America, We Have a Problem: Our Children Are Paying the Price for a Broken Education System

I work with kids every day, and there is something I need America to understand:

These are not bad kids.

I see intelligent kids. Funny kids. Creative kids. Kids who could become doctors, electricians, engineers, welders, teachers, business owners, mechanics, artists, nurses and people who create careers we haven’t even imagined yet.

But I also see children struggling to regulate their emotions. I see teachers responsible for so many students that giving every struggling child individual attention becomes almost impossible. I see children growing up surrounded by short-form content, algorithms and constant stimulation while we continue asking them to sit inside an education system that looks remarkably similar to the one their grandparents experienced.

And then I watch adults argue about whose fault it is.

Parents blame teachers.

Politicians blame parents.

People blame “these kids today.”

Republicans and Democrats fight over what should be taught.

Meanwhile, the children lose.

America, we have a problem.

And perhaps our biggest problem is that the people in charge have been too proud to admit it.

“These Kids” Aren’t the Enemy

Recently, social-media discussions about high school students struggling to read generated the predictable outrage.

“Where are the parents?”

“What are these teachers doing?”

“Kids today don’t care.”

Those questions aren’t completely illegitimate but, it is important to understand that parents aren’t the only people responsible, and teachers certainly aren’t the enemy.

We have put teachers in classrooms with children carrying academic, behavioral and emotional needs that one person cannot possibly address simultaneously, and then we act surprised when students fall through the cracks. If a teacher has too many students and several need individual intervention, who gets the teacher’s attention? The child struggling to read? The child having an emotional crisis? The student disrupting the class? The twenty other children waiting to learn? We keep demanding miracles from teachers while refusing to give them the conditions necessary to perform them.

Stop Passing Children Through a System That Hasn’t Prepared Them

I am a millennial. I grew up during the era of No Child Left Behind. I remember the promise embedded in the name itself.

No child left behind………

Who could disagree with that? But somewhere along the way, our obsession with measuring progress and moving students through the system became disconnected from a much more important question:

Did the child actually learn?

No Child Left Behind didn’t single-handedly create today’s education problems, and America’s struggles existed long before George W. Bush signed that law. But to me, that era represents a larger mistake in American education: politicians became obsessed with proving schools were succeeding instead of confronting where children were failing. If a teenager cannot read at the expected level, simply advancing that student does not make the problem disappear. It transfers the problem to the next teacher. Then the next. Then the next. Eventually, that child becomes an adult.

I don’t believe our first response should be making a struggling child repeat an entire grade. Before reaching that point, we should exhaust the interventions available to us.

Maybe School Itself Needs to Change

What frustrates me is how dramatically the world has changed while the basic structure of American education often feels frozen in time. Look at the technology around us. Ai can generate an essay in seconds. A teenager can learn video editing from YouTube. Someone can take classes from another continent without leaving their bedroom. Children carry devices containing more information than entire libraries once held. Yet somehow, when we discuss reforming public education, our imagination becomes incredibly small.

Maybe we need year-round education with shorter breaks spread throughout the year.

Maybe struggling students need additional instructional time during those breaks.

Maybe teachers need smaller classes.

Maybe technology shouldn’t just be the thing we’re constantly telling students to put away. Maybe educators should receive the resources and training to use technology in ways that compete for students’ attention and make learning more interactive.

I don’t have the perfect blueprint but, we should be willing to redesign the current blueprint.

College Cannot Be the Only Definition of Success

My generation was sold college as the pathway. Go to college. Get a degree. Get a good job. Make good money. For some people, that’s absolutely the correct path but for everyone? No.

I’ve been listening to people like Deante Kyle of the Grits and Eggs podcast talk about America’s need for skilled tradespeople, and it raises an obvious question:

Why aren’t we exposing more teenagers to these careers and careers we haven’t even created yet.

Showing students alternatives to college isn’t lowering expectations for them. It’s expanding their options.

A seventeen-year-old shouldn’t graduate believing the choices are college or failure. Our job should be helping young people discover what they’re good at and showing them multiple ways to turn those abilities into a meaningful life.

Teach Them the Whole Truth

Then there is history. My bread and butter what I have a passion for an a degree in.

While children are struggling academically, adults are spending enormous amounts of political energy fighting over what portions of American history might make students uncomfortable.

My position is simple:

Teach them everything.

Teach slavery.

Teach Jim Crow.

Teach the Civil Rights Movement.

Teach Black achievement.

Teach America’s accomplishments.

Teach America’s atrocities.

Teach the good, the bad and the ugly.

Protecting Black culture means protecting Black history.

If learning that history makes somebody uncomfortable, imagine how the people who actually endured that history felt.

History isn’t supposed to protect children’s feelings from every uncomfortable fact. Education should give young people the knowledge and critical-thinking skills necessary to examine those facts themselves.

I don’t want schools telling children what to think.

I want schools teaching them how to think.

That distinction has never felt more important.

Social Media Isn’t Hiding the Problem Anymore

Social media allows us to watch some of these problems unfold in real time.

We see classroom fights.

We see teachers breaking down.

We see students struggling with basic material.

But social media also creates another challenge. Children live in an environment of endless short-form stimulation. Something is trending today and forgotten tomorrow. Their attention is constantly being competed for. Schools have to acknowledge that reality. We cannot prepare children for the future by pretending their environment hasn’t changed.

It doesn’t scare me that children use TikTok. Not that they know how to use AI. I worry that we are raising a generation that knows how to find answers without necessarily knowing how to interrogate those answers.

What happens when today’s students become tomorrow’s doctors? Will my future doctor understand how to reason through my symptoms, challenge assumptions and make an independent judgment? Or will that person simply know where to type the question? Technology isn’t the enemy. A failure to teach independent thought is.

These Children Deserve Better From Us

This is the part that makes me emotional because I actually work with these kids. They aren’t statistics to me. They aren’t political talking points. They’re children. And they’re not bad children. Some of them simply haven’t learned how to regulate their emotions yet. Some haven’t had enough adults pouring into them. Some parents are struggling themselves. Some teachers are overwhelmed. Some communities don’t have enough programs or resources.

So where are the rest of us? Where are the mentors? Where are the programs? Where are the apprenticeships? Where are the politicians willing to admit that something isn’t working? Where is the Department of Education willing to say:

America, we have a problem.

Republican children aren’t losing.

Democratic children aren’t losing.

American children are losing.

While adults fight about who gets to control education, students remain trapped in the middle of our ideological battles. They are the ones who will inherit whatever we leave behind. They are supposed to become my doctors, electricians, engineers, teachers, caregivers and leaders. And when I look at the kids I work with, I don’t see a hopeless generation. I see the opposite. I see enormous potential trapped inside a system that seems more comfortable debating children than listening to them.

If we get this right, their future is limitless. But getting it right requires something adults in power have been unwilling to do. We have to admit that what worked yesterday may not work tomorrow. We have to stop protecting institutions simply because we’re accustomed to them. We have to stop treating education as another battlefield in America’s endless political war. And most importantly, we have to remember who all of this was supposed to be about in the first place.

“Them kids” are our kids

They don’t need another generation of adults arguing about who failed them.

They just need us to FINALLY stop failing them.