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Privatization Of Education In The United States

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In the United States today, there are many issues that need to be addressed and reformed, including education, the deficit, and its military spending. One of the most prominent being the money spent on its military compared to its educational system but overall the United States Government needs to do some serious thinking about education reform and the way education is done at the state and local levels. This issue is the "umbrella" issue to various other issues such as the privatization of schooling and testing, lack of interest in learning, and an abysmal standardized testing system. However, one of the issues that is most "easily" fixed is the spending on the military compared to education. The United States spends more on defense than …show more content…

While in some cases this is certainly true, such as the market, areas such as education should be, at least a larger portion than now, subsidized. The military itself has declared the lack of education a threat to national security because think about it, those drones are pretty complicated to build and fly. If its education system is to become completely privatized and unfunded by the government, it won't be able to manufacture or even control any advanced weaponry or defenses. While there are various other areas that could be cut, defense is easily the most logical one, at least during peacetime. As of 2015, the United States spent a bit more than $800 billion on defenses all together. The government's failure to fund education overall has led to local governments to do most of the spending. When you look at colleges, the government spends little to no money, comparatively, on them, forcing most students to take out student loans just to get through college. A lot of the time, students must deal with these loans for a large part of their life and often times, loan lenders will take them to court if they can't keep up with the payments, which is entirely possible. These loans can usually dictate what the graduates can do with their money throughout their lives and in order to have a prosperous and intelligent society, the United States must put more effort and money into …show more content…

The methods of closing the achievement gap in education among the rest of the world that the US Government has implemented have done nothing to help and have in fact hindered the progress those policies were intended to accomplish. Anyone who has worked in or attended a public school in the last 10-15 years know that policies such as Common Core and No Child Left Behind simply do not work on a fundamental level. The goal of No Child Left Behind was ensure that the nation's education rankings would rise compared with the rest of the world and Common Core was intended to standardize education throughout the country, indirectly raising the education rankings. As a result of these programs, the United States' rankings have unintentionally dropped due to the privatization of test making and scoring. Allowing the market to dictate everything will lead to some form of corruption because it doesn't have a reliable checks and balance system; citizens need the product, in this case tests, and have little to no judgment on how these tests are made or graded. These systems, in the end, prohibit bright, intelligent students from taking more advanced classes and furthering their education in order to better themselves. It is not a fiction that there students who simply are bad at taking tests; the anxiety and stress of a short

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