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Help Your Child To Be A Self-Advocate

January 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment

With budget cuts happening in many of the schools districts around the country, students are in danger of getting lost in the crowd.  You can help your child become a better self-advocate in the classroom by teaching him how to communicate his needs, goals, and attributes.
Before children can tell others about what they want and what they have to offer, they have to first understand themselves.  They need to discover their own strengths and weaknesses on a physical, social, and academic level and how these things can impact their success in the classroom.  This type of self-analysis may be hard for many children, and you may have to look for input from teachers to help with this step.  Teachers often comment on how their students are doing on report cards.  You can also use the critical analysis on your child’s graded work.  Using a teachers input this way may help the child better understand how he is doing in the classroom. Once it is determine where your child might be struggling, you can help him set specific goals to work on those areas.  Keep the goals narrow and focused so he doesn’t feel overwhelmed by them.  Writing the goals down will keep your child accountable and help him feel that he is in control of the outcome.
Once your child is aware of some of the challenges he is facing concerning his education, you can look for resources to help him overcome them.  These could be after school tutoring, peer tutoring, extra library time, or classroom websites that offer additional study aids.  Keep your child involved in searching out and taking advantage of these sources.  The resources that he is most comfortable with, will be the most beneficial to him.  Like the list of goals, keeping your child involved will keep him accountable for his education.

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Does No Child Left Behind Work?

December 30, 2010 By Leave a Comment

When the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) was passed one of the first questions that was posed was; will this actually work. For decades, education standards across the country had been slipping to undesirable levels and no one, on either the Democratic or Republican side of the aisle seemed to really know what needed to be done in order to fix the problem. President George W. Bush pushed for the NCLB as his own baby, though the final law had fingerprints from quite a few different congressmen and Senators. When it finally passed only the question of whether or not the government had given teachers and school administrators enough tools to repair damage done still remained.

On the surface it does appear that at least in some regards, the NCLB has actually helped flagging schools repair their educational systems. National testing showed that among other factors, reading retention and comprehension had progressed faster and more effectively over the first five years of implementation than the government had seen over nearly three previous decades. In addition, advocates for the law point out that as of 2005, 43 different states as well as Washington, DC improved or held steady in every major educational category. However there are critics who say statistics like these are misleading.

The problem with finding out exactly what the consequences of No Child Left Behind is that you have to take into account that some people are counting data that pre-dates the law. According to one source, most of the positive statistics for NCLB include data from 2000, a year before the law was passed and three full years before the law went into affect. While 2001-2003 could be explained away as schools preparing for the new standards, how does one explain data from a year when it didn’t exist?

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Testing Requirements Can Be Impossible To Reach

December 26, 2010 By Leave a Comment

One of the first laws that president George W. Bush got passed that had a resounding effect on the nation as a whole was the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB). Most parents, teachers and students know it simply as No Child Left Behind” and it has become somewhat a cartoonish villain for those who work in the education system. The NCLB was set up to make sure that students were receiving the same sort of education as their peers across the country and perhaps foolishly it set out a system of funding education in order to meet its goals.

Of course what any federal education act doesn’t take into consideration is the very real and very different circumstances that face a child going to school in urban Chicago compared to a child who is attending classes in rural Iowa. The circumstances are simply not the same and no matter who says they should be that will not be changing any time soon. Where NCLB truly fails is that there is really no mechanism for determining the different circumstances or metering out when a school may not have met its standards but has still met or surpassed what would be the realistic standards of that school, student and classroom.

The NCLB instituted a nation-wide system of testing that was designed to determine whether or not a school, a teacher and a school district was meeting the requirements that were set forth by the federal government. If these schools were able to meet the requirements of the testing, then they continued to receive federal aid at a level they had grown accustomed to. Should they fail what had become extremely subjective testing criteria, they would have their funding reduced and cut off all together. What this boiled down to was that schools which were struggling continued to struggle while schools that were successful continued to have success.

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Fatalism in the Federal Education System

December 24, 2010 By Leave a Comment

There are few people who would ever argue that education in the United States is exactly as good as it should be. There are fewer still who would say that there is no way to improve the quality of the schools, the classrooms and even the teachers in most areas of the country. Still, the problem lays when you start digging deeper and actually trying to find out where you can improve and how you can go about doing it.

