen in the labor force is expected to come from the population of adult native-born workers.

This period encompassed a US recession with great loss of jobs to outsourcing and automation, loss of wages, savings, and safety nets for workers, significant changes to opportunity for degree completion in both positive (e.g., the growth of for-profit education and additional avenues to gain a college degree) and negative (e.g., increasing challenges to accessing and passing the GED) directions, and accelerated movement towards online education for the masses (MOOCs).

Now, Jobs tend to move in three directions: up – requiring more skill, down – replaced by technology and outsourced to history, and across – broken into job components or gigs enabled by technology platforms that can be done anywhere in the world. These movements are all rapidly accelerated and shifting the employment landscapes and, thus, the educational imperatives.