In July 1991 an article swept the pages of Reason magazine. The author Jerry Jesness, a former public school teacher, discussed how “the floating standard” is inescapable and how it is destroying our Nation’s public education. Teachers who fail to support this standard are seen as setting their students up to be unsuccessful and in a way are being punished if they do so. So teachers pass their students and if the student can’t reach that standard the standard is lowered. Jessness states that “The floating standard makes everyone a winner.…
Michael Moore’s 2010 film, “Waiting for Superman,” illustrated that the ‘lemon dance’ continues to plague districts across the country. ‘The Lemon Dance’ refers to schools swapping their worst performing teachers at the end of the school year with another school’s lemon in hopes that he or she is not quite as bad. Some argue that it is time to throw away the rotten lemons and begin searching for more qualified and/or higher performing teachers. Due process is procedural enough in nature that removing poor teachers becomes as easy as making a pitcher of freshly squeezed lemonade! However, nothing in life is free.…
‘’Any good HR professional wants to be better. This begins with a desire to improve, followed by a clear understanding what it requires to improve. ‘’ (The RBL Group, 2012) KIPP Delta Public Schools is a free, college-preparatory education in the Arkansas Delta. They currently serve over 1,500 students across six schools in Helena, Blytheville, and Forrest City, Arkansas.…
Elementary school is the cornerstone of a child’s development. Elementary school is where a child starts to understand the concepts of responsibility, determination, and success which manifest themselves in the guise of the end of year report card. The articles written by Erica Ehm and Cayla Hochberg convey two opposing sides of the recent TDSB union disputes. These articles are in disagreement about who is responsible for the lack of report cards given out to the children. I find the latter article by Cayla Hochberg to be the most convincing.…
outcomes of in-grade retention warranted the OECD findings. During the 1964-65 school year, administrators of schools with inner-city populations moved quickly to implement no-retention programs. Resistance ran high among lower grade teachers who watched retained students’ growth the second time through a grade. Those schools where principals who were bold enough to empower teaching staffs to develop continuous growth programs fared well within that dynamic.…
“They had hoped to replace current methods – characterized by teacher led “telling” and student recitation – with curriculum packages that used “discovery” ”inquiry,” and inductive reasoning as methods of learning; the rationale was that students would find the field more interesting and would retain longer what they learned if they “figured out,” through carefully designed exercises or experiments (Ravich 324.” This method is utilized today in America’s school systems. She goes on to argue the point that the U.S. Commissioner in Education is quoted as saying that “more time, talent, and money than ever before in history have been invested in pushing educational knowledge, and in the next decades we may expect more significant developments (Ravich 324). This is concrete evidence the government was fully engaged in bettering our school system. Finally she explains the loss of motivation to continue funding America’s education because of racial inequality by her statement “No matter how well or how badly schools taught reading or writing or history, poor black children still lived in slums, black unemployment was still double the white rate, and black poverty remained high.…
In “Teacher Wars,” by Dana Goldstein, I read the first two chapters after I briefly read through each chapter to figure out what appeals to me most. I have done much research on Susan B. Anthony, therefore, I wanted to read that chapter to see if I could discover something new about her or a different perspective. Whereas, I have heard about Catharine Beecher and Horace Mann before, but only briefly. Therefore, I wanted to read that chapter to read who they were and what impact they had on education. I was not surprised that the book began with the history of teaching with females being the main correspondence.…
A central theme evident on urban education is the importance of the arts in education. The arts consist of many disciplines such as music, dance, and theatre. Arts education is crucial in the development of the youth through both critical skills and creativity. The benefits of the arts include motor skills, language development, decision-making, visual learning, cultural awareness, and an overall improvement in academics (Lynch, 2012).…
Barry was grateful for her teacher and what she did for her and the other students in the classroom. But as she was thinking she wondered what other kids went through that did not have quality teachers that went the extra mile for their students. While Barry was applauding the quality of teachers at her school Christina Fisanick implied that all teachers should be like Barry’s teachers. The quality of teachers is a big part of why some low-income students do better than others as Fisanick the editor of “Introduction to Has No Child Left Behind Been Good for Education? : At Issue”, says that every student needs a quality teacher in order to succeed in school.…
Those considering entering the education system reading this do not want to know that there are teachers losing their jobs. Especially in a time when they should not be losing their jobs, they still are. This article effects all types of people, parents, students and educators. Krugman plays to the emotions of these people while making his point. The appeal of logos becomes apparent with the statistics of jobs lost in the education sector.…
If a person with a comparable bachelors degree would walk in a teacher’s shoes for a school year they will realize how overworked, overwhelmed, and underpaid they are. Teaching is not just an ordinary job, yet teachers are affecting the lives of the current and future generations. It is up to this generation and beyond to ensure that teachers receive comparable pay, and by doing so, qualified candidates will enter the profession ensuring America’s…
Teachers and their profession are being demoralized by the expectations set by the Race to the Top program. Ravitch, (2014) explains that our educators are responsible for the test scores of white, black, Hispanic, and Asian kids being at their highest since the National Assessment Of Education Progress started in 1970 (p. 155), the blame for low test scores should be put on the lack of support that the Department of Education has given to poor and segregated kids in poverty stricken societies. However, Schroth (2016) presents a different stance to Ravitch, stating how college professors encounter high school graduates who lack the ability to read a book, write a sentence, have no regards for grammar, and cannot stand up and speak (p. 25). Unlike Ravitch, Schroth believes that the training received by today’s teachers from these poor programs and the laziness that the graduates of these programs exhibit, has been pushed on the students who in turn displays their lack of knowledge at the next level of higher…
Title Tenure in the classroom “study after study has shown a yawning educational achievement gap between the poorest and wealthiest children in America” (Cohen, 2015). It becomes extremely difficult to fire that teacher who is guaranteed a job with three to seven years of experience. Parents seem to be dissatisfied with the current situation on the concept of whether or not teacher should be tenured in American schools. Reaching for a higher education is vanishing for students who know that they are in a chaotic environment, so many students are a victim of the system. Similarly, the achievement gap in education creates an imbalance among a variety of students in their academic performance.…
The federal policy makers included alternate route Teachers that receive high quality professional development, before and during teaching, participate in a program with supervision, assume a teaching role, and make progress towards full certification as prescribed by the state are considered as highly qualified (Marszalek, LaNasa, & Adler, 2010). Increasing the number of highly qualified teachers in large urban areas has become one of the major missions of policy makers. Schools serving disadvantaged students, especially ethnic minorities and those in poor, rural areas are less likely to staff highly…
According to Danielson (2002), “a lot of underprivileged students are enrolled in schools with less resources and teachers who are least qualified” (2002, p viii). Furthermore, he stated a fact that “ 54 percent of math and science teachers are certified in their field, and only 42 percent hold a bachelor ‘s degree in the field, ( Danielson, 2001 p ix) “therefore , to address this issue school districts hired teachers who were highly…