During my 13 years in the classroom, I have worked in a variety of schools. In North Caroline, I taught in two title one schools. In California, I taught at a school with a high migrant and ELL population. For the last five and a half years, I have taught in a very large, but low diversity school. A very large percent of the students come from middle to upper middle class homes. My current school has seen a slow, but steady increase in low income students and non-English speaking students.
The first increasing population at my current school is the low socioeconomic population. While the school has a few programs in place to assist students from low income families, there are still a few areas I think could be improved on. The school
I performed my field experience at Chiefland Elementary. Chiefland is a very small town with the population of six thousand. There are over eight hundred students enrolled at Chiefland Elementary. There are fifty-two instructional staff members and two administers. In those fifty-two staff members, there is one African American teacher and one male teacher; the rest are women. This is a white dominate school. In the school there is 73% Caucasian students, 17% African American students, and 4% Hispanic students. There is only 3% of students that are ESOL and 5% are Gifted and Talented. This semester we learned that in small areas and with low income schools, there are more Hispanics and African American people. In this case, Chiefland Elementary
There are many different levels of professional need and growth, especially in the area of ELA which is the basis for all academics. Some people need training on the basics of running a classroom. Many educators still view diverse learners as already having deficits, which is not necessarily true. Others need more time on analysis, co-teaching, collaboration with others, how to identify students with needs or gaps in their learning. Questions that I have asked is: How do you increase achievement with children living in poverty? How do we use current data to close gaps these gaps? If you want to close the socioeconomic achievement gap in your school, what is my first step? Teachers need to learn about diversity. We need to learn about classroom strategies and how to give all students the opportunity to learn. Believe it or not, we need to learn about how to reflect on our teaching, something that was done almost daily during our internships. We need to understand the reasons for achievement gaps, not just what it looks like. Professional development is designed to provide additional support for teachers, both new and seasoned. If the quality
Currently, I am student teaching at Alfred E. Zampella PS #27 School in the district of Jersey City. The school is located in a busy city, next to John F. Kennedy St. which is especially busy in the morning and during rush hour. This results in several late students on a day to day basis. On the other hand, this school is also highly accessible and as a little over a thousand students. The school has grade levels from kindergarten to 8th grade, and has a mix of general, special, and inclusion education classrooms. Typically, families that enroll their students into this school are of lower-middle socio-economic class, and tend to be majority Hispanic, Indian, and African American, with few Caucasians and Asians. This school provides a variety of special programs for their ESL students and special need students. Students may be offered speech language pathology, occupational therapy, physical therapy, ESL programs, reading recovery, and counseling.
Poverty is a serious issue which our society and children faces every day. It is a constant struggle that shouldn’t be ignored. UNICEF states “The study of OECD countries in 2007, over fourteen percent of Australian children under the age of eighteen are currently living in households who are defined as poor or with incomes less than half of the median national income”. The increase in the number and percentage of children living in poverty within our society has contributed to making today's classrooms more diverse than ever it has been. This highlights and makes both teaching and learning more challenging. Diversity exists in the students who are living in poverty and the education assistant and teachers must provide the concept of diversity
Jonathan Kozol, a Harvard University scholar, witnessed the travesty of racial segregation within the inner city public educational system. After many years of teaching and exposure to substandard classrooms with dilapidated furniture, a shortage of materials to engage a pupil’s mind and a disproportionate diversity ratio, he could no longer tolerate the conditions in which he was surrounded. Kozol’s frustration compelled him to become a staunch advocate for disadvantaged children so that they might receive equal rights to a quality education.
Under certain circumstances, each school district has diverse needs that their students have. Although, I believe that we can create a general idea of what schools can do to closing the opportunity gap among the school districts. In the San Francisco School District, they have more than 6 out of 10 public school students who are from low income families. So, to change their situation, they want to implement a plan called Vision2025 to start closing the opportunity gap. In their plan they are committing to improve education in the early years(pre-k-third), start investing more in low-performing and low-income neighborhoods using research-based reforms, and starting to do more professional training for teachers and principals as graduation expectations arise and they start implementing new common core standards (HAAS Jr, 2015). Simply by having these expectations as a whole school district no matter how big the community is, schools will start seeing a change in their
The problem is students in the middle school grades are not performing on grade level in reading fluency and comprehension benchmark assessments prior to the state assessment given in the spring. Also exploring more factors that can contribute to achievement gaps such as peer pressure, student tracking, negative stereotyping, and test bias go along with the gap being more than half the struggling readers.
