Dear Madam/Mr. President,

In life, what people need are skills that can be applied to their lives. Being a high school junior, I have seen capable, potential kids who sacrifice their social and sometimes personal lives in order to meet academic pressures of society. Kids are also jeopardizing their health by sleeping less and attending school even though they are sick in order to not fall behind in school. Colleges nowadays look for students who have high GPA’s and SAT scores with many advanced classes. In today’s society, it is not easy to establish a good income without extended education past high school, especially with minimum wages as low as $7.25 an hour. In order to meet those standards, students have ended up sacrificing valuable time on homework that would otherwise rarely be utilized in everyday life--just so that they can succeed academically. Most of us would forget factual information that would hardly be used in life. That's just one issue with the education system today.

Schools simply cannot offer the same opportunities to kids nationwide when the government funding for schools is so unbalanced. Some schools have more opportunities and better teachers than other schools, forcing the kids to work harder to get the same result. Because schools have no money to fund school-wide programs and quality teachers, they are cutting off programs that appear "unimportant" or secondary to primary core subjects like English, Math, Science, etc. As a result, music, dance, art, and most creative classes get cut from the school's education. Money really is a limiting factor in a student's success.

So what do we need to do to fix these problems?

We need to fund public education more to allow schools to open more opportunities for students to learn. We also need to allow kids themselves to have time for learning life skills such as music, dance, cooking, etc. Whatever that could mean, some solutions could include less homework and an efficient learning curriculum that would reduce the amount of time spent on homework to learn the same quality of material. The education system in the U.S. assigns homework that would otherwise be pointless in learning the subject at hand. By assigning more focused, purposeful homework, the student may actually do less homework, but still do the same academically. High quality teachers and instruction are much more important than the homework assigned is. More funding equals more opportunities and quality teachers.  More efficient learning means more time for a balance between our personal, academic, and social lives.

Thank you,

Justin