Author Archives: Jonathan Lukasik

I seem to feel that the more I read about the No Child Left Behind act, the more I feel it was not to help lower-income, lower-performing schools.  The whole premise behind the act, to ensure that no child is left behind, seems to be difficult for a school which will have a 93% graduation rate.  The idea of trying to take a school which has a 45% graduation rate to 100% just seems utterly ridiculous.  I understand they would have a significant amount of time to achieve this goal, but why would President Bush’s plan  be any better implementing new teaching styles for students to learn from than any other previous plan.

With that being said, I see that a significant amount of people aren’t happy with the “teaching to the test” and the “standardized testing”, but if the Federal government is to allocate funds evenly to schools, what other way would they have to measure which schools are performing better than others besides this?  I’m not sure there is an answer to this question.  People have brought up taking grades from the individual classes, but who says that teachers can’t (or haven’t already) dumbed down their own curriculums, especially if funding for their school is on the line.

The only solution I seemed to find, is giving every state a specific amount of funding per student, regardless of whether or not the teachers/students perform.  Of course, this would probably make a lot of people angry, especially if teachers weren’t performing up to par with another teacher yet getting the same amount of cash/student allocated to their school, but I truly can’t come up with another answer.

My question stems from my first argument I made regarding a possible motive behind the implementation of the NCLB act.  Could President Bush possibly have implemented this program, knowing that many lower income areas that aren’t performing well wouldn’t be able to meet such a goal?

It is apparent that the No Child Left Behind act certainly has it’s countless amounts of flaws, whether it be the issue of teaching to the test, the impracticality of it, etc., It has to be looked at as an appropriate start to trying to rectifying the conflict. I myself was a very strong critic of the No Child Left Behind act, but in retrospect, it needs to be looked at as an attempt to rectify the problem.  When a program of such a large scale is implemented in such a large school system, there are certainly going to be problems.

The two largest issues that I found with the program myself, are the impracticality to have every single student at the “level of compliance”, which causes problem #2, the issue with the teachers specifically teaching to the test and dumbing down the curriculum.  While a third major issue, in my opinion, deals with the inability to implement changes to the program as needed, that tends to be more of a federal government legislature issue rather than a school system issue.

The idea that every student would be at the same place at the same time doesn’t account for students who just happen to learn slower than other students.  This puts more pressure upon the teacher to help that student and may hinder the teacher’s ability to focus on students who may not need such preliminary help, but will hurt their ability to further expand their knowledge.

The way I would have implemented it, was to set a percentage of how many students need to pass, which would differ upon the ability of the students, like having a goal of 30% graduation in a school which has 20% graduation rates, and having 85% for that which has an 80% graduation rate, then raising that bar slightly every year.  Furthermore, to prevent teachers from “dumbing down the test”, oversight must be implemented to see if for example, most students from one school did poorly in a specific section of a physics, and action must be taken upon the teacher, which includes the observation of the teacher during that certain lesson, as well as having testing the teacher to ensure they know how to do the work themselves.

Concerning the issue of “teaching to the test”, my question does ask to possibly challenge this notion to some extent.  If the teachers didn’t “teach to the test”, would this make the curriculum that much better?  Are all teachers (or a majority of them) capable of making their own curriculums that will surpass that of the test-set curriculum?

This chapter, discusses a significant amount of contemporary conflicts going on within the American School System today. One issue that is addressed through the chapter is the topic under “The end of the common school: Choice, privatization, and charter schools”.  I don’t necessarily see the end of the common school, simply because of privatization and charter schools.  In actuality, while wages aren’t rising and income disparities continue to grow in such poor-fair economic times, I actually would think less students would be attending private schools due to their parents having an inability to fund such an education.  Furthermore, he states that due to so many states adopting legislation towards the creation of charter schools, they will ultimately lead towards the end of the common school as well.

I think the first issue regarding the idea that charter schools will lead to the end of the common school is that he doesn’t bring up the amount of opposition that exists towards not privatizing the schools.  Second, he doesn’t seem to mention the possibility that there could be an overall failure of the charter school.  While there is conflicting evidence towards the effectiveness of various charter schools as of now, the possible mass manufacturing of charter schools could lower the overall quality of the charter school all together (as which occurs with the quality of many products sold by private companies, which includes food/appliances, etc.) therefore leaving room for the original common school to prosper.

