The Importance Of Education

All educators would agree that there are clearly issues with the education system in the United States. But, I think the issues is one of more political nature not are individual teachers. In my opinion, for every teacher that gives their students those worksheets every night, like Wolk talks, there is a teacher that really tries to provide meaningful homework. It the government standards that are making the fill in the blank educations, not the particular teachers. Maybe Wolk isn’t trying to blame the particular teacher, but the system, yet there seems to be a couple point in the article where I think his frustration and anger is misdirected. Some of this misdirected anger could be from Wolk’s personal experience with education. Everyone has a unique and individualize experience with the education and the teacher that you personally have. For some people this experience is positive while other times people experience is more negative. This makes in hard to make generalization about education, cause it impossible for one person to experience what goes on in every classroom in

In the United States, the average grade has been slowly creeping up during the past years. This grade inflation has generally been seen as a positive for students and parents, but it has much more detrimental effects for the state of higher education. One person to address these consequences is Brent Staples, author of “Why Colleges Shower Their Students With A's.” In his essay, he not only explains how grade inflation came to be, but he also describes how it is something negative since it is the lowering of standards so that excellence is no longer excellent because of how easily higher grades is given out.

Initially, the author begins by summarizing a story featured on the news. A simple thought, college level professors come evaluate teachers at a high school and then give tips to improve the learning environment. The only issue though, is that after the first round of workshops, the professors were fired and sent home. The story claims that the issue with this project was that the professors themselves were poor teachers.

In the view of Guggenheim, the American public school system is broken because “bad” teachers cannot get fired since they all sign tenure. Tenure originated from universities and was created to prevent professors from being fired. Usually, professors have to work hard to get tenure when they have been teaching for many years. In the K-12 system, teachers get tenure automatically whether they are “good” or “bad” teachers. Therefore, tenure makes teachers feel entitled to their job since they can do whatever they want without getting into any trouble. Since administrators cannot fire the “bad” teachers, principals from different schools in the district do the “lemon dance”. The “lemon dance” is when the school principals exchange their “bad” teachers with other principals in the school district

From my school experience I have seen many teachers who seem indifferent about their teaching. Most of them just teach you what you need to pass a test, and never talk about it again, even if you do not fully understand it and did bad on the test. This experience is only from twelve years of schooling, starting in preschool and now to my senior year. This makes John Taylor Gatto’s claim that much more interesting and believable, considering he was a teacher in some of the best and worst schools of New York City for almost thirty years. He claims that the American school system as it is structured now, it is not beneficial to either the teachers or the students. The teachers are bored and unmotivated to teach, which leads to the kids being

Valerie Strauss appears to her readers as an inductive/deductive personality. Throughout this article, she shows the readers her inductive side because she has logical information that leads up to her conclusion about teachers being underpaid. Valerie thinks her information that she presents is reliable and powerful to support her point. She shows the deductive side because she gives her generalization idea of teachers being underpaid, but then moves forward to the facts and statistics to support her idea. Valerie Strauss thought this would convince her audience, in which it did not.

    Students and parents always blame the teacher for their failure, when students should be taking responsibility for their own education. In the article “Obama needs to speak honestly about education” by Thomas Friedman claims that teachers are held at an impossible standard while students are not even responsible for their own education. Friedman says “Teachers are held to impossible standards, and students are accountable for hardly any part of their own education and are incapable of failing”(7). Everyone learns at a different pace and there are some really horrible teachers but more than half the

There should be a better educational system in United States. The first reason is that students of United states educational system are not learning what they need to learn. For example, there are students who come out of these schools and still do not know how to read. Also these schools are not protecting the student from drugs or premarital sex, which is only harming the kids. Kids are dying from drug over doses, and girls are dropping out of schools from teen pregnancy. These teen pregnancies also hurt the future kids, because they are more than likely not going to know their dad.

