Educate YourselfSchool is the site for learning. Teachers teach. Students learn. However, a problem exists. There are many low-performing schools, such as Parham Elementary in Cincinatti (Bhatt 1). Therefore, some students are not receiving the education they need. However, this can be remedied. It has been proven that these schools can be developed into more productive environments (Bhatt 2). To improve education, class population needs to reduce in size, the emphasis on standardized testing must be lowered, and traditional teaching strategies must change.Currently, students are not receiving the optimum education they need to succeed in life. With this lack of proper education, students are growing up without the fundamental knowledge to be able to strive for success. An abundance of students are failing in school and are not equal with their peers due to traditional teaching techniques and poor school environment Bhatt 1). Changes must be instituted to ensure the success of future generations which lies in the hands of mostly uneducated students.There are many reasons why the education system is slowly dwindling into oblivion. Overpopulation in the classroom has become a rising epidemic (Helfand 2). The overcrowded classes make it hard for a teacher to teach lessons to so many students. Because of this, students do not receive the individual attention from the teacher theyneed in order to grasp information. For example, at Carwise Middle School in Palm Harbor, Florida, the average class has 30 students. Teachers, such as Sarah Jaehn, teach to 186 students a day at Palm Harbor Middle. She said, "If class sizes were smaller I could have fun again" (Helfand 2). Jaehn, and others like her, feel they cannot get much accomplished with such large class sizes. Also, standardized testing is so overly emphasized in schools that it affects the way teachers perform. "Mary Lee Smith found that teachers gave up reading real books, writing, and long-term projects, and focused instead on word recognition, recognizing spelling errors, language usage, punctuation, and arithmetic operations. (Shepard 2)." With the emphasis on standardized testing, the teaching methods have changed.Much observation has been completed in order to determine why education is at the level it is. Lorrie Sheprard, the dean of the school of education at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a member of the Naitonal Research Council's Board on Testing and Assessment, completed involved large scale teacher surveys and field studies. She concluded that, "The efforts to improve test scores have changed what is taught and how it is taught. For example, teachers in elementary schools eliminate or greatly reduce time on social studies and science to spend more time on tested subjects (Shepard 2)." This has proven that students do not learn as much as they need because they are busy learning information for standardized testing instead. Teachers are "teaching to the test" rather than...
