Edcuation in United Sates

Alberto Orozco

Essay #4

ENC 1101

The poor education in United States

United States is in a real crisis when we talk about education, especially in math, reading and science, and this can’t be happening since we are the most powerful country in the world, but when we talk about education we are far behind. Part of the problem is because students do not spend enough hours in school, Government is doing pretty much nothing to fix the problem and they are aware of it. The economic situation also contributes to the problem and when it comes to International competitions we end up in embarrassing positions.

Just to mention a personal example, I come from a South American country “Ecuador” and when I came to the university here in Miami I was in shocked when I had to take the Math exam to enter College, I was tested on things that I studied in my first few years in high school, and at that moment I noticed that math classes here in the United States are far behind from my country.

A recent report published by Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, mentioned that students in Brazil and Chile are making improvements in academics three times faster than American students, and even students in Colombia, Poland and Germany are improving at twice the rate.

Also, part of this problem is that American students do not spend very much time in schools. According to the Harvard report American high school students spends only 1,460, hours in subjects like math and meanwhile in Japan students will spend 3,170, hours on basic subjects like math – nearly three times the hours devoted at American schools. Another very interesting fact is that teachers in Japan give their students three times as much homework as their teachers give American children.

In addition, a reality of this problem is scores of 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment (PIPSA) where out of 34 countries, the United States ranked 14th in reading, 17th in...