The historical influences seem to outnumber theoretical influences when looking at the impact to schools. The most obvious historical influences is the integration of schools with blacks and whites. Although largely overlooked today due to the fact that we are now one to two generations from that first integration, it is not a situation that is in the forefront of most students. Coming from a predominately white state, there was only one black student during my four year high school education. I did not have the opportunity to have interactions with other races until I left Maine and joined the United States Army. The integration of schools not only gave the black students the access to the better schools and materials that had been reserved for the whites, but it also gave the white students the opportunity to be exposed to entirely different culture.
The issue that has greatly impacted students today is the security of the schools. With the rash of school shootings, security is on the mind of students, parents, teachers and administrators alike.
Drugs and alcohol remains in the forefront of most people's minds when it comes to our schools. Students continue to experiment with both drugs and alcohol throughout high school and into college.
Of course as we move forward in research and discovery we have to constantly look at the material we are teaching and how we are presenting that material.
The theoretical influences on our school would be the open versus closed classroom, the continued use of a grade system, i.e. K, 1, 2, 3, and leaving classes co-ed. Without prior knowledge and a design plan in mind, the use of the closed classroom made the most sense when looking at how we wanted to design our classrooms. The use of the standardized grading system of K-12 was one that is the most comfortable and one with a proven methodology. There is a new study in Alaska demonstrating that students perform equally well when changing from a system of grades to an open system where students progress through a set of steps and tasks. This is system that may begin to work in rural school systems and it will be interesting to see what long term studies will show about this new system. A second change has been separating boys and girls and teach them based on the methods that work better for each group. This is another area that does not have any long term studies to show effectiveness or ineffectiveness so we chose to stick with the traditional mixed classroom.
Has anyone attended a school where there have been only white students?
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3 comments:
Great posting. I look forward to seeing what other theories and influences you think are important and if any take higher priority than the ones you mention. There are plenty more to come during your remaining education classes and beyond. I'm not sure we'll get a chance to address your question, but it's an interesting one.
After hearing and reading of all of the different shifts that have occurred during the past years it was more difficult to pick only one, but still believe that the ones from the mid 1960's forward have had the greatest impact on what we see in schools these days. After talking with more of the students, many are from larger communities than what I grew up in so many had classrooms with members of various races. Combine that with the increasing numbers of immigrants to Maine and the diversity will continue to increase over the next decade. The thought that comes to mind is are we doing the best for all of our students with having menus and such printed in multiple languages or should there be a bigger push for english only?
Wow. Great question. Or should there be a push for all Americans to know two languages--one English and the other one of your choice--which might help us be more united as a country while being less ethnocentric.
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