Effective teachers and leaders are being placed in these schools to help student learn the necessary skills needed and achieve to their highest potential. The new teacher and principal evaluations are assisting with this goal. These evaluations are singling out the highest achieving teachers through the evaluation process as well as tracking the students’ performance and achievement. This evaluation system is encouraging “deeper analysis and use of data to focus on student needs” (Real Progress in Maryland, 2014). According to Astuto, Clark, McGree, Pelton Fernandez, and Read (1994), effective educators demonstrate a level of expertise that surpasses that of a teacher that has just basic skills.
American Dream Essay Ethnic minorities have achieved the American dream to an extent. Democracy has been achieved since voting and registering is at its highest ever amongst ethnic groups and ethnic groups are also more represented in congress. Capitalism has been achieved since income has increased for all ethnic groups. Equality has been achieved since there has been an increase in graduation rates amongst ethnic groups. However, ethnic minorities are still under-represented in congress, whites still register and vote more than any other ethnic group and unemployment is high amongst minorities.
National guidelines must be followed for all students, thus states use standardized testing to evaluate all students within the school system. Often problems arise when students move here from other countries. Each state must measure the educational level of English Language Learners (ELLs) as they enter the school system. Once a student has been tested the school is able to place the child into a classroom that is appropriate for his/her level of comprehension. The state of Virginia uses W-APT, which is a test system set up for specific grade level clusters.
"Today, White non-Hispanics make up a shrinking proportion of public school enrollments and graduates, while students from other groups -- including some who have not been served well historically by our school systems or our colleges and universities, particularly Hispanics -- are seeing their numbers rise," says Dr. David Longanecker, the president of WICHE communicated Ronald Roach, editor of the website Diverse Issues in Higher Education. It has also been proven that the students’ social and academic experience as well as their sense of belonging has a major effect in students’ success. “Students’ interactions in the social and academic systems influence social integration, which, in turn, affects such outcomes as students’ satisfaction; commitment to college; and, ultimately, decisions to drop out.” Presents Sylvia Hurtado professor and director of the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA in the Graduate School of Education and Information Sciences and an Associate Professor of Higher Education in the School of Educational Studies at Claremont Graduate
This situation of unfair admission rate happened not only on the students from Asia, but also on the Asian Americans. “Asian Americans applicants and admittances, on average, score higher on the SAT than students from any other race”, Quynh-Nhu Le, the author from the Harvard Crimson Admissions Blog, points out, “while the percentage of students belonging to most other racial minorities in highly selective colleges have gone up over the years, the percentage of Asian-American students has not”. According to the admission expert, Jean Webb, the Director of Admissions at Yale Law Scholl said: every college needs to make sure it has diversity of the campus. However, why college admissions consider the problem of races? Does race really matter?
Multiculturalism’s Five Dimensions Dr. James A. Banks on Multicultural Education The article presents the five dimensions of Multicultural Education, and how teachers can help transform the world by giving equal opportunities to all students and create positive racial attitudes. New information and relevancy to my personal life - As many teachers I thought multicultural education is mostly a matter of content integration and the extent to which teachers use content from a variety of cultures and groups to illustrate key concepts, principles, and theories in their subject area. In certain subjects, like social studies, there are more opportunities to integrate ethnic and cultural content, so it is difficult to see why learning about multicultural education would be relevant to all teachers. After reading the article I understand that content integration in the curriculum is only the first dimension of multicultural education.
Parents of English Language Learner (ELL) or English as a Second Language (ESL) students have significant communication challenges impacting their lives. Imagine how different your life would be if you spoke no English, and your child was in charge. Social cultural influences effect how all people interact with one another. Children raised in the dominant culture understand what type of behavior is expected in school and other social situations. At home families' traditions, discipline styles, attitudes toward education, and prejudices are very different.
This proportion gradually changes in the majority language until the curriculum is equally divided in both the language by 5th grade. The two-way bilingual immersion program is based on the principle of clear curriculum separation of the two languages of instruction. Teachers do not repeat or translate the subject matter in second language but strengthen concepts taught in one language across the two languages in a spiral curriculum in order to provide cognitive challenge(Thomas & Collier. 1997). The languages of instructions are alternated by theme or content area.
Bilingual Education Bilingual education involves teaching academic content in two languages, in a native and secondary language with varying amounts of each language used in accordance with the program model. (Thomas & Collier, 1997) and (Lindholm-Leary, 2000) The following are several different types of bilingual education program models: • Transitional Bilingual Education. This involves education in a child's native language, typically for no more than three years, to ensure that students do not fall behind in content areas like math, science, and social studies while they are learning English. The goal is to help students transition to mainstream, English-only classrooms as quickly as possible, and the linguistic goal of such programs is English acquisition only. (Thomas & Collier, 1997) and ( Lindholm-Leary, 2000) • Two-Way or Dual Language Immersion Bilingual Education.
“For Once, Blame The Student” The article “For once, blame the student” by Patrick Welsh expresses the idea that American students are falling behind academically not because of the common excuses themselves. I agree with the article and have seen through first-hand experience as a student that a large portion of American students have lost the internal motivation and determination needed to succeed academically, i.e. my 7th period. In “For once, blame the student” Welsh talks about the way students who have emigrated to the United States often do better in school than the middle and upper class American students. Welsh says the reasoning behind the emigrated student’s success is the self determination and motivation to do well in school, as well as hard work exerted by the students.