Words: 1997
Students all over the nation are experiencing delays to learning. Whether children are poor or In low class families, have low school funding, are being discriminated against because of their standardized test scores, or are being tracked throughout their entire school career, they are not getting the best education they possibly can. A lot of schools are having difficulty with the No Child Left Behind law because it forces students who have learning disabilities and English as a second language students to take standardized tests.
Not only is this not fair to the learning sizable students and students who don’t primarily speak English, but this will also drop school’s test scores. In order for all students to get the best school experience they possibly can, standardized test scores should not count nearly as much as they do, and no matter what is different about each individual child, he or she should never be discriminated against in the classroom. Lower class students should have Just as good of an education as middle to upper class students. However, this is not always the case.
Lower class students are sometimes made to feel Like they’re stupid because the teachers or school itself isn’t put enough attention on those students. If a difficult topic Is being taught In class, teachers are more likely to call on the upper to middle class students so they don’t have to correct the answer of a wrong child because the teachers feel like the child doesn’t care, when in reality it’s because the teachers are not teaching the children well. The background off child should not influence the way they are taught or what they’re learning.
In America, the rich keep getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Not only is this bad for our country, It’s damaging the education process for the poor. Per class students always get the best education because they’re offered more advanced classes and a bigger variety of classes to take. As said by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (2013), “No matter how you slice it, when it comes to income and wealth in America the rich get most of the pie and the rest get the leftovers. ” I always wonder why America works like this.
Why does all of the money go to the rich even though they already have money? I think It should go to the lower class citizens who have multiple jobs and are soul In a great amount of debt and others who are In animal situations. If the government wants to get out of the recession we’re in, they have to help out the lower, and middle, class instead of continuing to hurt them. However, even though America is in a horrible recession right now, it should not affect children going to school. If teachers are interested in their students, it shouldn’t matter if they’re black or white, or rich or poor.
Teachers should give every Individual student the attention they need when learning to do new things. Not every case is the teachers fault though; children could be coming to school hungry, Hereford they wont be paying too much attention on the learning. Also, if the school itself is very poor they might not have all of the materials needed to give students a great education. Lower class students always seem to be the children that get picked on more often, too. “Even in the classroom, I couldn’t get away from the sting of high- school poverty In History when we learned about the Great Depression and the Dust nickname. (Sapp, 2009) Children who are going through hunger and bullying constantly at school most likely don’t care about learning at school, they have other wings on their mind. But teachers always need to step in and try to help them anyways. There’s a reason the child is at school and it is to learn. The schools in our country are not getting the proper funding that they should be getting. Back when I was in high school, I was constantly seeing my school beg the residents in our community for more funding for schools.
However, the bill always got declined because no one wanted to pay the extra taxes; therefore we had to have things cut out of our curriculum like some arts and music classes. We also ran out of white paper and were sometimes given assignments on colored paper or scrap paper. No one was thinking about the students’ needs and desires only what was coming out of their pocket. And if it was happening to the high school students, it was also happening to the younger students who need art and music classes a lot more than teenagers. The people of America need to stop thinking about only themselves and think of the children.
One day those children will grow up to run the United States and without the proper education, how will our country prosper? In America, schools are not funded equally. The upper class schools get high-tech equipment such as computers and digital cameras for a filming class while some other schools can barely give out paper. Kara states “our schools don’t get enough money, and the money they do get is not distributed fairly. ” (2007) I agree with Kara because Eve seen this first hand. I did not grow up in a poor town, it was middle to upper class families and we were constantly hearing the words “budget cuts. School funding in America is not equitable at all. If it was equitable, every child would have the same education and be able to do amazing things. The children growing up in lower class communities do not nearly have as much opportunity as the children growing up in upper class communities because they’re not given as many subjects to take and things to find an interest in. The United States needs to find a way to make the education system across the country equitable and fair because every child should have the chance to grow and make themselves whoever they want to be. Growing up I dreaded standardized tests.
Tests make me very nervous and I find myself to do poorly even on multiple choice tests because I would over analyze everything in the question. Standardized tests made this fear of tests sky rocket for me and many other students. My worst subject in school is math, so of course on math tests I was anxious. When I took the Stats and got to the math portion of the exam, I could barely pay attention. I was constantly thinking about how every answer was going to affect me in the long run and could possibly ruin my chances of getting into a good college. I had to take the Stats twice because my first score was not nearly good enough.
Standardized test scores should not count nearly as much as hey do. With standardized test scores being one of the determining factors of college and moving up by grade, students’ abilities in other academic and creative areas are being destroyed. Not only do standardized tests make students nervous, they are Judging the students differently based on color and class. Meier says “across age groups, standardized tests discriminate against low-income students and students of they’re automatically going to do worse than the student who is white and middle or upper class.
There’s absolutely no sense in that at all. Every child has the potential o do amazing things and standardized tests only discourage students who don’t do as well on them; especially black, lower class students. If these students know that their tests scores are lower because of the way their family’s income is or because of the color of their skin, it would make them not want to do as well in school. Why would they? It doesn’t matter if they get every single answer right because they have points off for being black and poor. Meier also makes a great point by saying “two false assumptions… En is that standardized tests are a valid measure of excellence. The second is that standardized tests can be used to improve education, especially for low-income students and students of color. ” (Meier, 2007) These statements are clearly false because not every subject and other things learned in schools are on standardized tests. And if a black, low-income students test scores are lower than a white, high-income student, then how will standardized tests improve education? Standardized tests should not be a deciding factor for student’s education, and they absolutely do not improve education.
Just about every student in the United States today is being tracked. Whether they have a little trouble with reading, completely can’t comprehend a subject, or excel in every field of study, they are tracked. Tracking starts as early as 1st grade and follows the students until they graduate high school. When I was in elementary school, I was placed in a special class for reading. Although that class helped me tremendously, it ended up causing problems for me later in my education. When I was in 8th grade all the students got to take Spanish or French, except for the students who were chosen to take reading.
I was good at reading by that point but I till had to take it and skip out a year on taking a language. If I was not placed in the reading class years ago, I probably would not have had to take the reading class in 8th grade. “A number of studies have found that top-tracking classes spend more class time on learning activities and less on discipline, socializing, or class routines. ” (Sakes, 1994) I agree with this quote because when I was taking the reading class in 8th grade, it focused strictly on getting better at reading. There were no group activities or talking together in the class.
But when I started taking Spanish n 9th grade, almost everything we worked on was with a partner or we shared answers and ideas out loud. Tracking throughout all of every student’s education careers hurts them more than helps them. Tracking occurs because some people in the country think that the top students need the best education to become leaders in our society. I don’t believe there’s anything wrong with students who have had trouble in the past, got help, and can now perform the tasks they couldn’t do before. Those students can also be leaders of the country one day too, because they learned from their own mistakes.
Tracking will keep a record of the student not doing well and hold it to them throughout their schooling, Just like me. Tracking should be taken out of the American schooling system because it really does not help students; it hurts the ones who are trying to better themselves. The United States education system needs to stop discriminating students who children of our country will get better only by learning from a teacher who truly cares and makes children want to succeed, not by throwing standardized tests at them or tracking them until the day they graduate high school.
If America cared more about its growing children then we would have a better view on the future, instead Americans are not agreeing to raise school budgets and funding. With the way the education system is going in America, I hope standardized tests and tracking will come to an end soon, or Just not be as prominent, and that students of all colors and backgrounds will have the same opportunities to grow and be whatever they dream of. Works Cited Kara, S. (2007). Money, Schools, and Justice. In Supplemental Readings. Meier, T. (2007). Why Standardized Tests are Bad.