low achieving schools

While doing my research I was shocked about my findings. I found out that there are a lot of schools who are in need of help and are on the verge of getting shut down. I found out that there are a lot of proposals on the table and grants that the government has but don’t really approve them because of the situation and standing of the schools and a major factor of that is the students who attend these schools. Schools are being rated on how well the students do in test and at the level that they are performing. I believe that’s not fair because these schools don’t have the same privileges as other well equipped schools have, so they shouldn’t be concentrated just this they should concentrate in helping them grow and succeed in school.  

While I was reading and doing research on the subject of low achieving schools in the Bay Area, I found a lot of comparisons that relate to the book that we are reading in class Savage inequalities by Jonathon Kozol. One of the major things that I saw in comparisons to the book was that there are actually a lot of low achieving schools especially in Oakland which is one of the closes cities to where I live from. When I was reading the report I saw a couple of names of school which seemed familiar and I actually know a couple of people who attended one of those schools. When I used to talk to my friends that attended that school they would always complain of how ghetto of a school it was and that the teachers didn’t really cared about the students. When I was reading the reports for grants and money that the government is actually approving there are some schools that aren’t getting any money and if they do get some money they have the money pending. And don’t really know when the school will receive the money. They make these choices because the school has very low percentage of students actually graduating and not improving themselves.  In the book the schools actually receive money but they get the least amount of money compared to schools that are doing well or are in the suburbs.  They get the least amount of money because they are located in the ghettos and kids really aren’t learning anything. Students in these conditions don’t manage to succeed in school and just drop out.

                I read a report in which they were talking in order to save the schools and not shut them down and expect a turnaround they would need to do a lot of remodeling. Not only by remodeling the school but remodeling the whole entire staff from janitors to teachers and even the principals. The way that they explained it in the report is that a major reason that the student don’t do good in school is due to the teachers and the people the staff they around all day. In the schools that are in the verge of getting shut down there reports show that the teachers are not good at all and there are not motivated and they probably just show up to school to receive a pay check because they really don’t care about the children or their success. In the book the teachers either treat their students really bad and don’t really care for their success because in the classrooms the children would be doing one thing and a portion of them will be doing something else while the teacher is reading a magazine or something else not paying attention to the students.  In the report in order to get a good turnover of the schools they specify that they would have to hire new teachers who are motivated and care about teaching and will inspire students to get excited to come to schools. By hiring a new principal they would have better structures and rules that would be followed and reconstruct the school. The government still hasn’t decided to pass this yet though because of the children’s test scores and the way they are learning they are undecided that by investing all this money into the schools that there is actually going to be a turnover. This concept actually happen in the book as well because the government would invest in the schools that were in the ghetto because the children would do good and there would be no need to spend all that money for nothing if they weren’t going to see any turnover in the process. I believe that the reason why students don’t actually do well in the schools because they are forbidden from so many things like computers, textbooks, good teachers, supplies that they actually don’t get because of the money situation of the grants.

                If the government would just give these low achieving schools a better structure and more support specially grants and use them for the better to reconstruct the schools. There is an actually a good possibility that there would be a turnover of children and students getting excited and being motivated to go to school and actually pass the courses and manage to graduate as well. I think that having these options for schools especially replacing the staff because they are actually the ones that interact with the students and are the once whom have the greatest impact on the students to do well. Also by having the correct technology and supplies is an essential way to learn because if they don’t have the latest technology or supplies they actually get left behind because society is advancing so rapidly. If the government would have done all these changes a couple of years back when I was still in high school maybe just maybe my friends that attend these type of schools in Oakland might of managed to graduate and have a better life.