Many students in Carlsbad have been used to the California common core standards since middle school, but at first many students found the standardized work and tests difficult. “Keeping up” academically is a problem just about everyone deals with throughout school, all over the world. However, some countries, including Finland, have different education standards. Rather than standardized tests and massive amounts of homework, Finland has developed a system made to allow students to work at their own pace.  

If America and California specifically changed education standards now, it could ultimately lead to higher amounts of high school graduates. “Working at their own pace” is the idea of not feeling pressured to be competitive with other students and always hoping for the end result of getting an “A”, and instead completely understanding the information, and being able to use that information in the future.

According to a a statistic from the Smithsonian Magazine, 93 percent of students in Finland graduate high school, which is 17.5 percent more than students in the U.S. 66 percent of the 93 Finland graduates also go to college. These large differences in the amount of students who graduate is not only because of their social lives, or standard students have for themselves, it must mostly concerns what people are taught within the classroom.

With this idea of changing some parts of our education system, there is no intention of dishonoring teachers who work hard for students success, but there are things that anyone can take note of from other countries around the world. Teachers now simply teach how they are trained to, but that training is what could be adjusted to better fit changing needs of education. Things like understanding how the math skills we learn in school could be applied in adulthood could be more important than solving an algebra problem three different ways only to get the same answer.  

So what could a solution for students around the rest of the world and in America be to alter the current education system? – Applying the most effective methods of educating kids developed by countries like Finland, and apply them to countries who need to reshape their future.