Why We Need Education Reform
Jackie Gerstein (professor at Santa Fe Community College) has a blog on education reform and states that its purpose is “to post issues, ideas, resources related to why and how so many children – especially marginized populations – are being left behind.” He highlights issues such as high school dropout rates, the importance of reading, and No Child Left Behind.
Going into the teaching profession, we need to know what issues are going to present themselves and those that are already present. Not only do we need to know what to teach and how to convey that content material, but we need to do it better every year and every day. And perhaps even more importantly, we have to figure out how to keep kids in school until graduation. We have to give them our best, despite the poor funding of No Child Left Behind and the education budget in general.
In his 11/03/2007 blogon the NCLB agenda, Gerstein remarks that actions speak louder than words: “President rejects 5 percent increase in education funding, while approving 9 percent increase in defense spending.” How can teachers explain to their students that education is so important (and, by relation, that reading, math, graduation are necessary) when education seems so insignificant to the national government? Also, from this rejection of funding, how can we as a nation be competitive in the technology market? Without proper funds, school systems cannot get new or more technology for their classrooms. As a student, I knew that my county schools struggled to get enough money to keep up with newer editions of textbooks. There is a similar problem with technology now (and probably still with textbooks – those costs are outrageous).
This videoon YouTube, featured in Gerstein’s 11/11/2007 blog, shows that technology literacy is and will continue to be in schools and beyond.
That video has been viewed over 3,000,000 times. If we could somehow harness those viewers to make a change in our policies, it would be incredible. Or, going back to the video itself, if only we could educate the millions of people that use MySpace (or Facebook) on the troubles and current and potential abilities of the education infrastructure. We need to demand education reform. We need to demand that No Child Left Behind lives up to its purpose: “to ensure that all children have a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to obtain a high-quality education and reach, at a minimum, proficiency on challenging State academic achievement standards and state academic assessments” [emphasis mine].
As my favorite band has said many times – albeit, on a completely different issue – Awareness is good. Action is better.
February 15th, 2008 at 2:18 pm
f you could harness your generation to change the way that we fund education in this country, you would be my hero! One of the sayings I grew up with as a teacher was, “It will be a great day in this country when schools get all the money they need and the air force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.”
Great video, btw. Glad you found it.