Saving Our Public Schools - Assignment Example

Saving Public Schools First Diane Ravitch’s essay on the existing situation in the American public school system begins by showing how the opinion that the public school system is failing has the majority of the consensus across the political divide. Teachers and school principals bear the blame for this. Ms. Ravitch writes that she was of the same opinion earlier in her career, even participating as a policy maker in the Bush administration efforts to improve the public schooling system before her experiences proved that they were tackling the issue through the wring approach.

In her essay, she offers what she considers to be working solutions to reform the public school system. She believes that social reform is the key to solving most of the problems in the public school system, as they are a direct result of poverty and racial discrimination. Only through initiating policies that are combat poverty and segregation, could the public school system improve. She is also against the use of grades to assess teachers, proposing that their peers and principals should do the assessment.

Testing of the students should also be for assessing their strengths and weaknesses and not for ranking purposes. She also recognizes the need to standardize resource allocation to be more equitable across the board as a key issue towards the improvement of public schooling. The privatization of public schooling, in Ms Ravitch’s opinion, will lead to a dual system, where those who can afford to pay for private schooling get into better schools and the poor in the society will be in mediocre schools.

IN the interests of democracy, this should not happen.Ms Ravitch mainly uses a cause-and –effect organizational pattern in her essay. This features prominently throughout this text. When she links the move to privatize the public school system to the creation of a dual education system, which segregates the rich, and the poor, which further leads towards affecting the very fabric of the American democratic system, which is equality. This is one of the many examples of a multi-tier cause and effect organizational structures present in the essay.

One of the uses of prepositional phrases, is evidenced in the sentence ‘They are being used by those who have an implacable hostility towards the public sector’, in this sentence the preposition is ‘towards’ which uses the modifiers ‘implacable hostility’ to show, effectively, the opinions of the move for privatizations towards the public.. Ms. Ravitch switches voice effectively between the first person and the third person to establish ownership and drive her points more effectively.

She uses ‘I’ in the first person when establishing her credentials and past professional experience to show her expertise in the field while using ‘our’ and ‘we’ when reaching towards the readers, and including them in the ownership of both the problems she states and in the solutions she proposes. Through regular pieces in the print, broadcast and electronic media, my perceptions of the state of the school system have been that it is failing. The comparison of our dismal performances in the sciences in particular, against the Asian nations, reinforces the notion that the public schooling system has failed.

The five main ideas in Ms Ravitch’s essay are:1. The public school system has not failed2. The problems it faces are caused by social inequality3. Policies to promote equality across all levels of government are needed to improve public schools4. Privatizing public schooling would further compound the education system in the country across class lines5. Inequality in the school system will affect democracy in the long termReferencesRavitch, D. (2013). Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to Americas Public Schools.

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