I think one of the biggest barriers in bringing education to everyone is the fact that we can neither fire a teacher who won't teach, or reward a teacher who is amazing! How can we expect our teachers to be enthusiastic every day about teaching everything they can, when they know that they have the same pay and benefits as the teacher across the hall who reads a book instead of teaching? Another barrier is the number of students to teachers, especially for those who are developmentally challenged. A bad part of that in particular is when the teacher attempts to help those who are developmentally challenged, the other students suffer! It seems like an impossible barrier to knock down.
I believe the biggest priority should be the ability to reward and discipline teachers who deserve it! While I don't believe that the teachers union should be abolished, I do believe it needs changes, big ones. Tenure should be deserved, not given out freely! This is something that everyone is responsible for, starting with the individual, working it's way up all the way through the government. It shouldn't be a local thing, it should be national.
The role of parents is to support their children, listen to them when they talk about how their teachers are, because no one will know how well the teachers teach if the children aren't listened to. Another role is to help the children, because while some things may come to some children naturally, everyone has a weak spot, so everyone needs help. Just because they have teachers doesn't mean the parents shouldn't help as well. This is how they can improve, by becoming more involved and listening more, as well as helping more.
To attract great teachers, you have to attract teachers in general, and be able to determine between them. There is no fool-proof system to attract only great teachers, only a system to figure out those that are great and those that aren't. If we could have a 7-day testing period, where a certain number of teachers try to do their job, and do it well, it may sort out some of the really bad ones. From there, you could have a 6-month trial period, and from there, yearly evaluations from the students, so that if a teacher starts to slack off, you can give them a warning. To retain the good teachers, you have to make them feel appreciated, such as potlucks for the teachers, cards, anything, no matter how small, to make them feel good on a daily basis.
To collaborate towards better outcomes, we, as a community, need to stand together and help as much as we can. Get to know our neighbors, and if they have children, collaborate with them so that if you are good at helping a child with English, and your neighbor on the left is good at helping with math, and your neighbor on the right is good at helping with social studies, you can get together to help their children while they help with your child. We can also be there for our neighbors in tough times, so that the children are not as badly affected.
An individual can start to help by simply getting to know people, spreading the knowledge about our public education system and how it could be better, and getting a group together to discuss it and hold meetings. By forming a group, one person can turn into thirty, and several groups can turn into hundreds of people, all voicing the same thing, which can make a big impact.
In the film, they did have a child who received one on one reading help, and showed how, in a good learning environment, the children were much better at reading than they were supposedly in class, in that bad learning environment.
The business community often donates money to local schools, and if you can get their support, they can also sponsor your group to gain attention to the fact that schools cannot fire the bad teachers. This is something I am sure most people don't know, and the business community can help spread the facts.
I also wanted to mention that I found the comparison of breaking the sound barrier to breaking the achievement gap a very vivid and easy to understand comparison, and it did truly stick with me.
I thought that this quote had a very good point: “You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives.“ ~Clay P. Bedford.
This picture, to me, really demonstrates how a teacher's determination to help their students learn can have a huge impact-
This article about teaching students with disabilities was very interesting! I thought it was a very good idea, and hopefully schools will be open to trying more approaches. http://ida.lib.uidaho.edu:3304/ehost/detail?vid=5&hid=17&sid=d1a44a68-cdb0-466d-a015-11509a98e6ab%40sessionmgr14&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=aph&AN=59289463.
This youtube video explains learning styles, and I thought it was a very interesting video, and it really is important to understand learning styles because if you don't, you probably won't be able to teach your entire class effectively. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNxCporOofo.
This site helps people teach children with Autism, which I thought was a very good idea because it's not only the poverty-stricken people who have trouble, it's also the learning-impaired children. http://www.autism-pdd.net/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=2241&PN=1.
This last article I thought was very informative on making teaching more fun- http://smarticus.hubpages.com/hub/What-is-Power-Teaching.
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