Education

As many of you know I am in school right now for early childhood education. I love kids and I love teaching and many of you also know I have always loved school. One of the reasons for this is my parents. We always had books, educational games, and support in my house when I was growing up. I was very lucky because I was taught that knowledge is important. My parents helped me with my homework and chaperoned field trips. The same can't be said for everyone.

Education has been in the news a lot lately and everytime I read it I'm always reading about how teachers need to be accountable and I agree. Teachers should strive to help all their children reach their potential. Teachers who don't care about the students and aren't teaching well should be fired. The thing that really irks me about all this talk about accountability is that it places, in my opinion, too much of the responsibilty of education on the teachers. If you have a student who is going to say Beechwood and another who is going to Cleveland, they can have the same teacher and would still turn out different results. The environment is a very important factor in a child's education.

As a teacher, you can work as hard as you can. You can try every teaching method in the book. You can extend the school year (very bad idea in my opinion). But, if those kids when they leave the school are going back to a home where mom is sitting in front of the tv with a bottle of rum and dad's not even in the picture, those kids are nine times out of ten not going to reach the same level as the kids who had the support system I had. Will there be that tenth kid that everyone will hold up as an example of rising above it? Of course. But the majority of the time the cycle of illiteracy and poverty will continue.

Reform shouldn't just be in the schools themselves. We need to try to reform America in general. More and more there are single parent families. And if you look at the statistics that makes the children more at risk for early pregnancy, drug use, even suicide. We need to be teaching our young people about responsibility and the consequences of their actions. Instead we just keep trying to come up with the easy way out of everything. There are boys getting multiple girls pregnant and not caring about a single one of the girls or the babies. If we can't try to fix the problem at it's core it will never be fixed.