Our Education System

Education is very important especially now that I am in college and I have to pay for my classes. I agree with Roy Romer that education needs to be kept a priority. If all the attention is being focused on the economy and war then there will be problems later on with the education system. I’m not saying that the war and economy are not important because they are but education is also very crucial to the United States and we need to keep up with the other rapidly growing countries. I think that the there should be higher standards set for students and more money for schools to help students who need special attention. I have a sister in elementary school and she is very bright. She had trouble learning how to read and she was behind at the end of first grade. She was not left behind but she had a really good second grade teacher who worked with her one on one until she was able to read at a higher level. Now my sister can read very well and I think she has developed skills that I need to work on such as reading out loud. My point is that if she were told that she needed to stay behind it would only set her back farther in my opinion. Challenging her rather than babying her was more effective. I do not support the grading system where they have incompletes. It might be discouraging for the student to receive a D or an F on their report card but I think it could be extremely encouraging if they are able to work hard and see that F turn into an A. Teachers have to deal with the brunt of the issues that come with the “No Child Left Behind” act. I remember taking the FCAT and SSS and it really took up a lot of classroom time. Teachers would gripe about how so much time is wasted teaching for the test rather than teaching other material. I of course did not mind because I got to relax in school when testing came around. The teacher in the last video was a bit odd at the beginning but she made some really good points. She talked about kids having to test for three hours with breaks in between. The longest test was fifty minutes and I agree that this is too long for ten year olds to sit. Many people are bad test takers and I think it is harder for kids to sit and concentrate especially if they are bad test takers. Another good point she made was about the way schools were rewarded or punished based on how well they did on the test. Schools who do badly should not be punished because these students who are doing badly obviously need more attention. Teachers who are losing money will get discouraged and if fear is being incorporated like she said then students may psyche themselves out and perform badly on the test. There are a lot of flaws within the system that need to be tweaked. Hopefully the next President is able to work on fixing these issues as well as making it more affordable to go to college.