The first article that I chose to work with is “The Rubber Room” by Steven Brill. This article is published by The New Yorker on August 31, 2009. Brill is an American Lawyer and a journalist-entrepreneur. “The Rubber Room” is about how it is wasting the city’s money as teachers are placed in this room where all they do is just sit around and play games. They are placed in these as they are waiting for their case to be heard by an arbitrator which could take up to many years. While they are sitting in these rooms, these teachers are still getting paid which is a waste of the city’s tax money. Brill also talks about tenure and how once teachers have tenure they seem to slack off at their job because they know that they have job security as mentioned in the article “she was given tenure after her third year of teaching, and then, like ninety-nine per cent of all teachers before 2002, she received a satisfactory rating each year.” (Brill 2) …show more content…
Steven Brill Thinks So” by Dana Goldstein. This article is published by The Nation on August 10, 2011. Goldstein is journalist and a media entrepreneur. “Can Teachers Alone Overcome Poverty? Steven Brill Thinks So” is about how Goldstein first talks about what Brill says and then she responds to the question herself. She starts off with talking about the things that Brill mentions in his “The Rubber Room” article and how he believes the issue is in school with teachers. She then goes on to say that “family income, nutrition, health, English-language proficiency and the like-affect children’s academic performance, no matter how great their teachers are.” (Goldstein 1) The rest of the article is about how these out of school factors impact the students’ in school performance no matter how good or bad their teachers
A short clip of a Milwaukee high school classroom displays students playing games, sleeping, and teachers lounging at their desks reading newspapers. The response in Howard Fuller interview displays the aggravation, disappointment, and ferocity against the actions of these teachers. Fuller fired those teachers but then forced “to rehire them with a year’s back-pay because of a provision in the teachers' contract called “tenure””, a specification by teacher unions. (Tenure is a status granted to an employee indicating that the position o...
For example, Students with high performing teachers progress three times as fast as those with low performing teachers. Yet they cost the same to the school. A bad teacher only covers 50% of the required curriculum. A good teacher can cover 150%. (34:48) The following triggered a memory to me. I had a teacher my freshmen year of high school who honestly I never learned a thing from. She let the class basically do what they want and just handed us worksheets. I could agree with the satistics of how we have good and bad teachers. How one person with a good teacher can receive a better knowledge than one who had a poor teacher. This concept could lead into how students who don 't receive the proper teaching could affect their home life. To exemplify, These 97 blocks are the highest rate of foster care and twice the unemployment rate of the rest of the city. Many experts believe that motivated educators cannot overcome the problems that these children brought from home. (48:18) Since the teachers cannot assist with the proper teaching, students have to settle into the likely hood of their neighborhood. Specifically, I had a friend who experienced a similar matter. The neighborhood the child grew up in decided how their schools were. How the education was at the school and how the children acted in the school, it reflected of how many kids would drop out of school in high school. The education reflects on how a student will reflect on the outside world of school. Students were not less motivated with school before in America. For instance, In the 1970s, America 's public schools were the best in the world. The image of public schools in our films and tv reflects an ideal that even if your unlucky enough to be born in the wrong neighborhood, education can be a ticket out. (58:35) Moreover, this statement made me questioned what happened in that gap from the 1970s for
Reading, writing, math, science, and other skills learned in school are instrumental for a child to have in order to be successful both in higher education and in life. Many factors contribute to a student’s acquisition of these skills such as their learning environment, preschool education, mental and emotional development, parental involvement, and dedication to learning. The issue that many young children are facing, however, is that all of these factors can be greatly influenced by the Socioeconomic Status (SES) of their family. Unfortunately, up until recently it was virtually unknown how teachers could help these “at risk” children, which caused an increase in the likelihood of children dropping out of school or repeating a grade. However, it is now becoming clear that there are ways that educators can help ensure children have successful academic careers and lead better lives.
Many people believe that “having an economy that places a greater value on skills and education is a good thing” and that is the thing that is needed to improve people’s lives and futures (Baicker, Lazear). If what our economy is trying to do a good thing they why are so many students still suffering? The main issues are the low-income education that many students have. Many schools are getting money from the government but that is not enough to pay for everything students need. Educational standards have continued to increase throughout the years but that does not help the students who are unable to pay for the better education. These students who cannot pay for the better education are stuck barely getting by with a low education. A low-education can affect many areas of regular schooling. The students who are at low-income schools do not know what type of disadvantage they have compared to other students across the country. These students believe that they are getting the best education, but there are many students who are getting a better education at a school that has the funds to pay for everything their students need. Low-income students are suffering due to the environment they are in at school and they continue to suffer throughout their life due to it. These students will continue to suffer unless something is done about the low-income schools and improve them for the future. Improvement has to come from all areas, not just one aspect of schooling but from all aspects. Although education has improved along with technology many low-income students still suffer from the vast inequalities. These inequalities will take many years to find a way to fix and even more years to actually fix, until this happens the students will...
