S Department of Education have issued more mandated test, close public schools that are not performing according to their standards, replace the public schools with charter schools and fire the teachers (Buntin). The school are not performing because the U.S. Department of Education have not provided effective training and support to their teachers and expect them to perform tasks that they were not prepared for. They have failed to effectively trained and prepared new teachers for the job ahead and holds them impossible standards without preparation. .
If the U.S. Department of Education provide more training and support to their teachers, the students will thrive and succeed. Firing teachers when students are not performing will not fix the education. We have to better train our teachers in order for them to be successful. Most of the training teachers receive through teacher training programs are disconnected from what they will experience in the classroom. Also teacher preparation programs across the U.S. have low entrance requirement and low exit standards (Esch). Take the country of Finland for example; it is a small country but their students' scores are among the top nations on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) (Gross-Loh). Finland provide their new teachers plenty of support and training, by having other teachers supervise new teachers in the classroom and providing feedback and guidance to them. Their teachers undergo yearlong teaching apprenticeship before teaching on their own. Finland has invested immensely on improving their teachers, in fact all of their teachers are highly educated--they all have master's degrees and becoming a teacher is highly competitive (Gross-Loh). They believe in highly educating their teachers, by doing so they trust their teachers to do their work correctly and allow them a lot of independence. They also invest in additional teacher training after even after becoming a teacher and give them tests and exams to make sure they are progressing.