Archive for November, 2008
Education Advice
During your campaign, you said you were in favor of merit pay for teachers. I was intrigued to hear a member of your party take a public stand in favor of something that was clearly going to be unpopular with teacher unions. I saw you support merit pay for teachers on the news. Some in the crowd expressed their displeasure. However, your willingness to face the issue was one of the main reasons I voted for you.
Merit pay seems like a reasonable way to recognize effective teachers. It also seems likely to increase the chances that good teachers stay in teaching. Teachers [Read more...]
Vouchers- Doing More Harm than Good
Across America there is an ongoing debate on whether we should have vouchers in our school system. Having vouchers in our school system would allow students who do not want to attend the public school to which they are assigned to choose to go to another school, including both public and private schools. This would allow the student to attend a school of their choice and take their tax dollars with them. This is something that many public schools do not like because it takes away from their enrollment and they also lose tax dollars. Although many schools do not like it, many lower [Read more...]
Remove Under Performing Teachers
Teacher accountability should be an addressed issue for the next president of the United States of America. There are many teachers across this nation that are fantastic educators and are preparing the youth of America for long and successful lives. However there are far too many teachers that have little or no ambition to help students learn, are not competent enough to manage a classroom, and are floating through the system knowing their jobs are safe. It is disheartening to know that these teachers are having a negative impact on students, and administrators are often helpless to the fact. For too long the teacher’s union in [Read more...]
Looking at NCLB
The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act of 2001 was signed into effect in January 2002. The Act aims to help close the achievement gap between disadvantaged and minority students and their peers. NCLB requires schools to have 100 percent proficiency among students in math, reading and language arts by 2014. This act was put into place with the best of intentions but as we are coming to find out good intentions do not mean good results. This act was also put into place without consulting one teacher. I think that if teachers were consulted on this issue that NCLB would have the proper conditions it [Read more...]
Change in Testing
President Obama,
I believe that there should be a change with testing in public education. Testing is an issue because teacher must teach to the students specifically for a test and another reasons is that the way the test is designed does not effectively evaluate all students equally. When classroom time is spent aiming towards scoring well on a curriculum evaluation test, there is less time for quality teaching. I agree that there should be a set curriculum for what should be covered per grade level, but each teacher should focus on helping students be successful with learning instead of ensuring they learn specific information that will be on a yearly [Read more...]
advice for President-Elect Obama
The advice I would have for President-Elect Obama would be to take a long hard look at No Child Left Behind. I believe that it is a well-intentioned piece of legislation, however, I feel that it has not been properly implemented. First and foremost is the requirement for special needs students to test at the age/grade level. If a 12 year old special needs student is reading at the 6 year old level then how is he supposed to test at the age level? How is this giving the government a quality assessment of how the school is educating its students? A school that has [Read more...]
NCLB and other advice
President Elect-Obama,
First I would like to congratualte you on being elected as this great countries 44th Prisident. I would like to also thank you for being willing to take on and attemp to solve some of the deep problems and issues surrounding our country. You not only are taking on foreigh policy issues, but you are taking on some of the worst domestic policies since the time of FDR. One of these policies that you will be taking on in the policy of NCLB.
I want to start of by saying that when this act was passed in 2001 I think that it was done with [Read more...]
As a future educator I feel that the No Child Left behind Act needs to be addressed and reevaluated. When this law was created and implemented it seemed like a great idea and was going to solve the many problems within school systems. Since the law has really took effect it seems that it has put more schools and teachers, administrators and others involved in the school system under pressure than really help our students. Standardized tests at 4-5 different grade levels may not be the way to measure student’s success. Nor do I believe is it the way to judge if a school is successful educating [Read more...]
Revise No Child Left Behind
The education system today has clearly become something that the previous administration did not intend. It has become hoop after hoop for our students to jump through in order to move on to the next. Specifically, I am talking about the standardized testing that our students are forced to monotonously go through. Teachers essentially started to teach not about the importance and significance behind their subject areas, but merely about how to take a test. Clearly, all these tests do is determine how well students can take them and nothing more. The purpose of education is to create a society of critical thinkers that will [Read more...]
NCLB and Standardized Testing
Education is very important in the United States and worldwide. It is the basis upon which all knowledge is learned and how everyone finds their place in society as a citizen. A few words of advice I have for the President are to reconsider the No Child Left Behind Act as well as the overuse of standardized testing. Although NCLB was originally meant to be beneficial in letting the general public know how individual school districts were doing and giving all students a fair, equal and significant opportunity to obtain a high-quality education, it has become out of hand. Teachers come to school everyday, afraid of [Read more...]
