The U.S. education system has fallen into disrepair, a sad truth that haunts educators and… The U.S. education system has fallen into disrepair, a sad truth that haunts educators and students around the country who struggle to teach and learn through a system that desperately needs a curriculum update.

Year after year, lawmakers try to fix our education system, which is intricately tied to our country’s economic and societal divisions, by throwing legislation at the issue, the most notorious piece of legislation being the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. The act takes a “teach to the masses” approach, by testing students on basic skills and rewarding those districts that achieve the standards set in place with federal funding.

The philosophy behind No Child Left Behind and similar legislation – including a recent Pennsylvania proposal that would require students to pass a series of state exams to receive their diplomas – is that raising standards will result in better performance. And, for legislators, the best way to track performance is through standardized testing.

While this type of screening can help to single out schools’ relative strengths and weaknesses, particularly in districts where basic arithmetic and reading skills are lacking, it lowers the quality of education in schools that aren’t plagued with failures in performance by forcing teachers to teach to the test, thereby lowering the quality of education as a whole.

While No Child Left Behind has certainly done little to improve our nation’s education system, U.S. schools were suffering long before the legislators put the law in place, and it will continue to suffer until our lawmakers, administrators, teachers, students and parents work together to completely overhaul the system.

When we imagine a productive U.S. education system, we think of systems in other countries, particularly those of Western Europe and Asia, that haven’t been afraid to redefine the concept of childhood education. In these countries, the education system is largely aptitude-based, students are tested early on in order to determine their relative strengths and weaknesses, and they pursue their careers-of-choice from an early age.

While these forward-thinking systems have certainly developed some of the world’s best and brightest, systems similar to those practiced in Europe and China might not be the best fit for the United States.

The United States has always emphasized the importance of delivering mass education instead of teaching to individual needs – a fact that is reflected in the current onslaught of standardized testing.

To improve our country’s broken education system, we don’t need to do away with the notion of teaching to the masses, but rather, should provide a quality of education that raises overall national standards as well as providing innovative and enriching classroom experiences for students who seek to learn more.

And the best way to do this is to start from the top: We need better teachers. And to get better teachers, our schools need more funding. Not funding that comes with strings attached or as incentive from standardized test scores.

We also need to stop assessing students’ achievements by looking at standardized test scores. These tests, particularly in the case of graduation exams, aren’t always indicative of a student’s achievements or knowledge base and encourage teachers to teach to the lowest common denominator.

Finally, we need parents and communities that nurture the importance of education by embracing the importance of quality of education, not just scores and grades.

Mending our country’s broken education system is not impossible, but it will take more than “raising standards” or tacking on more standardized tests. We need to change the way our country looks at education, the way we hire and train teachers and the way we assess students’ aptitudes and achievements.

And until we do, we will continue to fall miserably behind the rest of the world.