Opposing Viewpoints: The Quality of Public Education has Declined

"The quality of public education has deteriorated" (Bethell). I do not believe there is a better way to describe public education. Bethell throughout this article gives different reasons for why he believes this to be true. When Bethell refers to quality he refers to SAT scored dropping significant amounts since the 1970s. Many problems in education go back to civil rights issues. The impact of the whole civil rights movement has and still is greatly effecting public education. This occurs in mostly inner city schools and this issue will continue to grow because the percent of minorities in inner city public schools is growing. Bethell goes on to mention that a huge problem with America’s educational system is the teachers. Many teachers go to school to become an educator not to educate others on a specific subject. This leads to teachers teaching with less quality which creates public schools to lose quality. There has been much legislation for education to push for improvement but each piece of legislation has had little to no effect and some has even made the situation worse. Schooling is very important to America and with these issues it becomes very difficult for students to excel.
Due to the fact that these issues have been present and growing worse for about forty years is not good for the youth. This poses many problems for the future. Since there has been legislation failing to fix the problem for many years now the government needs to figure out what legislation will work. Another possible issue for the future is the future generation. This meaning that with generations getting worse and worse educations creates for an unequal balance in society, with kids who attend non inner city schools or private schools, which is majority white, will have better educations than those attend inner city schools. An additional issue that education could run into is that if the quality of public schools continues to go down the demand for public schools will go up. If this happens and more kids attend private schools then the quality of private schools will also go down. It is the government’s job and responsibility how to fix this issue without continuing to further damage and ruin education all together. This is a very challenging issue to tackle, but it needs to be done.
I agree with Tom Bethell's view point. I believe that the quality of public education has truly been on a decline since the 70s. His reasoning behind the bold statement I believe to be all logical and true. Not only that, but I believe that this will not end. Some schools and areas are so damaged that trying to fix them would be very diffiuclt and near impossible. This is why in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) they are shutting down some schools completly and getting an all new staff and trying to recreate them. But even this is not helping so what can the government do? What can we do as a middle class society with a good education? We have a moral responiblity to create a general knowledge across of America. If we can have this knowledge then we can improve as a society. But if education is fading out then how can knowledge be obtained?

Bethell, Tom. "The Quality of Public Education Has Declined." Opposing Viewpoints: Education. Ed. Mary E. Williams. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2005. Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center. Gale. Deerfield High School. 7 Feb. 2010 e=gale&srcprod=OVRC&userGroupName=deer63488&version=1.0>.