Education In Detroit Schools

Additionally, Albert Einstein once said, “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” There are different forms of intelligence that go beyond what our school system measures. Students are not a unit to be measured, and students cannot be assigned a numerical value to identify their intelligence. Students are diverse—they learn at different speeds, and they learn in different ways. Focusing solely on test scores is hurting our students and deviating away from building our society on success and excellence. Critics are slowly realizing the problems associated with standardized tests—they create anxiety, they are extremely biased, and they do not measure the ability to think deeply.

The situation with Detroit Public Schools has been taking turns for the worse. Every day it seems like something is adding up to the pile of Detroit Public School District issues. DPS has been considered as “The Worst School District” in the country. DPS have been struggling to improve the school district, The district has been trying for decades as nothing has been working. Detroit Public Schools main issues that need to be tackled down includes: unhealthy environments, oversized classrooms, and the district’s unbalance of power.

There has been many attempts to solving this problem, on all different types of levels. Local levels with committees and coalitions such as The Coalition for the Future of Detroit Schoolchildren have been striving towards a solution. For a strong coalition, there needs to be adequate human resources. This means the number of people involved and the power of the people involved (Graham, 181). The Coalition for the Future of Detroit Schoolchildren has regular citizens such as concerned parents, people on the school board, and also people with connections to higher powers. On the state level, there is Governor Rick Snyder putting more emphasis and promoting more blue collared jobs that only require skills training. Since this problem exists throughout the nation and crosses state

Standardized testing has been ruling over the lives of students, making or breaking them in their education without fair judgement. Tests like the SAT and the ACT count for way too much when applying to colleges, which in turn limits the student 's capabilities to thrive in an environment that would benefit them. There are many problems within a standardized test that deems them to be unreliable as a true test of knowledge. Although designed to test groups of students on intelligence, standardized testing neglects to fairly acknowledge the abilities of each unique student which reflect their true capabilities.

An outdated education system is the largest problem Michigan faces because it affects not only the present, but also the future of the state. Important issues cannot be solved, nor policies created to remedy them, if the people attempting to solve them are not equipped with the skills and knowledge needed to make informed decisions. The state cannot run itself, let alone the nation as a whole, if its’ people are uneducated. The Constitution, the very basis of our government, relies heavily on the assumption that citizens of the United States are able to make knowledgeable and well-reasoned decisions, the types of which cannot be made when a person does not receive a proper education. This proper education is unattainable when low

Did the teachers of Detroit forget to take their flu shots? That is probably the reason why

Students should not not go to school because they don’t have enough money, they should go to school to be better educated and prepared for a real job that makes more money. That does not mean that Detroit has to lower their taxes, because a lot of the population probably does not even pay taxes because they do not make enough money. However, students should have a good work ethic and want to strive to do their very best. A better work ethic in school might change the way that they view their responsibilities, and want to help their neighbors and neighborhoods. One change will be the illegal jobs that go on, such as drug deals and prostitution. If people want to improve the world that they live in, then they should either get a better job that is legal or go to school but do not be doing illegal things that will get them thrown in jail and start even more riots. This might be challenging for the lazy people that don’t want to do anything who are on welfare for no reason at all, but it might be a good start for the people that want to be successful in

A National Disgrace documentary by reporter Dan Rather changed my perspective towards quality public schools in America from adequate to shockingly shameful. Rather exposed the corrupt school system in detroit that is resulting more than half of the people predominantly African Americans to be functionally illiterate. Prior to watching the documentary, I have always thought the American school systems were difficult to be rigged due to the adequate quality of education provided in my area. However, as Rather stated, “At Auburn High School in Detroit, 900 students start freshmen year and the same cohort will drop to 200 students in senior year. By then they will have to take the NAEP test(minimum competency to graduate), and only 11 students… 11 students will pass.”

