Abstract:
Education is one of the main foundations of a modern society. It is how we pass on cultural values and prepare the nation's youth to become productive, intelligent citizens. American education has seen many changes in past 20 years, with the rise of charter schools to the passing of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. Many within the education field see these changes as detrimental to the field as a whole, but solutions are difficult to come by. While America has been lagging behind in education, nations such as Australia and Malaysia are bringing test scores up and driving greater numbers of students into higher education. Meanwhile, nations such as Thailand fall even further than the United States in terms of educational success. Investigative research, looking into each nation's educational standards, teacher ethics guidelines and policies, budget allocations, and major recent educational reforms, has been compiled, in order to determine potential solutions to some of the major issues within the American system of education.