Profiling In Schools

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Glenda Bachelor Dr. Isaac English 101 25 May 2014 Is profiling a problem in our justice system or does it begin in our schools? “This is Natalie’s file, she’s in the fourth grade, and has a 1st grade reading level,” said Selena. Selena was the program director for our church’s literacy program. My first year in Clovis, New Mexico, I volunteered to help the 1st – 5th graders at the local elementary school with reading improvement. As I delved into Natalie’s file, the prominent words were “English is her second language”. All of her teachers from first grade on major comment was “English is her second language”. I looked at her test scores and samples of her work and tried to see if I could establish a pattern that would help me help…show more content…
It’s natural to walk into a store and look around for someone to help you and choosing according to who you think will be most helpful. How do we determine this? Teachers are faced with the same dilemma. With so many children to cater to do they choose to help the children that appear to be most interested in learning or are easiest to deal with? It appears that the problem is not so cut and dry. According to a study done by Richard Ingersoll, University of Pennsylvania, the 56% of the teacher’s dissatisfaction with teaching prominently minority/low-income students was that they weren’t paid enough. (Renewing our Schools, Securing our Future Nov. 2004) More than half the teachers felt that they weren’t paid enough to have to deal with these children. In some cases the problem doesn’t lie with the individual teachers but with policy or decisions being made from a district, city or state level. According to a report released by the Applied Research center, “Students of color are subjected to racist policies that limit their opportunity to learn and ability to succeed in life. Racial Profiling and Punishment in U.S. Public Schools, outlines how excessive security measures subvert academic excellence and racial equity for students of color in U.S. public schools.” (Race Forward,…show more content…
What types of checks and balances are in place that can detect such problems? The Institute for Educational Sciences states that 13% of youth between the ages of 3 – 21 have learning disabilities. Anthea Lipsett of The Guardian writes, “Teacher training providers rely too heavily on schools to train teachers, Ofsted found. But less than half of the schools the inspectorate surveyed provide new trainees with a good induction into teaching pupils with learning difficulties and disabilities (LDD). Instead, inductions often focus on the priorities of an individual school so that teachers gain experience in the areas of specific concern to their workplace, but not wide enough coverage of learning difficulties to win qualified teacher status, the report warned. This report confirms the problem that several of the children had enrolled in our reading program. Our tutors went into the program not looking for excuses to why these “underprivileged” children could not learn but how we could help “just children” to learn. The training that our tutors were required to go through was a 2-week program, 2 hours a day that enabled us to help identify problems and help move them along and we were not trained
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