Draft 1

In Subtle ways everyone in your daily life supports and encourages the false fact that education is not important for our poor minority children. The evidence in life ranging from school officials, the rich, the poor, and most importantly the teachers in the school systems. These people are some of the most important people in a child’s education on the basis that they control the school systems emotionally and financially. These people are also the ones in charge of our children’s failure in education. The main piece of evidence that supports my paper is the book “Savage Inequalities.” By not funding schools properly that need the funds you are limiting the resources that a school has, Helping the flowing cycle of bad teachers to exist, and keeping the rich wealthy and the poor to stay poor.
Schools not receiving the proper amount of funding from the school officials are not equipped to set up their students for success. Without funding a teacher cannot teach properly which affects all students in that school. Simple resources such as paper and pencils up to sport equipment, art programs, and nice facilities to learn in all equal up to the same value. No materials being more important than the other. “If I had some lab assistants, we could make use of the lab…we are short of books…the replacement copies were different from the the texts that we already had…Despite these failings I have had two students graduate from MIT in twenty three years.” (34) To read that students lack simple materials like pen and paper is baffling. We live in a country where there is more than enough material resources to go around, and more than enough money to go around. I find it hard to believe that we force children to go to school by law, but cannot provide the bare basics to a student in class. Most of the children in Savage Inequalities come from families where money is scarce and so they cannot provide their own materials for schooling. Some teachers in the book buy supplies for the classrooms using their own money, but even that is hard for some to do because of delayed paychecks and budget cuts resulting in teachers having a smaller paycheck. The students in this book learn in facilities that are unsafe to them and depressing. I cannot imagine learning in an environment that smells of sewage and that is dark and gloomy. No views of the outside world that is beautiful that children can look at that will keep them awake and help them day dream and gather ideas. To not be able to use a science lab because of lack of assistants, or not be able to read out of books because they do not offer all the information needed to learn is enough reason for a child to not want to attend school. Why attend school if you are just going to sit in an empty classroom. Without art programs or extracurricular programs in schools a child is left with no option to express themselves. Being on a sports team or being a superior actor may be a childs only way out of the ghetto but no one outside of their living environment will ever get to see how good the students are because of the lack of attention the school gets from the outside world.
Reading about the lack of materials in Savage Inequalities makes me realize how well I have it when attending school. I have clean restrooms to use, a huge beautiful campus to roam, Computers in every room of a building that I enter at school, and so many options of classes that will allow me to gain more knowledge to help me land a good paying career. Lack of materials in a school is one of the first major problems that should be looked at when evaluating what a school needs. A solution to this problem is to actually use money given to schools to buy these materials needed instead of school officials using the money for their own personal reasons. You cannot short school materials because the money is needed for the hospital down the street. School money should be used for schools and money for the city’s needs should be used for just that.
There are three people in a child’s life that are most important to a child’s success in life. The first two people being the child’s parents and the third person being the child’s teacher. Parents care about their child’s well being the most and teachers are supposed to care just as much because they decided to take a job that helps a child to be successful in life. With illiteracy being so high among our students in schools it shows how well a teacher is not doing with teaching and how much they do not care about their students. Bad teachers do not stimulate a child’s brain or motivate children to want to learn. Bad teachers stand in front of a class and lecture what they are told to lecture as opposed to coming up with original ideas to teach that are interesting and fun. They hand out worksheets to be read instead of explaining lessons and materials. A bad teacher has no animation or enthusiasm in their voice when teaching. Bad teachers work for a paycheck only and are not open for change or to listen to change.  They feel that they are the ones in charge and distance any type of personal feelings or compassion that they may have for a student. “It is all a game, keep them in class for seven years and give them a diploma if they make it to the eighth grade…The parents don’t know what’s going on. They’re satisfied.” Some teachers teach for a paycheck only and are not concerned if a child learns or not. Not only are they still getting paid, they continue to keep their job no matter how poor they teach our students. Not teaching a child but passing them on to the next level is more common now days. A lot of school officials know about the practice of passing illiterate children but do not stop it. If a child graduates or continues to a higher level of education than it looks like schools are doing their jobs. If schools are doing their jobs, than they will look successful and continue to receive money.