With that being said, my personal belief towards charter school remains pretty much undecided.  Although most of my argument tends to go against charter schools, its more to go against the idea that charter schools are the end all of the common school.  I truly think with enough opposition towards such charter schools, their implementation across the country may be slowed/halted.  My question revolves around the disappearance of the common school.  Is the common school disappearing, because private and charter schools are becoming more common? Or is it that this may be a possible hiccup in the evolution of the school system, which may just disappear, almost like the creation of New Coke?

During one of the earlier classes, Professor Rybacki mentioned a person (I forgot their name) which stated that education can only do so much when combating the war on poverty.  The person making the argument stated that there needs to be more than just an education for these people to rise out of poverty, which includes but wasn’t limited to more jobs, a higher minimum wage, etc.

I, for the most part, agree with this statement.  While an education is very helpful in combatting the war on poverty, it is not the only villain when talking about ridding the nation of poverty.  One issue in this country is the rising income disparity between the wealthiest 1% and the lower 80% of the U.S. Population.  With the total capital of the 1% population continuing to rise, the lower 80% has less to work with.  The idea of ridding the lower 80% of it’s poverty most likely cannot be accomplished when it has less cash to spread around, even if they have a better education.

Another issue revolves around the jobs being created and minimum wage, as stated in the NYTimes (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/business/economy/01jobs.html?scp=7&sq=minimum+wage&st=nyt), the unemployment rate may be getting smaller at the moment, but many workers in these new service jobs are not expected to be able to pay for basic necessities which include rent, healthcare, food, etc. on such low wages that are being provided to them.  While education is definitely something that should be given to every child/person in America for reasons beyond combatting the war on poverty, it cannot be the only weapon used to defeat the antagonist.  With that being said, my question revolves around impoverished areas in the United States where this “war on poverty” was to be implemented.  Should students in this area be taught things like money management, soft skills, etc. to try to combat the war on poverty, or is it just more of a socio-economic issue that people cannot fight with education alone?

During the 1950’s, when groups of people in the field of education wanted rules to censor certain parts of media, it probably didn’t seem too drastic back then as it would if people in education tried to push for such in 2011.  With that being said, I do think it is a tad bit far-fetched.  In class last week, I brought up the idea of amending the constitution for the purpose of expanding their rights to infringe on our freedoms.  While I do think that certain areas should allow for more government control/regulation, the area of the media is not one which I think should be pushed.

The first major issue of course, is that if the government has the ability to censor what is in the media, they also obtain the right to censor anything in the media, so anything that would be put in the media which would be considered anti-government, the government could (hypothetically speaking) censor it.  The purpose of the constitution was to prevent the government from over-expanding their ability to control aspects of our life.  It was for the protection of the individual.  When in class, I spoke about the government banning certain foods from school cafeterias.  This again, is in the interest and to protect the individual.  With the expansion of government into media, as stated earlier, they have they would have the ability to censor as they please (not saying they would, but the option is available), therefore creating a system which in fact may harm the individual.  While teachers didn’t want the influence of the media to take control of the students mind, it just seemed a tad bit drastic but also a reasonable stance (at the time) to take when assimilating to the new technology that had been put onto the market.

My question is, in today’s society, does the media have an influence over the average student, and if so, does it also affect their behavior in the classroom and/or the teachers ability to teach the rest of the class?

Chapter 11 focused upon the implementation of the Teachers Union.  During the time that the idea of a Teachers union was being thrown around in the late 19th century, it seems to make sense that there would be a large amount of animosity towards its application.  This is a time where the teaching sector was largely dominated by women.  Women had very limited rights in the first place, whether it be the right for suffrage, the right to divorce, the right to property, etc.   The idea that there was going to be a union, which would entitle an industry that is primarily women rights to a pension, higher pay, etc. just seemed to be a failure from the start.  By no means does that mean they shouldn’t try to obtain such rights, it just seems like it’s doomed from the beginning.

In the video we watched earlier in the year, one of the speakers stated the Education System was looked at as a respectable profession until the establishment of the teachers union (I don’t recall if it was The Union, or a specific union). With that, I do agree that to some extent, teachers unions do get out of hand, and may cause more issues than they should.  Regardless, My question revolves around the establishment of the Union.  Did the creation of the Teachers Union have a positive effect on teachers, and a negative effect on students? Or is it different?

