Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos, nominee for Secretary of Education, will face an impending national forum on education. They will be directing the public education sector whose operation is lagging the economy of the nation.
Parental Choice in Schools
The incoming Trump Administration aims to expand the choice of parents in schools. This is expected to produce immediate results but is not a guarantee that it will solve the decreasing performance of U.S. schools, as reported by Forbes magazine.
Economic Recession
The U.S. economy is facing recession and this has greatly affected the economic landscape. With job outsourcing and globalization, a great number of the U.S. workforce has become part of the unemployed, in a report by Time Magazine.
Low-Performance of Students
There has been an improvement in academic performance over the last ten years. This is specially for schools in states and cities that have succumbed to standards-based reform. However, there is still a large educational gap in students of color and those who are from poor communities, in a commentary in American Progress.
Milton Friedman, an economist, theorized that focusing on choice improves productivity. He reiterated that goal of school choice is to boost improvements across public education through market dynamics and competitive pressures.
Taxpayers are paying a yearly contribution of $600 billion on U.S. public elementary and secondary education.
Even with the fifty percent increase in spending for education, there is minimal improvement in the last 20 years in the reading and math of fourth-and eighth-graders results on the Nation's Report Card or National Assessment of Educational Progress.
U.S. students have falling scores on two major international exams based on Education Dive report. This requires that the education sector must strengthen its efforts on improving its performance.
The public education needs to be improved greatly and funding is not enough to solve the problem.