He goes on to state that he fails “nine out of 15 students” and one has to wonder if this is due to the students’ lack of understanding or the professor’s lack of effort. Yes, the students he teaches are adults and are responsible for their own work. Nevertheless, he is also working a second job at a community college where students take his class as a mandatory course. This article makes him seem very jaded and tired of where he is in life. Professor X may have answered this question a dozen times, but this is Ms. L’s first time asking this question in his course and should be treated as such. One wonders more broadly if this is the same across the country, or if this professor fails an unusual amount of students each semester. The lackluster response of sighing is rude to say the least, especially when a student is coming to a professor for additional assistance or guidance. Ms. L receives a failing grade and even though she thinks she wrote a college level paper, Professor X makes it clear that she did not.

Many states across the country are experiencing teacher shortages. Without enough teachers, we can not successfully educate our children. According to Glori Chaika “Forty-two states issue emergency credentials to people who have taken no education courses and have not taught a day in their lives. Many teachers are hired based solely on their experience leading church or camping groups.” (Chaika) Due to the shortages, States are allowing those who are not even qualified to teach. One can not believe that children are being educated as best as they can be, if those teaching them have no experience or training before hand. Another problem is that teachers are not being place in the fields were they can perform at their best, Glori Chaika also states that “One-fourth of new teachers -- if they are licensed -- are not licensed to teach in the field they are teaching.” (Chaika) Many teachers have very little knowledge on the subject they are teaching, “About 55 percent of students taking physics in the United States, for example, are taught by someone who never majored or minored in the subject.” ( Asimov) As a result of the current teacher shortage, the quality of America’s educational system has gone down. People are being hired with no teaching experience and teachers are being forced to teacher subjects that they are not familiar with. Adding to the current teacher shortage is the problem of teacher

“What Our Education System Needs Is More F’s” written by Carl Singleton argues that our education system needs to enforce more failing grades to students who have not fully learned the required material. He believes that handing out failing grades in copious amounts to students will overall fix the issue of illiterate students among high schools and colleges along with draw attention to this issue and engage parents into their child's education. This argument could be fairly but is poorly executed and lacks valid evidence and supporting claims. Singleton fails to provide accurate benefits of this grading system he feels should be implemented. Carl Singleton overall expresses his concern of the grading systems deterioration and that the education system is not enforcing enough failing grades to students who have not fully mastered required material.

Likewise in my introduction, Teachers Union Exposed, a special project of Center for Union Facts, reports, “In many major cities, only one out of 1000 teachers is fired for performance-related reasons. Why? Tenure. Tenure is the practice of guaranteeing a teacher their job.” Because the teachers have guaranteed jobs, they cannot be fired, despite their teaching performance. Thus, teachers with bad performance have the tenure as their back: they cannot be fired because of it. The problem with bad teachers not being fired arises from this, but through finding the cause, now we can find a solution to the

Standers developed a system that measure a student’s performance and ranks teachers based on that performance. Ravitch believed that this system is flawed and unfair to teachers and don’t take into account other variables such as students with disabilities and non english speaking students.

Winters writes a short argumentative piece, but gets his point across in five short paragraphs. Winters starts the article off with the unsatisfactory rating of teachers in New York City is 2.3 percent; he continues to state “[2.3 percent] actually represents an enormous uptake (up from .89 percent)…”. Although 2.3 percent is a low percentage, stating it is a rise makes his argument weaker. He focuses on the objectivity of standardized tests in order to show the productivity of the tests in school settings. He admits testing can not show everything about a student, but it is completely objective to what it is testing. Winters has a powerful argument and stance on this topic, but has little to support his side. When I finish the article, I know exactly what he wants the reader to think, yet he has almost no support to make his

However, the fact that the study only focused on a small group (a specific university students), a specific race (whites), one specific social class (middle class), and one gender (female) makes the credibility of the findings questionable because we cannot use them to develop a general conclusion to represent all the teachers. The researcher also acknowledged this by stating that the findings from the study can be used to inform other groups, but is not meant to be representative of all teacher researcher groups (Vetter,