Month: October 2019

Passion #5

One of the biggest issues with schools today is the reemergence of segregation in schools. Now, to clarify, it is not the same kind of segregation that was present through American history until the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s. We reached the most integration in the 90’s and ever since we have been seeing increasing amounts of mostly all black and mostly all white public schools. This kind of new segregation is based on white flight and economic status. It isn’t just racial segregation either as school districts are becoming increasingly divided by economic status with entirely poor and entirely rich schools.

Schools were first desegregated in the mid to late 1960’s even though it was decided in the case of Brown v. Board of Education that school segregation and segregation for that matter was unconstitutional all the way back in 1954. The reason why it took so long is because the Supreme Court was too vague in their ruling as they ruled that schools needed to be desegregated with deliberate speed instead of using the word forthwith which was recommended by the NAACP. Lydon B. Johnson offered public schools federal money with the caveat that they could only receive it if they began to desegregate their schools. It took about 10 years for anyone to actually do anything even though the Supreme Court had already ruled it unconstitutional.

After this, the United States public school system made great strides to integrating schools to the point. One of the main reasons that this happened is because of the creation of magnet schools. Magnet schools were schools created with extra money in order to attract people to voluntary send their children to integrated schools.

Funding now is the main reason why schools are becoming more segregated. Schools in richer school districts receive more funding than schools in poorer districts which encourages rich white families to move to better school districts. This leaves the other school district with a much higher minority population and less funding. This causes a cycle as the quality of the poorer school will worsen leading to richer families leaving which will lead to less funding for that school district.

The only was to redesegregate is to give more funding to the poorer school districts instead of the richer ones. This seems like common sense, but its not how the current school system works.

Passion #4

This week when talking about the education in the U.S I want to focus on mental health at school and how it seems like this generation of students hates school more than previous generations, has more work, less sleep, and higher school shooting and suicide rates.

This generation of students has placed much more of an emphasis on higher education. So much so that now school has become extremely stressful and your grades matter at a much earlier age. Parents put added pressure on their children to get good grades in elementary school, so they can get into a good middle school. Then there’s added pressure for students to do well in middle school so that they can get into a good high school. And then the pressure just gets way higher for getting into college and beyond. In today’s society we are told that we cannot do well in life without getting a lot of education and its sad that its mostly true. There aren’t a lot of jobs that you can get without getting at least a bachelor’s degree. This seems kind of messed up as there are a lot of well paying jobs that really shouldn’t require a bachelor’s degree. This over-education ends up hurting people in the long run as many well educated individuals still can’t find jobs and have mountains of student loan debt.

All of this, not to mention social pressures, bullies, social media, sleep deprivation, being overworked, etc. factor into each student’s mental health. This is why we’ve seen a dramatic increase in teen suicides, and school shootings as students feel completely overwhelmed by the pressures and expectations put on them. We put too much pressures on kids these days and expect them to grow up faster than they should. According to the CDC, suicide is the second greatest cause of death among people ages 15-34. The number of suicides among people this young has been steadily increasing over the last century. And schools aren’t doing anything about it.

Another thing that schools don’t respond to well is mental illness. A lot of school don’t have the resources to deal with these kinds of problems and therefore disregard this. Depression rates are also much higher as well as other mental illnesses yet students are not reporting these issues and have no way to deal with them. Recently there has been less of  a social stigma around having mental illness, so hopefully schools will catch up and install ways to help their students who are struggling.

One of the biggest problems in schools today are school shootings. This is something that has never happened in history until the past couple decades. This is also something that has become increasingly normalized to the point where you see one on the news nearly every single day. They happen so often that we are desensitized to them. This is something that is a direct effect of the pressures of school. Not to excuse this type of behavior at all, because it is obviously horrible and they are completely at fault, but this kind of problem wasn’t a thing 30 years ago for a reason.

School is one of if not the most important factor in shaping a person into who they become. Most of us spend at least the first 18 years of our lives as a part of the school system and many more of us spend the first 22 or so when getting a college degree. This is an immense amount of time to be schooled. We need schools to include more resources for students to help deal with their issues in order for them to feel more relaxed and less stressed out.

RCL #7

I have decided that for my paradigm shift essay I will be using the advancement of modern medicine as the overarching topic. For the overall time period, I want to start looking at the broad figures such as life expectancy over the last couple thousand years. I could bring significant diseases such as the bubonic plague into discussion. Then, I would make more of my focus on the past 150 years or so to look at the exponential growth of technology.

