project proposal

America is the greatest country in the world. We’re certainly the richest and most powerful nation on the planet. We seem to rank number one in nearly everything. Everything, that is, except educating our youth. Polls have shown that America is in a major education crisis. The nation is ranked in the high teens at best in standardized test standings against the rest of the globe. Standardized test scores have fallen significantly since the nineteen sixties. For the first time in our history, the next generation is at risk of being less educated than their parents.
The nation’s schools are in a deplorable condition. Teachers and students both suffer from the state of public education in recent years. The literacy rate for the country is at a low point for the last fifty years. A huge number of schools in the nation are grossly under funded and at severe risk of being closed all together. Yet, by least in my personal observations, local school levees seem to never make it on the ballots and if they do, they almost never pass. The inconvenient truth of the matter is that the state of education is in peril and it is up to the people to set it right. The nation has plenty of money and definatly the means to solve this crisis, but yet the schools continue to suffer. Whether it be from government legislation or the work of the general public, something must be done or our nation at serious risk of falling to far behind other industrialized nations to compete in the world market.
My paper seeks to answer two questions. First, exactly how did the education system fall to such a low. Why hasn’t some kind of effective action been found. Second, what actions can be taken at this point to save the schools. There is certainly some kind of reasonable proposal to fix this crisis. It is my belief that the most important thing a nation can do to insure it’s prosperity is to educate the next generation so they can continue to build a stronger and stronger country. I feel that without a correction to this impending crisis, our nation will quickly become so uneducated that we wouldn’t be able to compete in the world. If we wish to have any chance of a peaceful civilization, we must eliminate ignorance in the world with education. As Ariel and Will Durant said “Education is the transmission of civilization” and we are at risk of ending this transmission without action to right the crisis facing us.