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Why is education policy so contentious? Do conflicts over specific issues in schooling have anything in common and what can help to solve these debates? I believe that education seems to be the primary domestic policy that politicians should focus on in United States at the beginning of the twenty first century. Right now different reforms and proposals to improve the education system for children aged from three to nineteen are taken by the Government.
What are the debates over schooling policy and what problems do the current reforms seek to address? It is said that American public schools are "in crisis, " and they fail now to generate adequate levels of achievement. (Martin Gerry. ) Another problem and debate is over the quality of education and its opportunities in cities compared to the suburbs, in public and private, and across other familiar social divisions. The contemporary push for reforms is aimed for longstanding, potentially conflicting aspirations for American schooling for quality and equality. It is impossible to make the quality of our education the same quality and to raise the education level in all the schools.
It much easier to generate individual schools of high quality rather than widespread high quality schooling. The new reforms gather under the banner of "choice. " (William H. Clune & John F. Witte. ) Rather than assigning students to public schools based on the location of their residence or some other characteristics, choice proposals would let parents and guardians select a school. In so doing, they seek to generate competitive pressures to promote higher quality schooling overall.
In addition, choice proposals are said to afford some measure of equality. Voucher plans are meant to grant to poor and low-income families some of the latitude for selecting schools and some families already enjoyed it. (Matthew Miller. ) Charter plans, offering resources to entrepreneurial groups interested in running innovative public schools, are intended to offer high quality options within the public system. (Phillip T. K. Daniel) Vouchers and charters also risk perpetuating inequality, excluding and segregating children with special needs, however, by skimming from public schools those families motivated enough to take advantage of voucher and charter programs and diverting resources from the project of improving the entire public school system. In some respects, choice reforms try to redress failures of the last wave of school reform, the equality movement driven by law. This push for equality includes racial desegregation as well as gender equity, education rights for children with disabilities, bilingual and bi-cultural programs for English-language-learners, school finance reform, and even equal access for religious as well as non-religious student activities in public school settings.
Each of these reforms tries to ensure equal opportunities for individual students, regardless of their race, gender, disability, linguistic and national background, economic class, or religion. Another debate exists that is focused on the homeschooling and its advantages and disadvantages. The number of home schools have increased significantly in last 20 years in USA as well as other countries of Europe and North America. (Knowles, Marlow and Muchmore, 1992; Thomas, 1998) Most of the debates about homeschooling have been arisen and mostly discuss the problem whether or not homeschooled kids are disadvantaged in the education they receive, versus children who attend regular school (Rudner, 1999). Other issues which have received significant attention are the legality of such education, the motivations of parents to homeschool, and what should be the ways in which homeschooling should be done.
In most of these discussions, the implications of homeschooling for citizenship are downplayed in favor of educational or methodological concerns. It is debated that the form and content of education among homeschoolers is clearly different from what children receive in school, but it is not an inferior experience. Homeschoolers, are believed to get the same level of education and become the same good citizens in our society. It also has been stressed that compulsory schooling is not a necessity to become the well educated and good citizen. It was said that the homeschooling system stresses the importance of family and participation in public activities as the basis of their understanding of the good citizen. In conclusion I want to say that one book called The American Dream and the Public Schools that I have recently is a remarkable one.
It examines the sources and influences of the policy debates in schooling and it gave me a deep understanding of such issues. This book examines issues that have excited and divided Americans for years, including desegregation, school funding, testing, vouchers, bilingual education, multicultural education, and ability grouping. These seem to be separate problems, but much of the contention over them comes down to the same thing -- an apparent conflict, rooted in the American dream, between policies designed to promote each student's ability to pursue success and those designed to insure the good of all students or the nation as a whole. The authors show how policies to promote individual success too often benefit only those already privileged by race or class, and too often conflict, unnecessarily, with policies that are intended to benefit everyone.
At the end of the book, the authors examine the impact of our nation's rapid racial and ethnic transformation on the pursuit of all of these goals, and they propose ways to make public education work better to help all children succeed and become the citizens we need. Bibliography Jennifer L. Hochschild and Nathan Scovronick (1999) The American Dream and the Public Schools. New York: Knowles, J.
G. , S. Marlow and J. A. Muchmore (1992) From Pedagogy to Ideology: Origins and Phases of Home Education in the United States, 1970 - 1990.
American Journal of Education, 100 (1): 195 - 235 Thomas, A. (1998). Educating Children at Home. London: Cassell Rudner, L. M. (1999). Scholastic achievement and demographic characteristics of home school students in 1998.
Education Policy Analysis Archives, 7 (8). [online]. Available at web Martin Gerry, Service Integration and Beyond: Implications for Lawyers and Their Training, in Law and School Reform: Six Strategies for Promoting Educational Equity, 244, 247 (Jay P. Herbert ed. , 1999) William H. Clune & John F. Witte. (1990).
Choice and Control in American Education: The Theory of Choice and Control in Education 285 Boulder: Westview Press Matthew Miller. A Bold Experiment to Fix City Schools. The Atlantic Monthly, July 1999, at 15, 15 - 17. Phillip T. K.
Daniel (1993) A Comprehensive Analysis of Educational Choice: Can the Polemic of Legal Problems be Overcome? 43 DePaul L. Rev. 1, 17.
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Research essay sample on Public Schools American Dream