According to the 2014 Public School Review Diversity Report, the state of Maryland is rated the third most diverse public school system in the nation, with 43% White students, 37% African American students, 11% Hispanic students, 6% Asian students, and 3% Unknown. With a significantly higher population of African American students compared to the state average, the Baltimore City School District is a far less diverse agency than the state school system as a whole. Collectively, the Baltimore City Public School District is comprised of 85% African American students, 8% White students, 5% Hispanic, 1% Asian/Pacific Islander, and less than 1% American Indian, Multiracial, Native Hawiian/other (Baltimore City Public Schools, 2013a). Considering
As a member of several clubs and organizations, I have always valued the wide range of people you can find within the walls of my high school. If you walk into my Physics lab, you will find me collaborating with a dancer strongly involved in his cultural heritage and a volleyball player in the engineering academy. If you come to my Calculus class, you will see me calculating derivatives with a football player, a snowboarder, a National Honor Society officer, and a painter. The word “diversity” is often used to describe a cross-cultural population, but it is so much more than that. At Bartlett High School, students originate from hundreds of different cultures, with an abundance interests, and participate together in an assortment of activities.
In my high school black students are the majority, and I, a white girl, am in the minority. The city’s 60-40 white to black demographic ratio becomes 20-80 in the schools due to private school enrollment. The city of University Heights, our neighbor, does not share the same racial diversity that Cleveland Heights does. What diversity they do have is even further weakened due to a large private school population. Badly in need of structural renovations our high school is to be housed in a swing space for two years. Entering this swing space means crossing over city lines into the neighboring community. Many University Heights community members, including the mayor made it clear that the black faces that would be suddenly “invading” their
Counselor Angela Cabello has a background of either Irish-Catholic or Italian Catholic background. All the classroom educators, the counselor and the school administration identify as Caucasian. There is a biracial media specialist and two African American kindergarten teacher assistants contributing to the diversity of the faculty/staff. However the faculty, staff and administration do not reflect the demographics of the students. According to Barbieri, diversity is important because “without diversity in staffing, students, and programs, they will be morally unworthy to survive, without diverse curricula they will be intellectually unworthy to survive” (Oustaloup, 2014). The students have explained that their teachers have
Within the core of many educational institutions, diversity is a commercial tacit. While every institution cannot offer the same kind of diversity, the endorsement of such exists through various definitions. The Western Association of Schools and Colleges define diversity through the various classes: race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender, disability, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, and age (“Statement on Diversity”)
The most important community to which I belong is my high school grade level. Unlike the contrary belief, an all girls school is one of the most drama-free environments that I've ever experienced. Like myself, a lot of the girls came into the high school knowing very few people, or no one at all. This allowed all of us to form a tight-knit friendship during the early days of our freshman year that has sustained until this very day. In this community, we support and help each other no matter the situation. We developed a sisterhood un like any other I have seen at my four years at Regina. During my time at Regina High School, I feel that I have become the person that everyone can come to. People tell me that I'm a very optimistic person and
With my shift to SWA, it took me a great deal of time to research and question my decision on going to a new school, environment and class style knowing this was going to be a decision I couldn't go back on. With SWA having their own new switch to a new location, name and system of sorts having a new building that houses not only high schoolers but middles schoolers and younger! Sounds weird to have almost all grades within one build but they make it work with a diversity of classes, schedules, and teachings. With researching how SWA works with its diversity I saw no conflict between the diversity they have in the space they utilize, this seemed great for the type of environment I was looking for, inviting, friendly yet work orientated to finish
On average, a person set eyes on anywhere between 90,000 to 3 million faces in their lifetime, and only recollects approximately 3,000 of them (Bellamy). Regardless how many people a person may encounter in their lifetime, some people will form a false opinion about the other person based solely on their appearance. Never knowing what hardships a person might have gone through, how or why a person likes or dislikes certain things, or why a person reacts a certain way in different situations. As human beings, we have the ability to form opinions or beliefs based on what we have learned, read or heard. However, when it comes to certain topics such as HIV, people tend to jump to conclusions and begin the vicious cycle of discrimination, stigmatization