Persuasive Essay-Topic(s) I’d like to explore

Sarah Ponce

Professor Ellis

EN 310

Persuasion Essay

March 21, 2010

Leaving No Child Behind

As educators, it is our responsibility to do our best in educating each and every student that comes through our classroom. There are laws protecting children and attempting to provide every child with equal quality education, no matter their individual differences or specific challenges. Being thrown into a mosh-pit of students is a sink or swim type of situation. Generally speaking, some students simply sink and there’s little administrators can do to assist in rescuing them. Or is there?

            Because of the integration classroom era most school districts now have within their classrooms, students with a variety of abilities who are consolidated into one place and they are all left to the responsibility of a single educator. This pressure on the educator is significant and burdensome especially when her time and efforts are forced to be spread so thin. While educators contort to meet the demands of various needs among students, students fail to receive quality but instead receive effects of teaching in quantity.

            This practice creates a platform of slotted gaps gaping wide. While children who needed extra attention used to slip through the cracks, there are now those children as well as gifted children falling through because they are not being challenged in their abilities. This failing educational system has a severe impact on students, educators and the future outlook for all of society. Since students are being produced on a mass scale in a cookie cutter fashion, there is little wonder where we are headed. In efforts to avoid a colorless and mindless sequence of generations’ action must be taken to up-heave some, perhaps many or most, practices going on inside our educational system. The change begins with those who can influence administration and have a direct impact on the students. Those in the best position to create change are the educators in the classrooms.

            For all of us “almost” teachers, we are new comers trying to arm ourselves with preparedness as we begin to enter the field. There is a resistant force out there and politically correctness within our field that keeps fences up and old practices in place. Bringing in new ideas and new techniques are not always welcomed by seasoned and tenured colleagues so before we step into this hard-knock of reality, there is something I suggest we learn and embrace with ownership to be ready for the unexpected. The questions ares: How do you as an educator, balance your time and resources, assignments in an all inclusive classroom, when you are responsible for a wide range of students from under-achieving to over-achieving, for example a student with Aspergers, Autism or other challenges and high achieving “gifted” children who perform above their classmates or grade level? How do you modify assignments? How do you assess each student if they are given different assignments and how to you move the class forward as a group when students are at such various levels of understanding and performance?

            I would like to learn how to do these things because so many districts have introduced inclusion classrooms ridding segregated ones and this change appears to be what the educational system is moving towards in the big picture.