Lone Star College Montgomery

How Can America Improve Their School System?

By

Jordan Green

English 1302

Professor Stacey Percival

20 May 2020
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How Can America Fix Its School System?

High school: an essential piece in the puzzle of American education. Most argue that high

school provides the basis for the rest of your education and entry into the working world, but is

the education system effective? The system stresses out students creating lifelong mental

illnesses and what they learn may not even stick. Currently, high schools are only putting

pressure on students to be perfect, most have only become numb, depressed, anxious, and even

suicidal. Grades are too rough in the American school system and the GPA system needs to

change along with the amount of pressure placed on students. High schools need to change their

approach to education to better accommodate the needs of students. Having first-hand

experience, it is easy to see that many high schoolers would appreciate these changes and benefit

greatly from them. Without these changes, it could be detrimental to many people s lives such as

parents, teachers, students, the community, and even the whole country.

The number one thing going to high school should do for you is prepare you to be an

adult, but students are not getting that lesson or message. The American high school system was

designed to prepare you for college by guiding students to the standard credits they ll need for

the major of their choice. In many cases, however, guidance counselors give students the wrong

classes and they go to college and discover they are utterly unprepared. Tre, who was

interviewed by Sonja Santelises for her article about college readiness, was one of the students

that were cheated by the American school system:

Tre, a Louisiana high school graduate(...), shared his dream of becoming a dentist with

his high school counselor, she advised him to take the bare minimum of academic credits

and focus his attention on electives aligned with his interests. So he did exactly that. It

wasn t until Tre arrived on a community college campus, eager to enter the dental
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program, that he realized just how far his high school course-taking — and his

counselor s advice — had left him from that aspiration.

Santelises means to say that Tre s counselor and the school system essentially cheated him out of

a good high school education. Tre ended up taking a year's worth of remedial classes in college

and dropping out. This is a prime example of what we need to change in the school system. High

school counselors should have more knowledge of what classes and credits students need to have

in order to get into the college program of their choice and desire. The students should also hold

some responsibility in learning what courses they take and not be afraid to correct an adult

respectfully if they think they may be wrong.

Parents may object to this idea because in their minds the school knows what is best for

their kids' education. When most parents were in high school there weren t so many classes,

electives, and career paths to choose from. There was general core classes, gym, sports, and

maybe a few more electives. This was all you need to get into college 20 years ago. In those 20

years, the world has made an extraordinary amount of technological advances and discovered

endless new things that require more career paths, more classes, and more personalized high

school career paths. The education system may have these classes sorted out but taking into

consideration endorsements and combining classes that apply to more than one career can make

the process of choosing the correct classes confusing and strenuous. The counselors often don t

understand all the information given to them to help students succeed. As for exactly how

schools make this change is hard to say. The best start is to better educate, or get better-educated

people to counsel these students and lead them on a better path.

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Now for the actual knowledge students receive, or are supposed to receive, in the classes

they take. High school is supposedly where we gain the knowledge that will help us in the real

world, but when has anyone used quadratic equations at their office job or the history of china

while performing surgery. The school system was made up of a group of ten men over 100 years

ago. Since then, we have taught the same 4 subjects of science, history, English, and math. Back

then that s what you needed to excel in life and the history was still relevant and had just

happened. Science was still extremely basic as the technology we have today hadn t been

invented. Author of The problem with high school Indra Sofian says “At its base, a good

education should either be interesting, useful, or both.” Sofian is agreeing that high school

doesn t actually teach you anything. Not only does it teach you information that isn t useful but

teachers are trained to teach the test which is only spitting random facts at teens and making

them memorize them just so they can forget them 2 hours after the test. The grading system is

what makes high schools teach this way. Colleges look for good GPAs and to have a good GPA

a student has to get good grades. The grading system we use in the United States is preposterous.

If a young student going through important life experiences can t remember 80% of the

information they get bombarded with daily, then they aren t considered smart and their chance of

getting into college decreases significantly. (see fig1).

Fig.1. Comparison of grading systems, Boldt, Sara. “Stress in the School System.” The Current

Wave, 23 Feb. 2015, currentwave.org/stress-in-the-school-system/.

In the United States, the failing grade is one point lower than what would be an A in the United

Kingdom. If you look at the chart and think in percentages, a student has to understand 70% of
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the information to get an A. That is a huge portion of the things that are covered in class. If the

U.S. adopted a grading system more like that of the U.K. and changed up the curriculum, then

there would be more kids willing to learn and a much higher rate of students who get into and

successfully graduate college.

Much of the school board would probably object to these claims because they aim to get

kids to excel at school. If the students knew they only had to achieve a 70% then they may start

slacking off more and neglecting work. While this is valid many students would also gain an

increased GPA and get more validation for the hard work they do. Parents and teachers may also

disagree with lowering the grading standards for similar reasons. Parents want their kids to get

the best grade possible and if getting a 70 on an assignment is an A, they may not reach their full

potential because they aren t being pushed as hard. Even though their kids may not be pushed as

hard, lowering the grading standard would make it easier for them to achieve good grades and

secure a good GPA for college. A handful of teachers would disagree with lowering grading

standards because it would be more work for them. They would have to get used to a new

system, recalculate students' grades, and change the way they grade. A good teacher, however,

would get past these inconveniences and realize the system would have a great positive impact

on students' careers. After all, a teacher's job is to prepare students for the adult world.

