The Buzz of Public Education

After leaving our last lecture I felt compelled to write about how I felt about the things that we discussed. (Interestingly enough I couldn't wait to jot down extra info that we didn't get to share in class.) Much of the class we spoke about an article by Harold Hodgkinson about demographics in education. Many of the statistics that he spoke of were reiterated from the last article we read, "The Public Education Primer." Although it seems as Prof. Goldstein explains that he is the creme de la creme of education demographics so it appears what I just said may be vice versa. In class we discussed many of the key terms in his article, in my opinion the most interesting one was transiency, this is a term also can be interchanged with mobility. When our professor told us about the example from Newark I was floored. For those who may have been spacing off about what you were going to do this weekend, or just weren't there let me fill you in. Some time a few years ago Newark's mobility rate within their schools was at 40%. This 40% means that if at the beginning of the year a school has 100 students and at the end they still have 100, BUT 40 students are new and 60 are old, this is showing us how much more stress this students as well as teachers are having. The way that I saw it was, how can these children be moving from school to school and not having problems with it? They must have at least gripes about it, each and every school has a different curriculum, while the state may try and regulate what the students are learning, nothing is perfect. While I find myself to be an educated person, I also find myself incredibly naive to the kinks in our education system. After reading both articles and hearing the experiences that Prof. Goldstein has to offer it makes me learn more and more about why I might possibly want to teach.