Politicians Make a Choice: Create a Culture of Learning or More Dropout Factories?

Decision: Create a Culture of Learning or Continue with Dropout Factories?

The United States has great universities for the best and the brightest of our citizens. In fact, our best universities dominate the top of the world charts (see here). Likely students who attend these schools also attend top high schools in the country as well. The problem is that only a small portion of our youth have access to high quality education at both the University and primary level. Stats show that the majority of our young attend subpar primary schools that are behind the rest of the developed world.

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We have amazing opportunities as a country, but we need an educated workforce who have creative, critical, and independent thinking skills to take advantage of our opportunities. With performance results we currently have, it is likely that we will not have the talent that businesses need and more of our citizens will continue to fall behind. Creating a larger and larger gap between the upper, middle and lower classes.

Looking deeper into the numbers, you only get more frustrated. Education costs are higher while performance is lower than almost every developed country in the world. Further, teachers are paid less even though costs are higher. This means our overhead (costs not directly helping students) is higher than the rest of the world. To make matters even worse, our high school dropout rates are higher than most of the world as well. Below are graphs and charts showing these numbers.

This episode I invite Kevin Chavous, leading education expert and education advisor to Obama, to discuss the issues we are facing. He discusses some disturbing and amazing issues that people all over the country are facing. Shining light on destructive politics and misplaced priorities that are damaging our education system. He also provides insight on what we can do to turn this around. He advocates methods for creating a learning culture that will serve all of our kids. Listen to the full interview (now available in podcast) to hear his ideas and insights.

You can also see Kevin Chavous’s full bio here.

Mr. Chavous welcomes parents, administrators, and politicians to reach out for questions, concerns, and help on any of the issues discussed. You can reach him on his website at www.kevinchavous.com

Charts and Stats:

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Hear full interview on YouTube: