The American Education System provides an equal opportunity for all children in the United States to get a quality education. Although it is not completely uniform across the country, with every state making its own guidelines, everyone is still presented with a chance to attend a public school from kindergarten through twelfth grade. This enables all children with an education to advance further in life. For giving everyone that opportunity this system should be praised, but in the system it also has many flaws. The lack of proper funding for schools, retirement of many quality teachers, and the rise of Internet schools to name a few. But in the upcoming paragraphs I will focus mainly of the over emphasis on testing and how it affects the schools. Too much testing, and putting too much value into the tests has created a problem in which many teachers now strictly teach to the materials on the test, creating better scores, but decreasing overall knowledge.
Compared with many foreign countries, we perform worse on many subjects on the tests. This is for a number of reasons. One reason is that in some other countries, only the smarter children pass on from grade to grade. So for example in twelfth grade in one country, only the students that are smart enough to have made it through the other grades are being tested, while in America all students in the grade are tested. Of course when you look at the results the U.S. will be behind in terms of scores, because we have a broader range of students that take them. .
Similarly in some countries the school system is a rigorous time in which you are pushed as hard as you can to get into the best possible college, and once accepted in one of the good colleges, you are pretty much guaranteed a good job once you graduate. In America it is different, in that high school is not as hard on the students, but the college education you receive may be more work and harder curriculum than those of foreign countries.