Rolla Public Schools are one of the best public school systems in the state of Missouri, which is ranked 26th in the nation for it’s ACT/SAT scores, so we’re about the middle of the table. And on the national level, the United States also ranks around the middle according to the 2013 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) test which came out in the last year and is a standardized test that assesses a pool of 15 year olds across the nations. So as a whole, were just above the average of the average.

   Yet, we have an excellent staff and able-bodied students and fairly impressive test scores. It just seems that nationwide we’re just sort of in the middle, the silver lining being we aren’t at the bottom. I think, though, that our nation’s schools, including Rolla Public Schools, are not at their full potential. We live in a developed country with trillions of dollars being spent on war, millions being spent in government and billions going to 1 percent of the countries population, and yet our schools are just average.

   One of the most crucial components of a school system is simply its teachers. I don’t think our teachers are respected enough as a profession nor trained as a respected profession. In the Finnish school systems being a teacher has a status equivalent to being a doctor or lawyer. Their universities that are dedicated to teaching have an acceptance rate much like that of MIT or Harvard here in the US. And how does this affect the school systems there? It produces some of the best teachers in the world.

   We have wonderful teachers here at RHS and throughout the school system, but I don’t think that most would disagree that to become a teacher here in the United States, it isn’t all that difficult. To become a core teacher you have to score a 23 or higher and then go to a school and earn your bachelors and then you have to take a test which you must pass to be able to go into teaching which you can take any amount of times until you pass. Even if you fail the test twenty times, you can pass it the twenty-first time, and then you’ll be able to teach. Also, you must go through a student teacher course with the grades you are interested in and do well in that.

   From my point of view, it just seems that teaching is viewed as a job to do if you love kids or don’t know what you want to do. All of our “smart” students go off to be engineers, or lawyers, or doctors or whatever, and in the leading countries in education, many of their “smart” students go off to teach.

   Teaching is viewed as a “simple” job in the United States. This notion is founded upon the requirements to teach that are set by the universities and education policy makers which then, in turn, makes teaching an average job in students eyes, when it is not. Rolla High School is a good school with good teachers that I have the utmost respect for, but what I do not respect is the fact that simply because it is easy to become a teacher, students who are brilliant do not wish to pursue a teaching career and those are exactly the people we need as a whole to be teaching. We were lucky enough to get such teachers here in Rolla, but most places do not have that and that results in poor academics and produces students who are not ready for our everchanging world.

  We’re an average country academically as of now, but if we do not change how our teachers are trained, then we will start to see ourselves slowly slip down the ladder as countries surpass us. You would think that since we’re America we would be extremely upset if we were not first in something since we are so driven by competition. It seems that we could care less if our schools, our future, is falling behind in the world.