One of the most surprising things about the school system is the amount of impact it has

on mental illnesses and how unprepared they are to deal with it. According to an article written

by Robert Leahy on Psychology Today “The average high school kid today has the same level of

anxiety as the average psychiatric patient in the early 1950 s”. Regular high school students are

experiencing amounts of stress and anxiety that would ve put their grandparents in mental

institutions at their age. The stress of keeping grades up in the harsh school system, combined
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with the bustle of loud hallways and being constantly aware and social takes a lot out of a

teenager causing anxiety on levels ranging from plain stress to diagnosable disorders. Anxiety is

not the only mental illness that high schools need to be concerned about, however. High school

can affect and cause many other mental health issues including depression and eating disorders

to name the ones that will be discussed. Depression has been known to be caused by stressful or

traumatic situations, continuous negative thought processes, social isolation. In students who

already have depression or are at higher risk to develop it, school can be a huge factor that plays

into it. The stress of grades can keep students up at night as well as the workload of assignments

they need to complete. Eventually, some of those students who suffer from depression give up

school completely. Their grades fall, and they lose interest in everything all the while no one

noticed even though they were surrounded by educated adults who should have seen the signs.

Evie Blad in an article for Education Weekly describes the efforts of one high school, Sarah Pyle

Academy, to maintain and track healthy habits of students. “teachers require students to track

and reflect daily habits—like sleep, phone use, and water intake—using apps or worksheets to

determine how they are linked to things like anxiety or engagement in class”. This practice, if

required in all high schools, could at least help trigger a start in noticing depression and mental

health symptoms and factors. A lesser talked about disorder in high school is eating disorders.

Rosewood Center for eating disorders explains that eating disorders have multiple causes

including psychological and social factors. Rosewood also says students that have pre-existing

mental illnesses who are driven to excel in classes can develop eating disorders as a way to

control things. High schools need to introduce more counselors, in-class coping mechanisms, and

access to mental health professionals to compensate for the mental turmoil that goes on in their

walls.
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High schools are the main objectors to this point. In recent years grants and government

aid have been cut or eliminated from many schools and they claim they cannot afford to

implement anymore help for students' mental health. However, in October 2019 the U.S.

Department of Education states that they have “$71.6 million in new funding to enhance safety

in schools and improve student access to mental health resources”. It is not revealed in full how

this money is used but if divided evenly between the 50 states each state would get

approximately 1.4 million dollars to help implement mental health resources. At the same time,

the department of education also gave 11 million dollars to 27 states to address the lack of

mental health professionals. There are many more grants and government fundings that go

towards getting mental health resources. Money shouldn t be a huge problem for high schools

that need to get more mental health resources.

High schools are supposed to be a place where students learn valuable information that

they carry with them through the rest of their lives, instead, they have become a place of stress,

fear, and mental illness. High schools need to reassess the way they teach, grade, and handle the

mental health of students. If schools continue to ignore these problems then there will be many

more of their students without proper education and preparation. The stress will continue to get

to students' heads and cause mental problems possibly leading to unspeakable things that then

affect more than just one student. Think of all the good that could come from changing the

United States school system.

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Works Cited

Blad, Evie. “Schools Grapple With Student Depression as Data Show Problem Worsening.”

Education Week, 7 Apr. 2020, www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2019/03/14/schools-grapple-

with-student-depression-as-data.html.

Leahy, Robert L. “How Big a Problem Is Anxiety?” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, 30

Apr. 2008, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/anxiety-files/200804/how-big-problem-

is-anxiety.

Ranch, Rosewood. “Back to School Can Trigger Eating Disorders.” Rosewood Centers for

Eating Disorders, 17 Aug. 2017, www.rosewoodranch.com/back-school-can-trigger-

eating-disorders/.

Santelises, Sonja Brookins. “Are High Schools Preparing Students to Be College- and Career-

Ready?” The Hechinger Report, 6 Apr. 2016, hechingerreport.org/are-high-schools-

preparing-students-to-be-college-and-career-ready/.

Sofian, Indra. “The Problem with High School.” Medium, Medium, 30 July 2019,

medium.com/@indrasofian/the-problem-with-high-school-caf770c87797.

“U.S. Department of Education Announces New Grant Awards to Address School Safety and

Improve Access to Mental Health Services.” U.S. Department of Education Announces

New Grant Awards to Address School Safety and Improve Access to Mental Health

Services | U.S. Department of Education, 8 Oct. 2019, www.ed.gov/news/press-

releases/us-department-education-announces-new-grant-awards-address-school-safety-

and-improve-access-mental-health-services.