The United States’ education system has many strengths, but it remains imperfect. In this short analysis, I outline how my perceptions about the country’s learning environment have evolved. I used to believe that the U.S. education troubles largely due to cost-cutting strategies, but the scourge runs all the way to the top.
The U.S. offers the best education in the world. However, there have been consistent evidence that student performance is declining. Deteriorating education quality is partly imputable to the use of adjunct professors by many institutions who wish to cut costs. Interestingly, these cost-cutting strategies have not eased the burden of tuition fees and the general cost of acquiring education.
Based on what I have learned in the literature, I now believe that the U.S. education system’s woes are primarily a leadership problem. The education system is weighed down by bureaucracy, which in turn hinders the agility and proactivity needed to navigate emerging challenges and, most importantly, maintain a student-focused approach to teaching. A promising solution to this impasse is an amalgam of transformational leadership and distributed leadership. Distributed leadership does not seek to make everyone a leader, but actively brokers, facilitates, and supports the leadership of others by viewing a leader in the school setting as only part of the leadership practice (Harris, 2013).
Once the bureaucratic hurdles are eliminated, transformational leadership, a rather accommodative approach to people management, becomes relevant to motivate both leaders and followers, with an aim of enhancing students’ achievement (Li & Karanxha, 2022). America’s education woes are too complex and numerous to be solved with a few bureaucrats making all the critical decisions at the helm; decision-making should be a shared undertaking whose participants are as much motivated to contribute as the stakeholders the choices ultimately affect.
In conclusion, reimagining leadership could fix the United States’ troubled education system. A combination of transformational leadership and distributed leadership could help top management be flexible and humble enough to consult and value diverse opinions of diverse stakeholders. Choices made at the top eventually trickle down throughout the system, affecting teachers who interact with students directly. Reimagining leadership could be the solution to policies that are seemingly detached from the realities of educators and their learners and inevitably derails academic success.
References
Harris, A. (2013). Distributed leadership: friend or foe? Educational Management Administration and Leadership, 41(5), 545–554. Web.
Li, Y., & Karanxha, Z. (2022). Literature review of transformational school leadership: models and effects on student achievement (2006–2019). Educational Management Administration and Leadership. Web.