Blog 5: $5 Billion in Grants Offered to Revisit Teacher Policies

Using the Race to the Top school improvement competition as a model, the Obama administration is proposing a $5 billion competitive grant program.  This program will encourage teachers by keeping good teachers on the job and offering rewards to the most excellent ones.  It will organize officials, union leaders, and teachers to address salary increases, permanent status rules, and improving professional development.  On Wednesday, Arne Duncan, secretary of education, will unveil a program meant to promote the Respect Project (Recognizing Educational Success, Professional Excellence and Collaborative Teaching).  They plan to help teachers have more of a voice in federal, state, and local education policy and also to rebuild, in a sense, their profession.  States will be allowed to design their own plans for improving teachers and the federal Education Department will select the ones showing the most potential for multiyear funding.  This project is designed to focus only on teachers—to concentrate on the needs of experienced teachers and to make teaching a more attractive career overall.  Steps such as increasing salaries and having more selective teacher colleges hope to draw more interest to students to become teachers in the future.  They want people to view teachers in a light of professionalism—where they are respected as “thinkers, leaders, and nation-builders.”  With hopes that this competitive grant program will give states an incentive to come up with the most pioneering ideas, Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, thinks that this will attract top notch teaching candidates for the future and help advance professional development. 

Although this program is seemingly attractive because of the hopes that teaching will begin to be held in much higher regards among people seeing career paths, the government must put their money where their mouth is and make this happen.  We all know that this has gone on for decades but somehow we must make teaching better seeing as how this profession is burdened with the most pressure in securing our economic future as a nation.  As I read this article I can only hope that this program is successful because teachers are an extremely important asset to our future and they need to be held in higher respects in order to be certain that children are being educated to the highest of standards. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/15/education/white-house-proposes-5-billion-in-grants-to-overhaul-teaching.html

Blog 4: Educational development: One in four children 'at risk'

In the article Educational development: One in four children 'at risk' the author, Hannah Richardson discusses how the amount of risk factors that children as exposed to will either strengthen or decline their level of education.  Some of these risk factors included financial stress, depression, drug and alcohol abuse, and low skills.  In the Millennium Cohort Studies, Dr Ricardo Sabates and Professor Shirley Dex helped to examine 18,000 families to see how many children were exposed to these risks.  About 28% of families with children were being exposed to two or more risk factors.  Widening these results to all of the UK would suggest that 192,000 children have been growing up in at-risk households for ten years.  These risk factors can certainly affect a child's development.  A longitudinal study shows that children who have grown up in a household containing two or more risk factors are seen to have lesser behavioural development and vocabulary skills by ages three and five.  Although accumulated risk factors do affect education, if a child is exposed to just one, development tends to rarely be affected.  The government wants to reach out to families and intends on helping 120,000 of England's most troubled families by 2015. 

This current event is very important to people all around the world.  It's significance is held in the fact that many families are exposed and are exposing their children to risk factors every day, everywhere.  Children who are different from mainstream society-- language, religion, race/ethnicity, etc. are found to face more struggles when it comes to schooling.  From a sociological perspective, most all attributes of being at risk are intertwined with social class.  Children who have more privilege receive more attention to their education.  But before their education comes their home life and having this affected by risk factors before school age can make for a more difficult time when enrolled in school.  Government should take steps to educated families about the factors that they could be exposing their children to and how these can affect their future.  

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-16906435