Failing Schools and Students in the US - Research Paper Example

? Schools and are failing across the United s Effects of climate change I. Introduction Thesis ment: Schools and students are failing across the United States because of a combination of factors from substandard schools and school systems, the bureaucrats that make decisions for schools, and students and the parents of the students. II. Body Outline Introduction Main Context A. Does the issue lie with the students and/or the parents? 1. Lack of Parenting 2. Students Hungry or Lack of Sleep 3. Student’s Lack of Motivation B. Is the problem with the school itself? 1. Schools Wasting Funds/Money 2. No Accountability of Individual Schools 3. Lack of Qualified Staff in Schools C. Is the Argument out of the School’s Hands? 1. Effects of the No Child Left Behind Act Conclusion Work Cited Introduction Today it is of crucial importance that education should be given utmost attention, as it is considered a guaranteed insurance into ones future. However, it is usual that children are failing consistently in many parts of the world especially USA. A student who is disinterested in the education will generally miss college lectures and would perform extremely poor in assessments tests. In worst cases, students would stop attending their schools or colleges and would thereby sit at home without concern for their education, career and life. It is important that causes of inability to perform well at school should be figured out before they can be pin down to improve performances in general and long term successes in whole. Does the issue lie with the students and/or the parents? Lack of Parenting Today many of the children fail because of lack of parenting guidance or parents lacking such skills. Children today need their parent's guidance so they could help them make positive options instead of just trying to control them or choose for them what they are not interested in. If parents act as children’s guide they are letting them not rely on their inner guidance. If parents guide their children through the process of decision making they are letting them look in to the situations from all of its sides. This even helps them build a sort of self esteem that is they would start trusting them and believing in ability to make good choices. According to Mr. PubMed, the usual cause of lack of parenting skills is their low socio-economic status. Parents which are living below poverty lines have no such access to parenting skills. Teen parents simply have a hard time forming such parenting skills. In middle families this is mainly due to lack of emotional and financial support and lack of awareness. In richer families this is mainly because parents simply lack time. Moreover, the younger parents were the ones who were more immature and less capable of giving the sacrifices sometimes that are required of parents. Furthermore, the parents that have abuse are more likely to make bad parenting choices. Students Hungry or Lack of Sleep August 2007 – One of the study by James F. Pagel who was the MD of University of Colorado school of Medicine has given reports that students could have insufficient sleep that could thereby have adverse effects next day not on adults performance but also on students performance. Hunger and sleep are two of the vital needs of a healthy society. Adolescents who have experience sleep disturbances are the ones more likely to receive bad grades. Based on a 238 questionnaires that were completed by the middle or high school students, the survey proved that those who have gained lower GPA were the ones who had most sleepless nights and such issues that include restless, a hard time waking up in the morning, when trying to fall asleep, difficulty concentrating during the day, snoring every night, aching legs, and falling asleep in class. James Pagel had said: Some of the previously conducted studies had proved that students who had irregular sleep patterns, inadequate sleep or otherwise poor sleep quality didn’t perform well in school in comparison to students who had no complaints of sleep. This study gives additional evidence indicating that sleep disturbances significantly affect daytime performance and occur at high frequencies in adolescents as measured by GPA." Some of the causes of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) including restless legs and the difficulty concentrating in daytime are evident. ADHD is a diagnosis that is associated with poor school performance. This study concludes that parents must discuss ADHD related problems and get it screened in case of their children are having sleep related issues. Student’s Lack of Motivation Students need to be motivated in order to perform well at school. Lack of motivation might result in failure for students one must find the root causes for such problems. Today we see more and more students showing up in classroom without having developed an appropriate motivation to learn. Students can just tune out for several of the reasons. The cause of lack of motivation can be placed on possibly many factors. The media today provides much of the distractions Students take entertainment on a higher priority in comparison to education. They could have a learning disability, they cannot keep up, they might not be getting help, and they could then simply give up! They become convince that they can’t do the work ("So why just even bother to try?"). They could have a physical problem, such as the poor hearing, poor vision or bad headaches. Negative peer influences are ever great too. "I just don't want to be nerd or the teacher's pet." (I have already heard that!) Students could not have developed ability to think and cannot discover motivation of their own. Parents and the other family adults are not just involved enough to bring on the basis of self-motivation. Today we often see both parents holding jobs outside their homes. These are just nuclear families, and such have no other adults to provide them loving guidance, wisdom, and further motivation. Children could not see much relevance of material in their lives. Moreover, they don't even at times see school as providing them with any benefit. The teachers are not at times taking sufficient steps to increase students motivate. Too absorbed in "Now" thinking along with not enough "Future" thinking could also result in much lack of motivation. Is the problem with the school itself? Schools Wasting Funds/Money Billion of funds coming to Schools remained either unspent or gets wasted away on expensive contracts this is according to a watchdog that accuses ministers on failing to hold head teachers account for on their expenditure progress. The Audit commission concludes that schools today are wasting nearly 1 billion pounds of public funds per annum by hoard such in banks or failing to make investments to produce better cleaning, meals or equipment. The report concluded that despite the increasingly funding since 1997, the time when labor came to power, head teachers have not been seen pulling all money to effective usage. They could save ?415m if they had negotiated better contracts for running of their schools plus are also sitting on the ?530m in "excessive" reserves. There has been much collective failure through system – from the schools right up to the government level – to emphasize efficiency, the report will say. "If no one ask 'could you do this mmuch more efficiently, more cheaply?', you are not then going to be focused on it," Mr. O'Higgins said. (Tony Attword: What the audit commission says about school finance in EducationMarketing) The children’s secretary Mr. Ed balls who published a white school paper had set an annual report card for schools that served as a drive to federate higher performing secondary and lower performing neighbors. Individual schools that have