Solutions to making better teachers, is hiring teachers that are qualified to teach and that have passion. Hire open minded teachers that believe change is beneficial and believe that students are our future. By hiring unmotivated teachers you are stunting a child’s mental growth and holding them back from having a successful future. It’s sad. A child at a young age wants to learn and be independent because of curiosity that children naturally possess, and to keep that urge of curiosity their minds have to continue to get stimulated. In Paulo Freire: Chapter 2 Pedagogy of the Oppresses he states that “A careful analysis of the teacher-student relationship at any level, inside or outside school reveals its fundamentally narrative character. This relationship involves a narrating subject and patient listening objects. The contents... tend in the process of being narrated to become lifeless and petrified.”  What Freire states is teachers are in charge and students are there to listen. The students are made out to be objects in in a game that we call schooling. With the student teaching with no character you make students feel lifeless. The importance of a good teacher is very high. Teachers are used to be mentors in a child life to help them mentally grow.
To keep minority children illiterate and not give them the same opportunities as children that are middle class or higher is setting their futures up for the same cycle of life that their parents and grandparents have had. You are not giving the child a chance to learn and do better for themselves which makes it impossible to break the cycle of living a poor basic minimal life. Without the proper knowledge that school gives, a student cannot build up their mind to be able to compete against another student brought up in a school that is rich with resources. Not being able to compete against another human being keeps you in your same slum and the richer minded student in his richer life. “Few of the graduates or dropouts of those poorer systems, as a consequence, are likely ever to earn enough to buy a home in Great Neck or Manhasset.” (147) You drop out of school or graduate from a school that is of lesser value than an exclusive school than you will forever be non successful. That is how the world is set up and what we are told our whole lives. The conflict with this statement is minority children that cannot afford a decent private school or minority children that have to drop out of school to help their families financially. Society makes getting a career more harder to attain and competitive. It is branded that you are either rich or poor, and if your family is poor than you will most likely stay poor in your adult life. There is no hope for students or help that is easily provided. This unofficial rule of life can be motivation to some children in poor systems but through proof of research it is not motivation, it is accepted simply as life.  Rich children still have to work hard in school and compete but it is only against their own kind which limits the competition. They do not have to compete against a minority who has more life experience or compassion which sets them up to win. A rich child’s future is already set in stone and is protected by money.
Breaking the cycle of the rich staying rich and poor staying poor limits the world of change of ideas and limits the world of future growing cultures. For example, if you have one hundred white people that are rich and one hundred poor people that are Latin the world is even. When white rich adults start having children they multiply their culture of people and also keep that culture protected because they are born into money. When the whites are taught that they should only marry and multiply with men and women of their own race they follow those rules and accept it. When you have a poor Latin family it is harder to think about having more children because it is not affordable. And to be healthy and live a long life is even harder to do because of lack of medical resources and money to live a proper healthy life. You cannot move out of the hood that you grew up in because you cannot afford to, and therefor stick with your same culture of people when it is time to marry. This practice is the long run continues that invisible line of segregation. It is highly important to have minorities working cooperate jobs along with the whites.
To make sure school children are successful in life you have to make sure that the right amount of money is getting spent on school materials and programs, you have to keep an eye on how well teachers are teaching, and you have to treat minority children like they are just as valuable as rich children. The people of government and the people that make up our school officials are not capable of creating change and diversity and slowly that will start to show in our human race. There is so much written proof in the world that backs me up and even more proof if you walk into a minority classroom or city, and compare what you see to schools in the suburb.