National school testing is one way that has been used for quite some time to at least give our elected officials a way to judge how one area of the country or state is doing compared to all others but when we use that as an end all and a be all we miss valuable data. Having testing requirements and understanding what they mean for each school is not always a cut and dry area of the educational field. It becomes even less cut and dry when you start talking about the numerous different outside influences that can affect everyone who is involved in the educational process. If teachers know there are tests out there which make it virtually impossible to score high on these national tests they will either work even harder to meet the standards or simply surrender and pronounce it a futile effort.

When the teachers begin to accept a sense of fatalism, it isn’t long before everyone else involved from the school administrations on down to the school boards and the parents and students themselves decide it is a lost cause. When the educational habitat becomes one that is toxic for all involved no learning and certainly no improving at even the most basic levels is accomplished. Instead you have a system that begins to fold in on itself.

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Rebuilding the Education Habitat

December 23, 2010 By Leave a Comment

When talking about an educational habitat, it can be important to really take a good long look at that term. When dealing with a habitat we aren’t talking simply about what someone calls their home or their living area. We are talking about a section of the world where people, in this case the students, teachers, school administrators and on down the line feel most comfortable.

Comfort in an educational habitat means learning and learning in a way that includes everyone involved in the educational process to feel as though they have helped in some small way. One way this education habitat can feel like a safe zone for struggling students is for the teachers to take an active role in the success or failure of the child. While some might say that is already being done, there have been studies which show that now more than ever teachers feel as though they are doing too much, not too little when it comes to educating children. The fact that education standards continue to fall shows that there may a disconnect here of epic proportions. Teachers need to realize that when a child is struggling in a subject it does not necessarily mean that the student has no interest in learning. It can mean that in a world that is telling most kids they should already know everything they need; this particular student is out of place.

Staying after school and offering up some of a teacher’s free time can mean the difference between reaching these students and showing them that I don’t know is acceptable to say as long as the following statement is but I want to. Teachers who offer up their free time are more likely to have students come to them looking for help and guidance than those who stop teaching when the day’s final bell rings.

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Modern Education In A Successful Habitat

December 21, 2010 By Leave a Comment
A teacher writing on a blackboard.
Image via Wikipedia

A new term that has come up in the education circles these days is what is called an education habitat. This means more than just where you go to school or the area of town where your school is located. Rather an education habitat is a place where everyone involved in the educational process feels at home and feels comfortable. Even this does not mean that a successful education habitat is someplace where the student feels they can walk into and put their feet on the desk or talk back to a teacher. And education habitat means that as far as learning standards are concerned, teachers, students, school administrators and parents are all feeling comfortable with the way the school day and year is going.

An effective educational habitat is one where a teacher understands that there are going to be different needs from each one of her students and instead of looking at that as a sign of weakness he or she sees it as their duty to meet those needs. A teacher who may even be able to come up with additional time in their day to stay after school and help a student who is struggling can be one of the most effective forms of keeping their habitat safe.

Teachers who understand that sometimes there needs to be a different study plan laid out for a student are the same ones who have some of the best class test scores in the country. Not everyone learns information the same way. A teacher who approaches their day as if the failure to succeed by some students is nothing more than stubbornness are the ones who will not last all that long in an effective educational habitat. Teachers who can adapt to their surroundings not only survive and flourish but contribute greatly to the construction of their habitats.

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School Vouchers and the American Education System

December 21, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Among the many solutions people have floated as a way to fix the American school system one solution that seems to be gaining the most ground, especially in urban areas is school vouchers. These school vouchers are a way for students from families who would not normally be able to go to private school to finally be able to attend them. The vouchers are basically free scholarships based on financial situations rather than actual academic achievements.

Of course one main drawback with these school vouchers is that poor students are then at the mercy of what is usually a religious private school that is free from the government restrictions of indoctrinating their students in any way, shape or form. School vouchers can also come across as unfair because for the most part they are now offering this private schooling to someone for a limited period of time. While some voucher programs might take place over the entire career of a high school student, other voucher funds run out before the student has matriculated meaning that they may have to finish their education in a lesser well funded public school.

