Final Project

It is not about the money, it is about the results and achievements. America ranks last in educational effectiveness-despite spending the most. In Camden, NJ they did not know their alphabet by the 9^th grade, and only knew math up to 4X4. This is unacceptable, children should know their alphabet by the time they enter kindergarten. America is spending $17,500, but what are they doing with the money if the kids still cannot read? People think we should spend more on education but they actually have no idea what we are actually spending that money on. It is obvious that throwing more money into our educations system is not doing anything to improve a child’s education. So what can we do to fix it? There are six different types of schools-magnet, charter, private, religious, voucher, and public. What can each of these schools do that the others cannot? Are there better types of schools than others? What can we really do to fix America’s public education?

First we will look at charter schools. Some say they are not necessarily better than public schools, while others say they are. The issue that bothers me the most is that there are so many people that want to get into, but then do not get in that it ruins the hope for so many other people. Charter schools were originally meant to serve the poorest of the low-income students, but really they only accept a small percentage of low-income kids, but they generally do not admit extremely high risk, high need, or challenging students. Instead of having charter schools we can focus our money and ideas into rebuilding our public schools instead. At the same time though charter schools are run better than public schools so we could just build more charter schools if the government would let us. Students who come from low-income families and/or are ELL, revealed higher success and performance rates in Charter schools than their public-school counterparts. Based off of the documentary “The Cartel” children in charter schools feel more comfortable and safe. They have a better opportunity to learn in charter schools without worrying about their own safety. Just a few more charter schools would make a difference; even if they do not allow every child into their school just a few more would make a huge difference.

Next we will look at vouchers. Education voucher is a certificate issued by the government, which parents can apply toward tuition at a private school (or, by extension, to reimburse home-schooling expenses), rather than at the state schools. Voucher programs are programs that let kids go to the schools they want to go to with the government’s money. Private vouchers for low-income inner-city schools should be used because they allow parents to pay for private schools. Vouchers are intended to allow students and families to choose the school that best fits their needs. Proponents assert that voucher and tax credit systems promote free market competition among schools of all types, which provides schools incentives to improve and greater accountability than any political bureaucracy via voluntary dollar voting (for which public schools are immune.) Controversy surrounds whether allowing families the option of both public and private schools undermines the public education system through threatening its funding and enrollment, but to me vouchers seem like a very good idea. Children who are not able to afford to go to the school that they want to should be able to go to that school.

In the movie “Waiting for Superman” they talk about four different parts that would make America’s education the best it could possibly be and these four different parts are great teachers, prepared students, excellent schools, increased literacy. We cannot produce world-class students if we do not train and support world-class teachers. We need to recruit the best and brightest teachers, and provide these teachers with proven tools, training, and coaching. They should be fairly evaluated using a variety of measurements so outstanding teachers are justly rewarded. We need to set a high standard curriculum and help all kids meet the high standards. Common Core State Standards Initiative is a set of standards which would ensure all students from K-12 are taught using a world-class curriculum. We can help students reach these standards by volunteering at your local school, or being a mentor. All students should have access to excellent schools, but more importantly, EVERY school should be excellent. People need to invest in what they know works, remove other barriers to choice, including charter school caps, so parents can have more options. Reading to a child three times a week makes them twice as likely to score in the top 25% or their class in reading. Tutoring, giving books, or simply reading to children fights illiteracy…one book, one student at a time. Literacy is the number one predictor of a child’s ability to succeed in school.

Stand For Children is an organization that’s mission is to ensure that all children, regardless of their background, graduate from high school prepared for, and with access to, a college education. To make that happen the want to educate and empower parents, teachers, and community members to demand excellent public schools, advocate for effective local, state and national education policies and investments, ensure the policies and funding we advocate for reach classrooms and help students, and elect courageous leaders who will stand up for our priorities. The only thing is that Stand For Children is only in nine different states. What we need is more organizations like Stand For Children in every state in America. We need people that want change.

