Sean
Carbrey
Professor
Monique Williams
English
1A
28
February 2014
The Goliaths of Education
The
chasm between the have and have nots in education is huge. We need a radical
reform in our education system. The overall goal being to make it equitable. We
live in the wealthiest country in the world from an overall standpoint. We
spend an exorbitant amount of money to provide aid to countries all over the
world. What about our country? The way in which the poor are treated in America
is deplorable. The children of this country should come first. Not that I don’t
agree that we should be helping other countries, but we need to help ours
first. Assessments need to be implemented, and plans need to be carried out to
correct this problem. Our country’s leaders need to face the challenges, flaws,
and inequalities that exist in our educational system because this system is
failing.
It
is evident that many flaws exist within our educational system that negatively
impact student learning. In my opinion the primary issues are the inequities of:
educational facilities, teacher tenure, improper allocation of funds, lack of a
“good teacher”, high class size, and lack of needed materials in the poor
school districts vs. the wealthy school districts. “Average expenditures per
pupil in the city of New York in 1987 were approximately $5,500. In the highest
spending suburbs of New York City…funding levels rose above $11,000, with the
highest districts in the state at $15,000. “Why…,” asks the city’s Board of
Education, “should our students receive less” than do “similar students” who
live elsewhere? “The inequity is clear.”
Teacher
tenure is a road block to success in the schools. Teacher tenure is certainly
contributing to the problem. I feel that teacher tenure should be eliminated
and that teachers should have to work and be held to a disciplinary standard like
other working individuals. Teachers need
to feel the fear of being unemployed which, in most cases, will have an impact
on their work ethic thus complacency would be replaced with motivation. The
elimination of teacher tenure would insure the expulsion of ineffective teachers
who have become “burnt out” or those teachers who are just not cut-out for
teaching. There was an attempt made to eliminate teacher tenure in the
Washington D.C schools by the superintendent. That superintendent, Michelle
Rhee was brilliant. She recognized the problem and set forth with a passion to
fix it but was shut down by the lazy, and fearful individuals heading up the
teachers union. “There is a complete and utter lack of accountability for the
job that we’re supposed to be doing, which is impacting our kids.” Please
understand that job security is important, however, there needs to be
guidelines for teacher performance. The measurements for teacher performance
are not cut and dry.
We
need to make sure we have only excellent teachers in our school system. There
are too many ineffective or unmotivated teachers. “We have teachers…who only
bother to come in three days a week. One of these teachers comes in usually
around nine-thirty.” This is not acceptable. Excellent teachers are those who
aid in the growth of a student’s self-esteem, help encourage their students to
learn and to not give up, and have an excellent grasp of content knowledge. A
good teacher can find a correlation with the student and the material being studied
to make it real. A bad teacher is one who cannot connect with a student or is
unmotivated to sculpt the curriculum to the student’s needs in his/her
classroom. The effects of a bad teacher are very detrimental. The effect a bad
teacher has on a child promotes a lack of motivation, the classroom most likely
reflects a negative environment. The student’s achievements will most
definitely decrease. This will greatly affect the student, and any learned
information will be lost which will impact the subsequent educational years if
it’s not corrected.
An obvious illustration of the
inequities of the educational system is evidenced by the facilities where the
children attend school. In East St. Louis the children where sandwiched between
Pfizer and Monsanto. The soil surrounding the school is contaminated with lead
and human waste. The environment in which these children are placed is extremely
toxic and detrimental to their health, and imposes serious threats to their
safety. This environment is not conducive to learning. This is a highly toxic
industrial waste dumping ground for this school. The children cannot play on the playground. Attracting
teachers to this environment is very difficult, you do not receive high
performing teachers in a heavy industrial and highly toxic setting. Because of
the impact this has on attracting teachers, the resulting outcome is high class
sizes. High class size can have a negative effect on a student’s achievement. Students
benefit from lower class sizes. “Teachers who have fewer students are able to
provide each student with more individual attention. Fewer students means
teachers have more manageable workloads and more time to work one on one…” There are significant benefits to lower class size. There
was a study conducted on the effects of class size on students. “The study
concludes that…a small class increased the rate of college attendance by 11
percentage points.” Schools in wealthier areas do not experience the
same facility issues that exist in the East St. Louis district. These students
in the affluent areas are not handicapped by their environment and experience a
much better outcome. This is appalling that conditions like this continue to exist
in the United States. We are not a third world country.
