The education system in US is quite different from the other education systems around the world. US don’t have a country level education; rather each state of the country has its own departments of education and set of guideline or rules to be followed by the educational institutions coming under them. Finance for each public school in the country, are received from their respective state and local property taxes. The public colleges and the universities also receive their funds from the individual state they are connected to. Apart from this, the students belonging to the grades from one to twelve are exempted from paying any tuition fees and even though the college and university goers are entitled for tuition fees they do have opportunities to receive scholarships and loans for the purpose.
Major parts of the schools are decided by the school districts that are governed by school boards consisting of people elected by the local community or prearranged by the government. The school districts are majorly divided into three- elementary schools, middle schools and high schools. The elementary schools contain kindergarten and grades 1 to 5. Middle school contains grades 6 to 8 and high school contains grades from 9 to 12. Children attend kindergarten at the age of five and grade one at the age of six.
In high school children are expected to take courses in English, mathematics, science, social science. They may also be asked to make a choice of foreign language, physical activities, a choice between music, art or theatre etc. Their academic year usually starts around mid August and ends around early June.
In US, education till sixteen or eighteen of age, depending on the state, is compulsory. They ‘graduate’, once they complete all the courses. The grades provided at the end of each semester; is that A denotes excellent, B above average, C average, D below average and f denotes fail. Incase of failure the student has to repeat the course. After graduation, the students have a choice of doing two year junior college course or four years university course. Junior courses are easy to get into and has lower tuition fee along with smaller classes. A junior college pass out earns an associate degree with the help of which they can do a two year course in the relevant university.
In the university, a student doing a bachelors degree is an “under graduate” and master’s degree is a “graduate”. Most universities provide the undergraduate students, liberal education, where they have to take in a number of courses before specializing in any specific fields.
This would be a general idea about how education is planned out in US.
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