Re: Waiting for Superman

Teachers are to blame for the failures of our children's education. Children are around three people for a good portion of their life, their parents and their teacher. Children at a young age want to be so independent and crave new knowledge but lazy teachers that are undeserving to teach stunt our children's mental growth. A child will take whatever you give them and accept easier than adults will, hence children who have accepted the idea of not having a real future versus a teacher alliance that cannot accept reform. A child accepting failure because they do not know better is devastating to watch and is morally wrong to everyone involved. A simple request from our children "a good education" is so easy to talk about, but so hard to give due to politics and power amongst everyone  that is involved. The solution being, have every person on the same page from the classrooms to the government. To open our ears and listen to what children want the most.

Low achieving schools in the bay area

I don't believe that the schools in Savage Inequalities have much in common with the schools that we have in the bay area. The schools in the book had no materials from pen and paper and books all the way up to teachers and broken down campuses. All the schools in Hayward have materials to spare to the children and most of the time the students come to school prepared with their own school supplies. The children in the book weren't able to come to school with supplies at hand. In all classes in Hayward there are enough books to go around, if not at the very least students can share a book two at a time. In East St. Louis if they even have books to share the books are old by many years and do not have all the pages in the book. In Hayward there are enough teachers to go around. You would never find a classroom full of students without a teacher present. A campus in Hayward is a campus of dreams to the children in East St. Louis, who are used to sewage floating around their school and buildings falling apart. 

Schools in Hayward are given chances to improve and are given chances to earn money for schooling if they succeed in improving test scores. In the schools in Savage Inequalities, money is not giving to schools because the money "will be put to bad use," and the money goes to "more important" issues in the neighborhood. Examples of the money going to more important uses are police, hospitals, and Fire Stations. School directors believe the schools in Hayward and in all the bay area would be more successful if they had more quality teachers and more "instructional time," an option that school in Savage Inequalities do not even consider. The students are the ones to blame and are encouraged to drop out of school to make the jobs of teachers easier. Children dropping out of schools weed their own selves out. 

The one common factor that all schools do have is the failures of the students and the drop out rates of students. The lack of qualified teachers. The lack of motivation that a student has for schooling for whatever reasons.

Poorly Funded Public Schools

You cannot properly learn when you physically cannot see examples of what you are learning or cannot practice or write thoughts or ideas down. The most simple of all materials in school matters. Without pencil and paper you cannot write, without chalk a teacher cannot show examples of work for children to see, even having a teacher's assistant is a material that could be highly used in over crowded classrooms. "I have 30 children in a class and cannot supervise them safely. Chemical lab work is unsafe with more than 20 children to a teacher. If I had some lab assistants we could make use of the lab." If you have a run down campus that is unsafe for children you jeopardize their health resulting in children missing school and having health problems down the line. When you have a beautiful fully equipped campus you leave room for successful students that want to learn and attend school.

What makes a teacher bad is no motivation given to students, no passion in what teachers teach, and no patience for school children. A teacher only teaching for a pay check or teaching because they have to equals a bad teacher. A teacher that challenges a child and has the child learning something new on the daily, or at least thinking is a good teacher. Bad teachers exist in schools because they are not punished for the ways they teach and for the things they do not teach. Bad teachers are hired or teach because they have no options to where they teach and cannot be fired so they have to teach subjects they are unqualified for. They are mechanical and teach out of books because that is what school officials make them do most of the time. Good teachers are scarce due to the stress of: lack of materials in schools, children's attitudes and illiteracy, and lack of pay that the teachers receive. "In a somewhat mechanical way, the teacher lifts a picture book of Mother Goose and flips the pages as the children sit before her on the rug." With lack of passion you have students feeling like teachers do not care for them, and if the teachers do not care about their education than why should the children care about their own educations. 

By teaching rich children job skills in school that will benefit them in a cooperate setting prepares them for jobs they will most likely earn in the future. Not teaching the same skills to poor children keeps them at a disadvantage, and takes away all chances they may have at competing against a rich kid for the same type of job. "Competition is the lifeblood of New Trier. But there is one kind of competition that these children will not need to face... they will compete against each other and against the graduates of other schools attended by rich children. They will not compete against the poor." By not providing equal schooling opportunities to poor children you are keeping them in jobs that deal with fast food and hair. None of those jobs pay as well as a job in the cooperate world would. It keeps the rich wealthy and the poor stuck poor. By not rationalizing jobs to both the rich and poor you are not breaking cycles of discrimination and are not taking the steps to make the world a more even place to live in by everyone.   

My Blog

I want my blog to reflect how warm I am. I want it to be simple and clean. Any pictures I post will definitely be my loves of people and things. Any of my thoughts will truly be how I feel.  What is most important to me in this point of my life is to figure out who I am. I have been through hell all throughout my life and I want to learn to leave my past in the past. I am passionate about love, women standing up for themselves (which I am still learning), reading and writing all of my thoughts. The best form of therapy is you rereading your own thoughts. You will naturally solve your problems from doing that and see what things you need to continue to keep in your life or leave out. I am in school to prove to myself that I can do this, satisfy my want to finish college, and to be a role model for my daughter. Out of this class I hope to learn how to better my writing skills and I hope to see things from a different perspective. To become even more open minded. Continuing to be passionate about everything I do in all my classes will help me succeed in my college career.