Although everyone seems to have a different opinion on how to fix public education, the one thing that most people can agree upon is that the United States’ public education system has problems, and lots of them. This is the issue that I want to address in my next year of school here at UC. Public schools, especially those in the city, are facing a severe shortage of resources. Funding for many schools is being cut, or was never enough to begin with. Teachers are overworked and underpaid, have few resources in the classroom or must pay for their own, and have too many students to give each the attention they need to reach their full potential. On top of this, an increasing number of students live in poverty (as shown by the graphic below) or don’t receive the support that they need from home. This is an important issue to me because I know that I could not have made it to the point that I am at today without the great education that I received as a child. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the teachers I had, the schools I went to, and the support my family was able to give me were privileges that not everybody is able to share. My goal is to engage this problem at the local level, in Cincinnati schools, to help solve the public education problem and give students what they need to succeed.
|
The goal of education is not to increase the amount of knowledge but to create the possibilities for a child to invent and discover... - Jean Piaget
|
I used the “Research” and the “Community Engagement” thematic areas to find opportunities that I could use to help solve this problem. With “Research” in mind, a great opportunity to learn more about public education is to discover and analyze how its problems specifically manifest in Cincinnati public schools. I could step out of my comfort zone by not only researching facts and statistics about the schools, but by also interviewing administrators and educators that actually work there. Talking to teachers would help me gain a better understanding of how the big picture problems, such as budget cuts and poverty, directly affect the education of the students that they are working with every day.
Another opportunity, this time under the “Community Engagement” thematic area, that I could use to help solve this problem would be to directly tutor and mentor younger students from Cincinnati. There are many great programs in Cincinnati, such as the Wesley Chapel Mission Center and UC Scholars PREP, that help match college students to local kids for academic tutoring and general mentoring. A program like this would allow me to step out of my comfort zone by having a direct connection with a local student who may be struggling in public education and who may need someone to help guide them one-on-one. I would also have the benefit of learning about their education issues first-hand, and being able to help directly fix these problems in the student’s life. My goal for this next year, in either the spring term or the fall 2018 term, is to actually participate in one of these programs or any other tutoring service in a local elementary or middle school. I want to form a one-on-one connection with a student and give them the support that they may be lacking from their home or school to ultimately help them succeed in their education.
Two of my strengths that I could use and develop in these opportunities are “empathy” and “learner”. “Learner” would especially come into play in researching the problems in Cincinnati’s public education system. The very definition of research is trying to learn about and understand something. Right now, I feel that my “learner” strength is very academically based, as I’ve usually used it in school, but I think that I could grow and develop that strength by interviewing educators, like I described above, and expand it to include learning by talking to and listening to other people’s experiences. The other opportunity that I described before, tutoring students, would also develop my “empathy” strength. I think that to really have an impact on the student, I would not only want to teach them academic skills, but also understand the issues that may be happening in their school or at home that are also affecting their performance in school. This would allow me to use my “empathy” strength to relate to their struggle and hopefully to be better prepared to help them navigate their problems.
Finally, I think that all that I’ve learned about reflection in my Gateway course will also help me to be part of the solution to this problem. Reflection may have been one of the first lessons in the course, but I think that it had the greatest impact on the way that I think. It taught me to reflect on my past as not just something that is done and over with, but as something that is still affecting me today. It taught me to look at all the details and to not just look at them as facts, but to also analyze how they have an impact on my feelings, values, and ideas. I think these skills, even though they specifically apply to reflection, relate very well to the problems that exist in public education. To solve those problems, we need to reflect on what caused them, what situations existed that changed the system, and how issues in other areas, such as poverty or policy, contribute to those in education. I think that it’s important that we understand and reflect on why the problems in education exist, before we decide on solutions. For example, it’s easy to see that a child is struggling in school, but it’s harder to reflect on way they are struggling. Maybe their parent has to work multiple jobs, so they can’t help their child with homework, or their teacher doesn’t have the resources to give them individual attention. I think that reflecting on and understanding these underlying causes will ultimately help me solve the larger problem.
Two of my strengths that I could use and develop in these opportunities are “empathy” and “learner”. “Learner” would especially come into play in researching the problems in Cincinnati’s public education system. The very definition of research is trying to learn about and understand something. Right now, I feel that my “learner” strength is very academically based, as I’ve usually used it in school, but I think that I could grow and develop that strength by interviewing educators, like I described above, and expand it to include learning by talking to and listening to other people’s experiences. The other opportunity that I described before, tutoring students, would also develop my “empathy” strength. I think that to really have an impact on the student, I would not only want to teach them academic skills, but also understand the issues that may be happening in their school or at home that are also affecting their performance in school. This would allow me to use my “empathy” strength to relate to their struggle and hopefully to be better prepared to help them navigate their problems.
Finally, I think that all that I’ve learned about reflection in my Gateway course will also help me to be part of the solution to this problem. Reflection may have been one of the first lessons in the course, but I think that it had the greatest impact on the way that I think. It taught me to reflect on my past as not just something that is done and over with, but as something that is still affecting me today. It taught me to look at all the details and to not just look at them as facts, but to also analyze how they have an impact on my feelings, values, and ideas. I think these skills, even though they specifically apply to reflection, relate very well to the problems that exist in public education. To solve those problems, we need to reflect on what caused them, what situations existed that changed the system, and how issues in other areas, such as poverty or policy, contribute to those in education. I think that it’s important that we understand and reflect on why the problems in education exist, before we decide on solutions. For example, it’s easy to see that a child is struggling in school, but it’s harder to reflect on way they are struggling. Maybe their parent has to work multiple jobs, so they can’t help their child with homework, or their teacher doesn’t have the resources to give them individual attention. I think that reflecting on and understanding these underlying causes will ultimately help me solve the larger problem.
Find more information about problems in the US public education system here: