It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted.

The Essence of Education Reform

-- By JessicaRogers - 26 Feb 2013

Education Reform as a Major Legal Issue

There has probably been no social policy issue that has gotten more attention over the last decade than education reform. The debate has taken on many forms, and, I have come to appreciate, involves many legal policy issues as well. The debate has most recently been framed with such catch phrases as “No Child Left Behind” in the Bush administration, and “Race to the Top” in the Obama administration. There has been an enormous amount of focus on the role of the federal versus state versus local government, putting to the test the issue of where the responsibility for education reform most lies in our federal system.

Issues from federal regulation and standards that schools need to meet in order to qualify for enhanced federal funding, all the way to the New York City Mayor taking control of the school system away from an independent Board of Education have marked some of the many legal/governmental controversies over the last decade. Yet test scores of American students continue to deteriorate relative to scores of other nations, and the success of charter schools created to compete with neighboring public schools is still an open question.

The Law Student’s Education Reform

On August 15, 2012, myself and 360 fellow first year students arrived at Columbia Law School to begin our legal education at what is considered one of the great law schools of the world. As we began our Legal Methods class training, we were pressed to analyze the essence of our federal system in terms of the relationship between federal law, state law, the respective court systems, and court review of the regulatory apparatus that have been created under each. In my mind, I began to relate all of this back to the various jurisdictional conflicts over who is really going to drive an improved educational system in this country.

Then something else dawned on me. I was in the process of my own personal “education reform” and it occurred to me that the macro policy education reform goals were totally missing the beat. My new fellow students and I all really struggled with being exposed to a new way of thinking - - a highly analytical reasoning process that involved honing in on the key facts of a case, the standards under which those facts were to be assessed, and the distinctions between various cases as the facts and law evolved or changed. Here we all were, after 17 years of education under our belts, the last four years of which involved training at the best undergraduate programs in the country, and we were all struggling to grasp an analytical reasoning process that was entirely new to us.

The Uniqueness of the Law Student’s Education Reform

That’s when it occurred to me, how did we all get through so much school, so much liberal arts education, so much reading and writing, and here we were for the first time truly being exposed to the exercise of getting to the essence of what really matters, analytically reasoning our way through it, and articulating a point of view based on it? Why were we all struggling so much through this process, as opposed to this being the type of educational training we have had all along? It dawned on me even further, isn’t there some seriously wrong with our educational system that it would take getting to law school, which only a fraction of one percent of all students of any given year are privileged enough to get to, for our minds to be exposed to this kind of training?

No matter what someone pursues after their formal education, what matters most is to be able to distinguish the relevant from the irrelevant, to analyze your way clearly through a problem, to present and articulate your thoughts, and to do so in a persuasive manner. Yet, so much of the education reform debate is focused on test score competency, which rarely captures these ingredients of what are so central to being a well-rounded person with well articulated thoughts. Often, instead, the testing is about measuring skills that largely get at a teacher’s ability to get a child to memorize and regurgitate information. Instead of this rote learning, test-score-focused, approach to stuffing in ones head mounds of irrelevant facts, we should be focusing on the key ingredients of a legal education becoming the foundation of all educational reform. If education had always been geared towards assimilation of relevant information, analyzing its meaning, and articulating our viewpoints, my classmates and I may not have been so initially confused by the notion of “material facts” and so terrified of the notion of a “cold call.”

Maybe Law School Could Have Gone a Step Further

That is not to say that a legal education is beyond being critiqued and subject to thorough analysis itself. Even in law school there is very little time spent challenging and analyzing the process you are going through, even though that very process is all about acquiring analytical reasoning skills. Yet, if the mindset we are taught to acquire in law school had been an intricate part of our entire education, perhaps questions about whether law school really does everything it should to cause prospective lawyers to challenge their own training/profession/professors would not be something reserved for discussion in a single class my second semester of law school. Had it been a central theme of my 17 years of prior education, that kind of challenging of the status quo legal education might, instead, be found in the mainstream of the entire law school process. Legal education being subject by students to probing analytical assessment might well lead to greater self-awareness by lawyers and the profession.

Conclusion

Applying the essential ingredients of analytical reasoning, along with written and verbal advocacy, to how we approach education reform generally, would seem to be a path much more worthy than many failed paths taken to date.

• #Set ALLOWTOPICVIEW = TWikiAdminGroup, JessicaRogers
• #Set DENYTOPICVIEW = TWikiGuest

Note: TWiki has strict formatting rules for preference declarations. Make sure you preserve the three spaces, asterisk, and extra space at the beginning of these lines. If you wish to give access to any other users simply add them to the comma separated ALLOWTOPICVIEW list.