Over the years, people have changed and the problem of discrimination against those who do not fit into the norms of society has overwhelmingly diminished. As stated in Sociology in Our Times by Diana Kendall, “sociology is the systematic study of human society and social interaction” (Kendall, 2015, p. 4). In the video presented, the viewer gets to see the physical and systematic conditions that Spain Elementary School in Detroit, Michigan is in. Teachers and counselors point out the mold that has accumulated due to leaky ceilings and faulty pipes. Also, the school counselor shows a music room filled with instruments and uniforms but states that the music teacher had been laid off two years prior and has not been replaced. How can a school

“High school grades reflect years of effort and are more reliable assessment of college potential than test scores.” Historians detected that standardized testing started back in the seventh-century in China. The government of China began to organize written exams to select people for the civil service. Also many educators try to make sure that they are following the right requirements but some of them don’t and do all sorts of stuff with the results. Many individuals would say that standardized testing is a helpful way of learning from what the student knows and doesn’t, but the consequences that teachers found out of the standardized tests are making the students have a decrease in critical thinking.

Ever since then standardized testing has been a huge part of education. Teachers across the nation had to teach to the curriculum instead of what they thought the students needed to learn. Nowadays colleges strictly look at ACT and SAT scores rather than classroom grades, because they believe that some teachers grade on a curve and are not giving the students a fair chance. Standardized tests are an unreliable measure of student performance. A 2001 study published by the Brookings Institution found that 50-80% of year-over-year tests core improvements were temporary and “caused by fluctuations that had nothing to do with long-term changes in learning…”(“Standardized Tests”). Teachers are stressed over if they are teaching “correctly”. They went to a 4-year college, some even more, to get a degree in something that they wanted to do, either for themselves or for the children, and now they have to “teach to the test”. Tests can only measure a portion of the goals of education. A pschometrician, Daniel Koretz says, “standardized tests usually do not provide a direct and complete measure of educational achievement.”(Harris, Harris, and Smith).

According to the Glossary of Education Reform (http://edglossary.org/high-stakes-testing), high-stakes tests are designed to measure student achievement and to determine whether a student is intelligent enough to advance in education. These tests can come in many forms; although the SAT and ACT are considered the most common examples of high-stakes tests in America, any test used to make important decisions about a student can be considered a high-stakes test. For example, students giving oral reports in front of a faculty panel to receive their diplomas would be taking a high-stakes test. However, because these high-stakes tests can only be taken a few times at most, and because these tests are supposed to accurately represent a student’s ability in the classroom, many students report anxiety before these tests. Because higher levels of test anxiety may be associated with lower test scores, one question arises: is high-stakes testing truly the most accurate way to assess a student’s ability in the classroom? To answer this question, researchers have begun to explore an alternative to high-stakes testing: low-stakes testing. Low-stakes testing is also used to measure student achievement; however, these tests are not typically used to make important decisions about students. I argue that low-stakes testing should be implemented in schools in hopes of lessening student test anxiety and encouraging long-term retention of course material.

Detroit's public schools have been in crisis since January. Fantz (2016) explains how the school district is in about $515 million in operating debt. The Senator of Michigan, Goeff Hansen, wants help to bail out Detroit’s schools. The Senate has approved to help the schools but now they are waiting for the House to approve. The teachers have protested before because of unsanitary conditions such as a rat and roach infestations, black mold and pieces of the ceiling falling. This forced dozens of schools to close.

A very current and ongoing important issue happening within the education system is standardized testing. A standardized test is any examination that's administered and scored in a calculated, standard manner. There are two major kinds of standardized tests: aptitude tests and achievement tests. Standardized aptitude tests predict how well students might perform in some subsequent educational setting. The most common examples are the SAT’s and the ACT’s. The SAT and the ACT attempt to estimate how well high school students will perform in college. But standardized test scores are what citizens and school board members rely on when they evaluate a school's effectiveness. Nationally, five such tests are in use: California Achievement Tests,

Every year, hundreds of thousands of students across the nation are required to take many standardized tests. Which are used to determine student’s achievement, progress and growth. These tests supposedly say the outcome of how much knowledge a student has or has not learned. The stakes are high all because of a test score. Standardized tests may determine a pass or fail status for grade levels through K-12 or admission into colleges if you are taking an ACT or SAT standardized test. It is unfair and a very unreliable method to use to measure the performance of students. Standardized testing methods creates more harm than good and should be revised because many students, teachers, and schools suffer from this annually.