It comes as no surprise to anyone that our public school system is seriously failing our children. Students are not learning the basic skills needed in adulthood nor are they retaining most of the knowledge they are given. Worst of all, teachers have to spend valuable time reviewing the previous year’s work to ensure that all students have the same knowledge base.

Each teacher has a school board approved syllabus to guide their lesson plan. While the syllabus lays out what concepts are to be achieved during a specific grade period, specific lessons are not explained. For example, the math skill expectation might be “Uses properties or attributes of angles or sides to identify, describe, or distinguish between (specific shapes).” That seems to make sense, right? And that expectation could extend from second to fourth grade, so which teacher teaches it? Second? Third? Four? The way this usually works is that the school decides to purchase books that they believe adequately cover the expected curriculum. Teachers design their individual lesson plans around the material in the textbook and the material that the administration encourages them to cover. Now let’s say there are three different classrooms in third grade. Each teacher designs a different lesson plan that covers different material and may not cover some material at all or cover more than required material.

Flash forward to the next school year. Seven students from a class that did not cover enough, ten students from a class that covered everything, and four students from a class that made a little more progress are now in the same classroom. No matter how the teacher teaches, there will be some problems: students will fall behind, or students will get bored with endless review… nothing effective in this system.

There are additional problems when students move from several different elementary schools to a middle school and when students move out of the district, or worse, out of state, encountering a completely different set of standards and expectations.

What needs to happen is that the United States should develop and adopt a uniform national curriculum that clearly outlines what teachers are required to teach at each grade level. A standard federal curriculum would keep all students trying to achieve the highest possible standards. Students who cannot keep up will receive special attention just as they are currently doing. Granted, this would not solve all the problems with the public school system. There would still be students who would learn faster or slower than others and each teacher has a different teaching style which can affect absorption and retention. But at least this would put all students in America on the same educational page.