The most powerful teacher unions, the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers, continue to block reforms needed to improve our nation’s schools by putting their focus on teachers rather than on the students they teach. We need to stop teacher unions from doing this. Great Teachers and Leaders Law (Senate Bill 191) requires teachers to demonstrate effectiveness three years in a row to earn tenure, 50% of their evaluation would be based on student academic growth. This bill was issued in Colorado, and is a very good start to evaluating teachers and making sure they are the absolute best they can be. There are so many teachers who have tenure that do not deserve to have it. Tenure protects that bad teachers from getting fired then seems to do nothing for the good teachers. If every teacher receives tenure how do you even know the good teachers from the bad? I believe we need to eliminate the bad teachers and start to train the good ones

Some other ways that teachers could improve would be different way teaching styles like making songs as lessons to learn the material. We could also use a method called whole brain teaching, which is another encryption method that the brain uses to encode what is happening. It is a way to make teaching and learning fun again. You are able to engage different parts of your brain so you are not overusing that one part of your brain. Teaching children thinking critically at a young age is important. We are growing into a technological would, why not use that to our advantage? Create learning games and such on the computer. Kids like playing on computers, why not create games so they can actually be learning when they are on the computer?

Based on all the information provided above we can conclude that Charter schools are a very viable option and provide good learning opportunities, but only provide those good learning opportunities to a handful of children each year. Teacher unions only care about what is best for the teachers and not the students they are teaching. Voucher programs are helpful to many parents who cannot pay for a child’s education if that child chooses to go to a private school. But there are still a handful of people who are still against vouchers even though they help out many low-income children. Everyone needs to be on board and help out. There are so many different organizations and programs across America, yet are only in a handful of different states. How about we use these organizations and programs in every state? It is not terrorism that is going to kill America it is urban public education if people do not fix this problem.

Work Cited

The Cartel

http://www.thecartelmovie.com/cgi-local/content.cgi?g=23

The Documentary Film “The Lottery”

Waiting for Superman

http://www.waitingforsuperman.com/action/people-page/what-you-can-do

Stand for Children

http://www.stand.org/Page.aspx?pid=1268

Common Core State Standards Initiative

http://www.corestandards.org/

School Vouchers

http://www.schoolchoices.org/roo/vouchers.htm

Project Introduction

How would you make the world a better place? There are so many different options to make the world a better place. So many people nowadays are thinking that making the world greener by recycling and reusing materials would make the world a better place and a more sustainable world. While this true I believe that improving our education in America would help make the world an even better place and even a more sustainable place.

For the past couple of years there has been a lot of talk about an education crisis in the United States. As the years pass the children entering elementary school are slowly less and less prepared for kindergarten and to learn in general. Age’s three to five are the most important time for children to develop literary critical thinking skills. Millions of children are entering kindergarten considerably behind the standard curve, 25% vocabulary as robust as their more affluent counterparts. Children in low-income neighborhoods, on average, start kindergarten 60% behind their wealthier peers. Every year 63% of all kindergarteners begin school unprepared for lifelong learning. So many children nowadays are not developing these skills in this time, and then once they enter kindergarten they are already behind everyone else.

The fact that many of these children live in low-income neighborhoods affects their access to books and other resources to develop the literary skills they need. There are 13 unique children’s book titles per child in middle class neighborhoods, and 1 per 300 children’s book titles in low-income areas.

When people are more educated I feel as if they would care more about making the word more sustainable. As my grandma said “the only thing that will save us is education”. Education in the sense that people need to be educated about the ways to make the world more sustainable, but also education in the sense that we need to improve our public school systems here in America. Education is extremely important in order to succeed in life. It is especially important at an early age, but so many children now are not receiving the education they should be in elementary school, and throughout in junior high and high school.

When people are more educated they will become positive contributors to our society. An education should bring out the best in our students; develop their potential and natural gifts. The children of our future are bright and need this boost to keep them going throughout their entire schooling career. Our educational system is failing to challenge these bright children. These next generations are going to become the most important generations of our future, and these children will be the ones who help decide what our future will be. Is the future looking up? Not if these children are not properly educated. We want to keep the earth intact and running. These children could very well come up with the next brilliant ideas, like a cure to cancer.

What will the job prospects and quality of life look like for people who are not well educated? How will employers in the United States remain competitive in the global marketplace if this trend in our education continues? According to oecd.org “governments therefore need to invest in education. In the long-run, their budgets will benefit from investment in education. The better educated are less likely to need unemployment benefits or welfare assistance, and pay more taxes when they enter the job market.” So the more educated people are the more benefits they will contribute to everyone else. Everyone benefits when people try their hardest and succeed. “A man with a tertiary education will pay back an average USD $91,000 in income taxes and social contributions over his working life, over and above what the government pays for his degree.”

