Abstract
Personal experiences and ideologies, as opposed to research-based evidence, hinder organizational changes and reforms in the American higher education realm. Many policy makers in the training sector, including players from the government, rely on their college experiences, and nor research. Even students and university staff employ personal interests to determine what policies survive. The present work covers this issue by first introducing the situation, then provides examples of personal interests and ideologies in the sector, and concludes with a wrap-up section.
Introduction
Education is a significantly powerful element in all social settings worldwide. Policymakers and minority groups view it as a fundamental liberation tool with the ability to make all populations equal. Having a college education is key in the many global communities that esteem education as a balancing social apparatus. The aspect informs virtually all the organizational changes and reforms enacted to promote higher education effectiveness. Nonetheless, most of the strategies adopted to transform the sector fail frequently. Thus, personal experiences and ideologies, as opposed to research-based evidence, are principal hindrances to organizational changes and reforms in the American higher education realm.
Reasons for and Examples of Reform Failure
American higher education, similar to many other university systems worldwide, faces increasing scrutiny from multiple sources. Examples of parties concerned with the sector’s performance include political leaders, scholars, American youths targeting college training, the international community seeking quality university education, and investors looking for highly trained graduates. The U.S. tutelage policymakers want to establish a higher education structure that offers real competitiveness globally (Streitwieser et al., 2019). The desire leads the government to enact laws and policies, often blindly, perceived to cause the anticipated effects. On the other hand, natural forces, such as innovation, the development of numerous online students receiving instructions from limited instructors, and the need for flipped classrooms, among other rapture factors, make training management challenging policy-wise. Consequently, almost all organizational changes or reform policies targeting the U.S. higher education system require real facts and evidence to become effective, aspects that miss conspicuously, as described below.
Ignorant Experts
The fact that almost everybody in the U.S. political system or academic fraternity is an expert on the topic of organizational reform proves the reliance on personal ideologies and experiences in making higher learning policies. The feeling results from the simple aspect of being an academic graduate, with Elmore (2004) maintaining that many policymakers in charge of top-level education operations do not care about facts. Thus, strategies targeting specific emergent issues affecting university learning pass based on the majority’s support (Elmore, 2004). The facet exposes the highly sensitive college education transformation agendas to politics and individual biases. Elmore (2004) provides the case of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) as an example of a mistaken strategy that is failing the U.S. education system. Though the decree targeted primary and secondary training, basing it on standardized tests led to significant failures and the eventual inability to cause the intended impacts (Acosta et al., 2020). Accordingly, personal ideologies make the NCLB policy weak as the strategy causes pressure and socioemotional instability among learners.
NCLB and Biased Students’ Categorization
The NCLB policy could deliver real results if based on research-based facts. The strategy correctly targeted to promote fairness in the American system and to promote the education structure’s international competitiveness. According to Schueler et al. (2020), those designing NCLB wanted to have a larger pool of educated workforce, resulting from both the majority and minority groups. Realizing such a goal would give American organizations increased skilled labor and output, thus boosting the nation’s economic power. However, Elmore (2004) notes making education concerns political converts the highly technical objective into a radical movement supported by the nation’s two rival political divides. Thus, American learners’ achievements are classified based on socioeconomic categories, which relates more to race issues, even though the NCLB decree is no longer active. The policy further focuses more on arithmetic and reading aspects while neglecting essential disciplines covering social issues, making the original purpose of education hard to realize (Elmore, 2004). Moreover, NCLB intentionally overlooks the need to empower trainers, as observed by Elmore (2004). Thus, it relies on personal ideologies and feelings while assuming research-based evidence on effective educational policies jeopardizes America’s higher education training reforms.
External Pressure over Internal Motivation
America’s higher learning reforms mainly result from external pressure, as opposed to internal motivation, giving politicians’ personal familiarities and philosophies substantial room to dominate the domain’s reform plans. Cyfert et al. (2022) describe intrinsic motivation as the best force to lead effective transformations among humans and organizations. However, giving the overseer responsibility to an external force often leads to the establishment of abstract solutions meant to deliver the supervisor’s hypothetical targets, as opposed to the actual challenges affecting the issue at hand. The matter is evident in the American education system, where the government and politically appointed or elected officials determine the kind of strategies informing the nation’s academic system (McDonnell, 2020). Elmore (2004) says that the disconnect between the teaching fraternity and the policy-making side leads to friction, with the former group mainly bearing pressure to implement erroneous plans, even when some do not work. Therefore, establishing a system where genuine educational experts use real investigations to develop evidence-based educational strategies promises to develop transformational education policies that cause a true paradigm shift.
Controversy and Conservatism
Controversy and conservatism mentalities among the general higher education populations, including some educators and learners, constitute personal ideologies hindering organizational reforms at the American university level. Gowen et al. (2019) note that American universities constitute exceptionally conservative administrative and cultural establishments. The settings contain tremendously vocal and ephemeral constituencies comprising students and faculty members. The two assemblages effortlessly organize themselves to oppose modifications associated with learning strategies, particularly when the alterations oppose lodged welfares (Aina et al., 2022). College student bodies hardly allow genuine fee-rise policies to materialize, even when such implies improvement in the quality of training received. On the other hand, university staff and administrators generally remain opposed to merger proposals meant to boost failing institutions, thus making policy changes hard. Therefore, conservatism constitutes a critical personal ideology troubling American higher education organizations’ reforms.
Conclusion
Higher education constitutes a central countrywide public agenda in the U.S. and multiple other international players. Decision-makers regularly foresee campuses as societal mobility and economic expansion apparatuses. This aspect makes it domineeringly essential for America and other nations to ground higher education policy changes on the evidence concerning operational tactics. However, such is not the case in the U.S., where organizational reforms continuously fail due to personal biases. Technological innovations, including mass online courses covering thousands of learners across the globe, form examples of the critical rupture factors affecting universities in the U.S. Others include competition from for-profit colleges providing professional pieces of training closely connected to labor market requirements and fresh liability modalities leading to global rankings. The U.S. education system works hard to remain relevant and current by meeting the specific needs of its customers and the ruling class. However, many policies meant for the country’s higher education sector’s organizational reforms fail significantly due to biases. Thus, America needs to build a body of applicable understanding with the ability to delineate the array of reform possibilities to make suitable decisions based on factual data concerning causes and effects. Implementing such changes amounts to transforming the learning fraternity’s culture for more realistic changes in the future.
References
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