While I don’t think that a school should be run like a business/corporation, I can’t say completely that this is the fault of the creators of the system.  Earlier in my studies as an Education minor, I felt that standardized testing was a huge problem with the education system, probably one of the main issues of our educational systems today.  As I continued with my studies, I started to challenge my argument.  For this arguments sake, I will focus upon standardized testing.

While cutting costs shouldn’t be the main reason for the implementation of standardized testing, I don’t know if there is much more that the school can do to assess every students’ knowledge of the subject matter.  While it would be great if there was another way for colleges to look at all applicants without such standardized testing, I do feel it does create a more even, equal playing field for all.  Now with that, there are of course issues with the SATs themselves, like catering to higher socioeconomic classes, but there are also problems with looking at non-standardized factors, like a student’s high school GPA.  Due to a lack of a common curriculum, different students have different curriculums, some may be easier, some harder.  The point I’m getting at is while people may not want to mass produce things, there may be no choice, due to what I feel is over population.

My question is, if standardized testing was to be ridded from the curriculum, what is the alternative that would be put into its place?

What I found interesting was at the very end of the chapter, which really defined the equality of opportunity.  It is important to recognize that the purpose of it is to allow everyone an equal opportunity to succeed.  While I do agree with this statement,  the more important point is in the last sentences in the chapter, which states “No longer did students receive an equal, or common, education; rather they received different educations based on individual differences.”  This is where the problem lies.

While everything should be equal, or at least aiming towards reaching a higher level of equality than what has previously existed, it’s not.  The variations in education in different schools ultimately leads to an inequality of education.  Certain schools tend to prepare students for college, while others try to push through students to graduation.  Would having a national curriculum rid this inequality? Or does it more revolve around things like teacher pay, teacher quality, access to various technologies, etc.??

The idea that schools were becoming “welfare institutions” in the United States (whether or not it is good or not) seemed inevitable, whether it happened in the 20th century or if it were to occur today.  Specifically focusing on the City of New York and Long Island, it’s very expensive to live in these areas, to the point where both parents need to work.  Therefore, while parents and teachers may not want the school system to become a “welfare school system”, there may be no alternative to the solution.  I don’t know if it’s necessarily the best way that will ever exist for a school system, but I do feel it is in the right path.

Furthermore, with a large influx of immigrants coming into the country, it’s always been a given that immigrants were not always guaranteed jobs, and many who did received jobs that paid significantly less than those who were native to the country.  I don’t know why people then (and now to some extent) find it OK for anyone not to be supported if necessary, but it seemed that children were still given a high priority regardless.  My question would focus upon whether or not it was the place of local, state, or the federal government to provide money for this “welfare institution”.  Is the government(s) too involved when providing the people such a service??

Chapter 7 showed the many problems that existed in the common school system due to racism.  I’m going to specifically target the issues regarding the Mexican-Americans and the issues they came across regarding the spanish language having no place in the common school curriculum in Texas.  My issue doesn’t regard the school making English the official language, or even teaching English as a subject, but rather how many Texans discriminated against the Mexican-Americans because of their background of where they live and the language they speak.  Rather than implementing a system like ESL, where students where their first language wasn’t English can be assisted differently, they decided to just make English the official language and practically told those who didn’t know it “too bad”.  I find the idea of making the English language in these schools the “official language” a bit unnecessary, and it just seems to support the idea of prejudice being the reasoning behind their decision-making.

With that being said,  I do feel that the children should’ve been taught English early in their academic life, and then taught in English later in their careers.  I don’t know if people in earlier posts were saying that students living in the United States should be taught in whatever their native language is, but I feel that not teaching them English and not teaching them in English will ultimately hurt them.  While their is no official language in the United States, I do believe that not knowing English is more harmful to a student than helpful. The majority of people in the United States did, and do speak English.  I don’t mean this as “Majority Rules” but rather as “You can speak your native language, but most of the country wont.”  If a native Spanish speaker wanted to move up the social ladder in the United States, I find them having an extremely difficult time doing so if they were unable to speak English.  This is because everyone I’ve ever heard speak that holds a high position in government, a large business/corporation, hospitals, etc. in the United States does in fact speak English.  Again, I’m not saying to strip people of their Native Language or teaching them history about their native countries, but I do feel that not teaching them in English will hurt more than harm.