Children who are poor do not receive nearly as many educational opportunities as children who are rich. Kozol acknowledges that poor children barely have any social skills, which will harm them in Kindergarten. In contrast, children who have been in preschool-like programs since their toddler years are more likely to develop social skills and have early-learning skills, like knowing how to hold a crayon. Children in all social classes in the United States have to take the same standardized tests and are measured on the same grading scale. Kozol questions, “Which of these children will receive the highest scores?”(Kozol 413) Sadly, poor children will not be the ones with the highest score, and they will be held accountable for their test scores, as Kozol points out “There is something deeply hypocritical about a society that holds an eight-year-old inner-city child “accountable” for her performance on a high-stakes standardized exam but does not hold the high officials of our government accountable for robbing her of what they gave their own kids six or seven years earlier” (Kozol 413). It is unfair to expect a child to perform on a test equally with other children who started their education earlier. Kozol mentions that some people, who are well-educated, feel that money is not a problem with education inequality, and that other factors such as, “The values of the
Winters, Marcus., and SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES. "Challenging Tenure in D.C: Rhee Tackles the Holy Grail of Teachers' Contracts." Washington Times: A.23. 2008. Print. Link
Grubb, Norton. The Money Myth: School Resources, Outcomes, and Equity. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2009. Print.
As children, we look to our parents to teach us skills that we need in everyday life, whether it be social skills or how to. Yet for a variety of reasons, some children do not have this personal role model for them to follow and learn from. For these children, their teachers may be the first adult to give them any sort of attention or care. As a result, a teacher can play a huge impact in a young child’s life. The Allentown School District’s high schools are both considered Title I schools, meaning that over 40% of the school’s students come from families that are legally considered low-income (www2.ed.gov). In the ASD, this number is nearly doubled at 88.7% (www.allentownsd.org). Most likely, these students come from homes in which the adults they live with are working most of the day and
In many low income communities, there are teachers that are careless and provide their students with poor quality education. These teachers are there just to make sure that they keep receiving their monthly paychecks and act in this way because they believe that low income students do not have the drive, the passion, or the potential to be able to make something of themselves and one day be in a better place than they are now. Anyon reveals that in working class schools student’s “Work is often evaluated not according to whether it is right or wrong but according to whether the children followed the right steps.” (3). This is important because it demonstrates that low income students are being taught in a very basic way. These children are being negatively affected by this because if they are always being taught in this way then they will never be challenged academically, which can play a huge role in their futures. This argument can also be seen in other articles. In the New York Times
The effects of poverty can cause negative behaviour in the classroom due to emotional and social challenges. Research suggests that children who have had a disadvantaged upbringing are less likely to do well at school (Connell, White and Johnson as cited in Ewing , 2013, p. 74). Not being socially accepted because of socio economics can deter a child’s experience of schooling and create cognitive lags. For this reason, it is important for schools to bridge this gap. Children from different socio economic backgrounds bring similar knowledge to the classroom, but it is the children’s experiences that can have a negative impact on a child’s learning (Thomson, 2002, p.4). For example, children from low socio economic backgrounds can have high levels of behavioural and emotional problems, anger, have less linguistic knowledge and high levels of absent days from school. Likewise, another factor that can affect a child’s schooling experience is gender
That over half of all public school students are struggling to afford school supplies, let alone pay to be involved in any school activity. With these number it is easy to understand why there are so many students dropping out. It is hard to look a head and see the need for diploma when one does not even know if they will eat that night. Later on the the article, it is also addressed that “problems about separation or divorce of parents, violence at home, lack of guidance, and environment” can also play a huge role in a child's education (Admin). All of these factors are situations that a child can not control. All of these factors affect how teachers are able to communicate with parents. Now while it may seem that all of these factors are what children that are homeschooled or attend private school may face, it does not change the
... the wealthier a child’s family is the better school they will attend. This essay does an excellent job of describing the myth of equal opportunity in America. It is obvious from this literary selection that those who are born into wealthier families are set up for success as soon as they begin kindergarten while other children from less fortunate families are simply thrown into working class blue collar positions with little chance for progression to a higher socio-economic class. Education is one of the most important elements within our modern American society. As long as we have this broad spectrum of teaching philosophies and methods, there will always be children with advantages over others. If these differences are evened out, I believe that a reestablishment of a large American middle class is possible, creating a more lucrative and successful nation.
Troen, V., & Boles, K. (2003). Who's teaching your children? Why the teacher crisis is worse than you think and what can be done about it. Yale University Press.
Living in poverty exposes children to disadvantages that influence many aspects in their life that are linked to their ability to do well in school. In the United States of America there are an estimated 16.4 million children under the age of 18 living in poverty (U.S. Census Bureau, 2010). “The longer a child lives in poverty, the lower the educational attainment” (Kerbo, 2012). Children who are raised in low-income households are at risk of failing out before graduating high school (Black & Engle, 2008). U.S. children living in poverty face obstacles that interfere with their educational achievement. Recognizing the problems of living in poverty can help people reduce the consequences that prevent children from reaching their educational potential.
While it may be true that the government did provide these people with an option to get an education, the argument breaks down when you look at the effects that an underfunded school can have on people. Without proper funds, schools are left without the basics found in most modern education systems, textbooks and other materials to assist learning. When faced with the question on how can better funded schools provide a better experience to students, several authors resonate that “Better-funded school districts can attract teachers with higher levels of education, more experience, and higher scores on competency tests; these teachers, in turn, seem to generate better achievement scores among students” (Biddle & Berliner) With better achievement from students, there is a less likely chance that they are going to turn to crime or even become retail salesmen on the streets like the previous generations had. This proves that education does have a positive effect on poverty and that if it was funded properly that it could