Student materials are necessary for success.
Not all materials are important, however fundamental ones are. A school
district that does not receive proper funding needs to look at the needs of the
student population and prioritize. For instance, desks are not really
necessary, but books, paper, pencils, and teacher manuals are. It’s all about
resources and per pupil funding. If the money is not available you have to
weigh the needs and the wants. More affluent areas depend heavily on parent
supplementation for funding. In my school district, parents were expected to
contribute a substantial amount (called a recommended donation) to cover
various costs/programs. This money went into a ‘Learning Fund’. A percentage of
this money was allocated to the teachers depending on grade level needs to use
for supplies. If the money is not available, or parent assistance is not
possible, then many of these ‘needs’ are scratched which is a huge disservice
to each child. It then may become the classroom teacher’s responsibility. Most
classroom teachers spend a substantial out-of-pocket expense trying to assist
the needs of each and every child. There is no getting around it. Basic school
supplies are needed to facilitate a learning environment. “A teacher at an
elementary school in East St. Louis has only one full-color workbook for her
class. She photocopies workbook pages for her children, but the copies can’t be
made in color and the lessons call for color recognition by the children.”
Unfortunately, the poorer school districts lack even the basics.
Society
in general has not recognized the severe inequities in the educational system. In
the book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed,
Paulo Freire spends a great deal of time studying the teacher/student
relationship. I find the Pedagogy of the
Oppressed to be insulting when it comes to the poorer school districts in
this country. “A careful analysis of the teacher-student relationship…involves
a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient listening objects (the students).”
The basic premise of the Pedagogy of the
Oppressed is that students are being oppressed by the teacher/student
relationship. Really? In the East St. Louis schools you cannot even get
teachers let alone worry about the teacher/student relationship oppressing students.
I find the Pedagogy of the Oppressed
to be very esoteric and not germane to an impoverished school system. “Education
is suffering from narration sickness.” I am sure the students of East St. Louis
and other impoverished districts would not mind suffering from “narration
sickness.”
As
expressed in the movie Waiting for
Superman, the society in which you are placed will determine your
educational experience and outcome. If you are placed in an underprivileged
area, you are going to get a poor quality education. Our educational system is discouraging
our students instead of propelling them forward. This is a very complex issue
with a lot of moving parts between the federal, state, local city governments,
teachers union and parents. “No individual is necessarily to blame, but
collectively they are the goliath of the system.” The educational system is
flawed. We have put into place educational acts and doubled the money per
student thinking it will help. But there is no improvement. “The things we’ve
done to help our schools work better, have become the things that prevent them
from working.” The flaw is not just with funding, it is with the system. There is
no clear answer.
Our educational system is in desperate need of reform. I
get so frustrated when I hear ‘education reform.’ They have been doing
education reform for so many years with no positive outcome and we still have a
myriad of inequities in our school system, i.e. East St. Louis. The question is
this, how can we provide an equitable education for all students? I do not have
the answer. However, I will do what I can to foster change and will support
measures to improve the quality of education for all students.
Works
Cited
Kozol, Jonathan. Savage Inequalities. New York: Crown
Publishing, 1991. Print
Paulo Freire. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York:
Continuum Books, 1993
Brozak, Jennifer. "The Importance of a Low Student to Teacher
Ratio." Everyday Life.
Demand Media. 28 Feb. 2014
<http://everydaylife.globalpost.com/importance-low-student-teacher-ratio-8579.html>.
Dynarski, Susan, Joshua Hyman, and Diane W. Schanzenbach.
"Experimental Evidence on the Effect of
Childhood Investments on Postsecondary Attainment and Degree Completion." Class
Size Matters. 16 Oct. 2011. 26
Feb. 2014 <http://www.classsizematters.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/dynarski-120426.pdf>.
Guggenheim, Davis, dir. Waiting for ‘Superman’. Walden Media, 2010. DVD.
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