Monday, April 27, 2020

Title of the Paper Essays (1567 words) - Education, Education Reform

Title of the Paper (Critical Thinking Essay: Final Essay ) Submitted By ( Kadeejah Johnson, [emailprotected] ) Number and Name of Course (Introduction to Political Science - HistGov 130 ) Class Meeting Time/Day (T/T: 11:00 A.M. - 12:20 P .M.) Professor (Dr. Carmen Walker ) Semester (Spring 2017 ) Today's Date (Thursday May 2 , 2017 ) Bowie State University Department of History and Government Bowie, Maryland The most important social issue affecting the United States children and students in the year 2017 is education. The issues that are affecting Education are class sizes in urban area schools, the No Child Left Behind Act, student health and government funding. These issues have been major characteristics of failure in both students and teachers, because the students are not getting the attention they need due to classes being too big. The teachers are not able to teach the students the fundamental values, and important subjects that they need because of the no child left behind act, limiting teachers to teaching for standardized test. Both students and teachers are affected by the limited funding, and the student's health due to ineffective lunch programs. Most importantly these factors need a solution, these teachers and students need funding, they need the fundamental education that was once given to my generation prior to 2002. Education is the basis for all citizens to achieve in life, and to invest in their American Dream. To be educated is to be given the necessary values and materials needed to be modeled citizens. The classroom sizes are a major issue facing students in public schools. For example, public schools in Georgia faced a huge budget cut and caused schools to be closed (Background on Education.2016). The class sizes at a local elementary school had gone from 16 to 27. The most difficult task was teachers being able to compensate for all the new students that had entered the classroom. A more local and recent incident was in Fairfax County Virginia where faculty, are looking to propose increasing classroom sizes during significant budget cuts. The funding issue has caused schools along the East Coast to create an initiative to ensure that class sizes matter. There has been study's indicating that minorities appear to benefit from smaller classroom sizes the most. In cases, such as these, the government has two options in dealing with the full class sizes. Liberals and other party leaders should advocate for smaller class sizes, and or building more schools. Generally, this does imply opposition to funding private schools. The building of more schools is a huge budget situation, that most federal government can assist in is building more classrooms in schools that have unused space. The second issue facing Education is the "No Child Behind Act" which was set in place by President W Bush in 2002, to help assist students with national test. There are many reasons why this is a problem with education because it only allows teachers to educate their students based on the next State and or National test. Many teachers and parents see this as a detriment to public education environment (Koenig, Larry.2016). The Obama Administration worked on reform NCLB policies, however the focus of education on both National and State level continues to be on the testing process. The government has taken the fundamental importance of education away from both teachers and students, and have created competition among them. If the students do not perform well on the test, they are placed into this pool and are judge based on how they perform. For teachers, there is this quota that they must meet to receive funding for projects and programs (Jones, Maurice,2016). Student test scores are now being used by several states to evaluate teacher performance, which ultimately puts pressure on faculty to remediate those who do as well. The government can simply assistance by implementing a new bill in terms of riding the system of standardized test, and more so replacing it with what teachers across the country feel is appropriate. There also should be more involvement from the National Education Association in regards to assisting teachers with training and the tools they need to make and produce great students. Student