Finally there is something to be said for directing the money that usually goes to the private school vouchers towards rebuilding and improving the existing public schools as that money will almost assuredly reach a larger population in the long run. Education testing has long shown that the surroundings that a student learns in has a major effect on their performance. Public schools that are well funded have a much better chance of turning out well educated students as compared to those who are allowing their schools to rot and the teachers and staff to continue to be underpaid and underappreciated. School voucher programs may seem like a quick fix but in the long run they actually hamper public schools improvement.

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Educational Habitat and the Quality of Education

December 20, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Study after study, survey after survey and test after test show that the quality of student’s surroundings directly equate to how much and how well that student will learn. If a school is falling down around the student, in effect the school district is saying they don’t really care what sort of state the buildings are in, the students will be far behind their age level peers in schools that have better upkeep. Teachers that are scraping the bottom of the barrel for text books and supplies will find students who are either barely attending classes, not attending at all or when they do attend could care less about the subject that is being taught.

Not surprisingly, most of the educational habitats that are negative for both the student and the teacher are occurring more and more in urban areas with high population base and a high poverty rate. Even public schools that have higher donations by student families as well as better funding from the city, county and state in urban areas do quite a bit better that schools that may be located just a few miles away but is suddenly located in the magical bad part of town.

Students can tell when they are being ignored or not cared about and most of those students will respond by not caring about their school or their own academic achievements. Educational habitat means more than just where they go to school, it means the feeling they get when they enter that school or the classroom. If a feeling of apathy surrounds the school, it should not be on the student to break through the torpor. If a school is falling down around a student’s ears it is not something that fools students into thinking the school district cares about them. The apathy is catching and it’s catching quickly.

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Public Vs. Private Schools

December 19, 2010 By Leave a Comment

We are in a crisis situation in this country when it comes to education. One test after another shows that we are lagging behind other countries when it comes to education ranking and worse yet is the fact that we do not seem to know how to fix it. No matter what we do, it seems, our schools in inner cities continue to deteriorate while private schools in this country tend to look like cathedrals. There is a reason that private schools in is country always have higher collective test scores than public schools, especially, in urban areas do. That reason is not because they continue to put god in the classroom.

The reason that private schools have developed academic dominance over public schools in inner city areas is because they have the money to devote to top notch education. Students test better in private schools not because people who are better of financially are inherently smarter. Students in better neighborhoods and better schools test better because they have better and more access to tools that will allow them to learn faster and retain more.

Private schools are also able to pay their teachers more, meaning that the really good teachers, unless they are driven by a need to help people are migrating to private schools in order to have a better life for themselves. This means that teachers who cannot get jobs at the better schools are being shunted to the lower quality school districts because those are the only areas willing to hire them. Poorer teachers, poorer school districts and some of the poorest kids in the country all team up to churn out some of the poorest test scores in the world. This of course leads to less federal and state funding, which only exacerbates and continues the problem for years to come.

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The Repercussions of No Child Left Behind

December 18, 2010 By Leave a Comment

When one looks at what George W. Bush’s legacy on education is going to be some may say that it won’t be pretty. While he did pass sweeping legislation that changed the way the education in this country is administered, whether the policies he put into place actually helped us or set us back is going to be up for debate for quite some time. Bush’s centerpiece, the No Child Left Behind Act, made sure that schools that were actually improving in their test scores and other measurable areas got a bigger piece of the education funding pie. Those schools that struggled were urged to make changes or face having their pie taken away from them.

No Child Left Behind also had a side effect one would hope the Bush administration and the congressmen who passed NLCB didn’t realize. The tenets of NCLB basically encouraged certain schools to either downright cheat or bend the testing rules. Schools who had underperforming kids would make sure that those kids were seeing tests that were much easier than the rest of their grade level or they would simply avoid those particular children having to take the tests at all. The result were higher school wide and district wide test scores and an influx of cash.

This also meant that schools that were not cheating or bending the rules were actually being punished for being open and honest about the lower scores their students were getting. This meant that schools that honored the very tenets of the bill, that schools who were trying to improve in certain areas but could not because their funding was being cut were seeing even deeper cuts. It is hard to believe that when George W. Bush and his supporters offered this bill up they hoped that school administrators would look for ways around the policies.

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