Some of the main topics that I would choose to look at is tracing the life expectancy and quality of life for people. Also, I would look at vaccines and how the development of certain major vaccines has led to longer lives and led to less diseases. I also could focus on the rise of obesity due to the rise of other forms of technology and how that has led to a lot more heart disease. There are also so many other subtopics that I could choose to use. The possibilites are basically endless for this topic.

For the Ted Talk I am going to be using the subtopic of vaccines and more specifically anti-vaxers. I think that that will be a very interesting topic to cover in a speech since it is very relevant in today’s society and has become somewhat of a meme. It also has become kind of a civil rights issue and has led to a lot of legislation.

Passion blog #3

For this weeks Passion blog I wanted to focus specifically on how schools in America are structured. More specifically how they are broken up into two distinct categories. Schools that are separated by their different tracks and schools that are separated by ability grouping. A lot of people think that these two concepts are the same thing, but in reality they are constructed quite differently and yield different results.

Ability grouping is splitting kids up into different groups in the same classroom based on their individual skills in a certain subject area. For example, this could be having three different reading groups for a class (beginner, regular, and advanced). This technique is used primarily when children are much younger and is very adaptable. Most children are in one group for reading but fall into another group for their math skills and in an other group for their history skills and so on and so forth.

Tracking is placing students on separate tracks to complete their schooling and is most often used in older students especially in high school. For example, there might be a regular track, honors, AP, and college level tracks. The difference between this type of education and ability grouping is that most kids stay in one level for all of their classes. This means that there is little to no mobility between the levels and it is extremely hard to move upward. In fact, the younger kids are when they are placed in a track, the harder it will be for them to get out of it. Another thing that comes into play is that the instructors for the smartest kids in the best tracks are normally the smartest teachers. This may seem logical at first but in fact it just puts the kids in the lower levels at even more of a disadvantage since they are being taught the least challenging and engaging material from the worst teachers in the school. In fact, there is a lot of research that suggests the way to combat this issue is to instead give the lowest tracks the best teachers in order to balance out the scores of the students.

One of the most interesting things to look at when comparing these two different styles of schooling is the results that they yield. For instance, both of these two types of schooling in America yield practically the same average and median. However, the one major difference is between the highest and lowest performers. Schools that have ability grouping have a much smaller variance with their being not as many outliers since they were all taught in the same classroom by the same teachers. On the other hand, you have tracking classrooms which have students who score much higher and much lower making the variance between the two groups very large. This is because they weren’t taught in the same classroom, but instead the smartest kids were taught by the smartest teachers and the dumbest kids were taught by the worst teachers.

This begs the question of which one of these two different systems is better and honestly it is hard to make an accurate judgement. On one hand, ability grouping may better as a whole since it brings up the lowest scores making most of the kids finish in the middle of the pack. However, tracking also has the highest scores since ability grouping may limit the potential of the smartest students by holding them back. There needs to be a way in which we can bring up the lowest scores of all of the kids without hurting the scores of the highest achieving kids. I just don’t know how that will work.

RCL #6

My first idea for my paradigm essay is tracking the way in which society has viewed women over time. This would be a very good topic for my paradigm shift essay because it is an extremely generic and broad topic that could cover lots of different subtopics and time periods. This means that I would have a plethora of choices for my Ted Talk where I could dive more in depth on one of the particular topics. Just spit balling, I could track voting rights for women, women’s education, women’s pay, etc. All of these topics and more could be addressed in a way that touches on the major points but leaves a lot more information to be discovered in a Ted Talk.

Another idea that I could possibly use for my paradigm essay is technology more specifically how modern medicine has advanced. Using this topic I could compare the average life span over the last couple of centuries and the exponential way in which the life span has grown. I could mention vaccines and that would give me a great transition into talking about anti-vaxers and how that is wrong. I think that that would be a really fun and interesting topic that I could dive into for my Ted Talk. Also, I could talk about the advancement of medical technology and also the increased prevalence of prescription drugs. That would give me a way to talk about the problems with prescription drugs and how that has led to many people abusing them. That would lead into a more in-depth Ted Talk on how the rise of prescription drugs has led to more people abusing them leading them to other alternatives such as heroin and meth.

Either of these would be a very good topic but I think that I like the second one better.