Waiting for Superman

This week we watching Waiting for Superman. This movie was all about the lack of quality education in the public school system. It was geared towards the people that make up our education board. The movie explained how our education is schools wasn't advancing like it should be to keep up with the rest of the world, and it was even worse in poorer communities. Thus came about the idea of charter schools. Charter schools are independent of the government, therefore, they do not have to hire teachers under the ten year law. Charter schools made school days longer, school on saturdays and even in the summers. Charter schools like this are very vigorous and are not for kids that want to goof off in classes. The numbers from these schools show that these kids have higher test scores and are learning much better than kids in public schools. The only problem with charter schools is that no one in the public school system is going to extend hours, possibly hold schools on Saturdays or even in the summer. Kids or parents or teachers will not go for that because education is not so important to people that they are willing to work extra hard to achieve the levels of higher test scores to catch up or go above and beyond more advanced countries. I think that if we somehow fixed the problem of quality education, then we would solve the lack of unemployment among US citizens. The reasoning for this is because people would be qualified to work and we wouldn't be looking to other countries for our need to be filled in specific departments.

Education Empowerment Week 2

This week, we are continuing the education empowerment readings. We saw last week how in Anyon's  essay, that education is not a level playing field and we need people who will not go to college to do work that someone who goes to college will not do. Then, this week we read an essay by Kozol basically saying the same thing, but about inner-city schools. Kozol studied some fifth grade classes to see if the playing field was the same between the different areas of the schools, and it was not. This is really disappointing to me because I believe that everyone has a given right to learn and become very capable members of society. I plan on being a teacher, and the lack of enthusiasm for the job and for these children's education just breaks my heart. I do not understand why everyone shouldn't have a good education. I agree with the fact that if you are paying a school tax, that your money should go to your school, but I believe that less-fortunate neighborhoods should not make their children suffer as far as their education goes. I do not think that is right at all. I do not know how you would go about fixing that, maybe more government funding for that neighborhood? It is everyone's responsibility to pitch in to help people in need, so I think that it should be required for lower income schools to have more funding to make up for that missing link.