High school graduation rates are lower today than they were a decade ago. While congress wages partisan political warfare, America’s education system keeps declining. This all shows that so many different aspects of life point to education. And so many aspects of bad qualities in different cities point to the deterioration in the quality of American schools. Some of these aspects are a 560% in violent crime, 419% increase in illegitimate births, a quadrupling of divorce rates, a tripling of the percentage of children living in single-parent homes, 200% increase in teenage suicide rates, and a drop of almost 80 points in SAT scores.

For my project I am going to research the different ways to why our education system here in America is failing and the different to how we can improve. There is a positive correlation between low-income neighborhoods and the quality of their public schools. We need to focus on this fact that these low-income neighborhoods and schools need help. What programs work and what programs don’t? No Child Left Behind states that based on the belief that setting high standards and establishing measurable goals can improve individual outcomes in education is purely just not true. Setting high standards doesn’t really do anything. The ACT does not truly measure someone’s scholarly abilities. Time tests do not measure someone’s true abilities as well as other methods.

This problem is not new. We have been dealing with this problem since the middle of the twentieth century. This difference between low-income areas and the more wealthy areas has been an issue for a while. All of this is preventable though, and this is what I will talk about in my project the different ways that we can prevent America from going down the toilet. I want people to know different ways they can try to help out, and just have people acknowledge the fact we need to fix the problem that our education systems are failing.

My mom works at an Elementary school in Lincoln, Nebraska, Saratoga Elementary. This school is in one of the low-income areas of Lincoln and it shows with the children that attend Saratoga. My mom helps out with teaching some of the kids to read better. There are so many students that need help that it can be overwhelming for people like my mom and all the teachers at these schools. They now have to spend more of their time to try and teach these kids just the letters in their names. When teachers have to spend so much time on these kids then it distracts attention from the kids who do know their alphabet then they are not getting the education they deserve either. If every student comes into elementary prepared and ready to learn then every student will then hopefully receive the attention and education they deserve.

Once we improve America’s education systems maybe then we can travel to third-world countries that need more improvement than America in their education. When people are more educated in America I feel as if they will be more willing to go out and improve the rest of the world and help out others. There are countries that are a lot more poor than America and really do need a lot of help just to survive. We here in America need to realize that also and go out and help these people. But if we can only focus on how to improve our own lives we cannot focus on improving others. We can only take one step at a time. First we have to improve our own education, then we can go out and help the rest of the world that needs much, much help. My goal is to let people know about the problems that America’s education and educate them on the ways to change these problems.

Work Cited

Education: crisis reinforces importance of a good education, says OECD

http://www.oecd.com/document/21/0,3746,en_21571361_44315115_48651029_1_1_1_1,00.html

America’s Early Childhood Education Crisis

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-yarbrough/us-childhood-literacy_b_986201.html

Solution To The Education Crisis

http://www.streetdictionary.com/travel_guide/14199/education/solution_to_the_education_crisis.html

Education Crisis Jim Pinto

http://www.automation.com/resources-tools/articles-white-papers/articles-by-jim-pinto

The Educational Crisis of Young Men of Color

http://huffingtonpost.com/gaston-caperton/the-educational-crisis-of_b_877716.html

If I could make the world a better place I would try to improve our public school systems. There are so many different ways to improve our world but I would choose to improve the school because then everyone will have an equal education. To me education is one of the most important parts of society. Education is also a huge part of sustainability. I believe if children at a young age feel more willing to learn and stay in school, then at an older age they will more willing to stay in school and help out other people and help out our environments.

Right now there are so many different schools around our country that could be so much better than they are right now. There are teachers who do not care enough about there students. Which then makes kids not care about learning. There are also schools who purely just do not have the money to provide their students with supplies like books and computers. While maybe just down the street in the same city another school could have all the money they could ever want to provide students with the supplies they need. Schools need to provide an equal opportunity to every single student. No school should be better than another one.

Some ways that I was thinking about to making schools be equal with one another would be something like creating fundraiser to raise money for the schools that need more money. We also need to educate parents about helping out with their children’s schools like joining the PTA. We need to get parents and teachers involved with their students and we need to find ways to receive more money to those schools in need.