Today, in this day and age, you would think the United States public school system would be mastered. After years and years of learning from the past and schools around the world, America should not still be considered a country of educationally backward idiots. However, we still are. Why is that, people wonder? It’s not because of bad teachers, and it’s not because of bad students. It’s because people that haven’t seen the inside of a school for 20 years decide what kids should be learning and how they should be tested on it. This leads to less time learning, more time testing, and way more homework for us, the students. So who is this really helping? No one. All it does is cause additional problems.

One of the biggest problems that students have today is homework. They stay up late writing essays on laptops that wreck their vision and cause countless other health problems. These kids stress out and have breakdowns over projects they simply weren’t given enough time to work on. The easy thing to do is blame the teachers. After all, they’re the ones that assign the homework. But they don’t do it to be mean or purposefully give their 12 year old students mental breakdowns. It happens because the teachers have so much to teach in one year. The only thing they can do is give us as much information as they can while we’re at school and have us apply what we learn at home. The results; lecture format classes and nonstop homework. Luckily, there’s an easy solution. Let the teachers design a reasonable curriculum for the students they teach. They’re the ones that interact with the kids and know what they can actually do, so why is it that random politicians decide how a school works? It's like asking a lawyer to tell the rocket scientist how to build the rocket: completely illogical. If we fixed this, there would be less homework and healthier kids.

Another huge issue with students today is standardized testing. Students spend weeks of potential learning time to test all that knowledge they’re supposed to learn. However, there’s a major flaw in this system (I know, it’s a shocker to us all). How are we actually supposed to learning anything if we’re too busy being tested? At least a month and a half of school every year is wasted taking standardized tests instead of learning. Yet again, this leads to happy politicians and stressed out students. There’s nothing worse than hearing that the test you took on that one day will be looked at for your high school classes, which will decide your college classes, then your job, and eventually your entire future. What happens if you aren’t feeling well that particular day? What if you’re actually really smart, but are bad at taking tests? So many students, including my friends, don’t do well on these tests. Then they start to think they’re stupid, and they’ll have no future. In fact, these people are geniuses that could change the world. However, worrying over standardized testing wrecks them. Again, there’s an easy solution. Limit the testing! Instead of hour long sessions every trimester, exams at the end of every unit, finals, and six part, month long assessments for every class, only do end of unit tests, a beginning of the year pretest/posttest, and ONE session of state mandated assessments for each class that takes maybe three days combined. Everyone will still get the information they’ll need, and we students can stop living in a world of constant stress.

To wrap this all up, students have two easily solvable problems. We know what they are and we know how to solve them, yet we still haven’t. And  this was figured out by one middle school student, not even the people who are actually supposed to do it. So when will this actually be solved? I just hope it’s before I graduate.