taken their eye off the ball are the ones lacking to build good students. The problem lies with the agency conflict as the school runners are not the school funder. Given tight financial forecasts, then they are going to have to then [be aware]. The report will then urge the government to ensure that such schools are spending money efficiently or not. Schools waste millions of pounds of tax payers money this is suggested by an internal governmental report. BBC Politics show has revealed a report by WH smith Mr. Richard Handover. It claims civil servants along with head teachers appear to having no idea what money value means. In his friendly report, Mr Handover narrates: "Financial efficiency... is just not seen, at any level, as core responsibility of management." Today there is no accountability or poor accountability of schools progress. The secretary of education Mr. Michael Gove says that if one is serious about holding educational institutes to account, we need to form a much sharper focus on whatever happens to pupils as students move through the school, as well as they leave the school. (Schools to be held accountable for pupils' career success) "Publishing such information about what students do once they leave GCSE would also help enhance schools and parents accountability and provide chance for improvement in result Accountability gets improved though with report cards. However, not all schools take any action against students failing. T.J. O'Malley talks about America (USA) in his 2010 report where he points attention to ever increasing APT ( Advances Placement Tests) in the past 10 years. It is important that schools should take actions to improve their results and give attention to weaker students however their accountability could only increase through government and parent’s attention. Lack of Qualified Teachers Are qualified teachers important? Teacher quality has a much stronger impact on the achievement than other of the school resources. Students who had the ineffective teachers in a row had lost ground and may never recovery. In California, USA the State’s lowest ranked schools are on the Academic Performance Index (A-P-I) have least qualified teachers. The schools with many under-qualified teachers have usually high turnover rates and the lack of connection with the student or to the community. When schools lack experienced and qualified teachers, new teachers don’t have much skills and experience and need to learn to teach well with standard. Moreover, passion and commitment are the vital qualities in the teachers. However, such characteristics must be the ones that should be coupled with rigorous training that credential of the states require and with awareness plus valuing of many cultures that making up California’s student population. Disadvantage with Disinterested Teacher Often, the teachers are unable to connect to students or convey their expectations to them and this would then leads to communication gap between the student and Teacher. Also, many of the teachers have the habit of just constantly dominating the thinking process of students, this reduce their decision making and brain storming power and they are unable to score well at school. Effects of the No Child Left Behind Act Effects on teachers, schools, and school districts Increased accountability Supporters of NCLB claim that one of the strong positive points in the bill is the increased accountability that it thereby required of the schools along with its teachers. According to this legislation, schools are required of to pass yearly tests that will then judge how much improvement students have to make over the fiscal year. These annually standardized tests are the major research that is now used to decide whether the schools are living up to standards that they therefore are required to meet. If such improvements are not met then the schools face decreased amount of funding and other sorts of punishments that contribute to increased accountability. According to the supporters, these goals would help teachers and the schools to realize the significance and the importance of educational system and how that affects the nation. Opponents of this law base their objections on the accountability by stating the punishments only would hurt the schools more. It won’t contribute to the improvement for the students. If the schools along with the teachers don’t live up to accountability standards, then parents may choose to shift their children to other different schools in the area. Effects on curriculum and standards The incentives for the improvement also may result states to the lower their official standards. This is because each of the state can then produce its own standardized test a state can then make its own statewide tests easier to produce increase score. A 2007 study that was done by the U.S. Dept. of Education indicates that observed differences in the states' reported scores would largely cause differences in the stringency of their standard. Improvement over local standards Many argue that the local government had fail the students, necessitating much federal intervention to remedy issues like that of teachers teaching outside of their areas of expertise, and the complacency in face of continually failing of schools. Some of the local governments, notably the New York State, have voiced much support for NCLB provisions, because the local standards had just fail to provide an adequate oversight over the special education, and NCLB would allow the longitudinal data to be just better used to monitor. Quality of education Ideally the increases in quality of education by requiring the schools to improve much performance Improves the quality of instruction by requiring the schools to implement "scientifically based research" practices in classroom, the parent involvement programs, along with the professional development activities for students that are not expected or encouraged to attend college. This also supports early literacy through Early Reading First initiative. Emphasizes the reading, language arts, the mathematics, science achievement as among the core academic subjects. Conclusion It is a general fact that each of the students is not of similar aptitude and mental ability as that of another. Everyone takes time to learn and then to perform. While many of the students are able to tackle through tough challenges of the academic pressures and to perform well in the exams, yet many others are unable to handle such pressure. The constant poor performance lowers self confidence of student and he or she will feel lost in the crowd of the brilliant students. It is of utmost attention that parents along with the teachers should make sure that every student takes career in the field that would motivate him/her to give his/her total dedication. Besides the academics, sports and the other disciplines must also be encouraged, to maintain interest and avoid burnout. Work Cited 1. Alhola, Paula; Paivi Polo-Kantola (October 2007). "Sleep deprivation: Impact on cognitive performance" (Review; Full text). Neuropsychiatr Dis Treat (Dove Medical Press) 3 (5): 553–567. PMC 2656292. PMID 19300585. "Although both conditions [total and partial SD] induce several negative effects including impairments in cognitive performance, the underlying mechanisms seem to be somewhat different." 2. Jeevan Vasagar “Schools to be held accountable for pupils' career success” in guardian , 2011 < http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/feb/17/schools-accountable-pupils-career-success > 3. Schools That Do Too Much: How Schools Waste Time and Money and What We Can All Do About It by Etta Kralovec 4. T.J. O'Malley More students failing AP tests nationally in the pendulum 2010 5. Tony Attword: What the audit commission says about school finance in Education Marketing 6. Read More