Grand Challenges of the 21st Century

The White House is asking the citizens of the United States of America to help identify goals for the twenty-first century. Some of the goals that have been mentioned in the past include early detection of dozens of diseases from a saliva sample, solar cells as cheap as paint, and educational software that is as compelling as the best video game and effective as a personal tutor. I really like the idea that the White House is asking the citizens for feedback and not just having politicians make the decision for us.

One of our biggest challenges in the twenty-first century is global climate change. There are many things that are affecting this change. Our reliance on fossil fuels is a big contributing factor to climate change and I think the one area where we can make the biggest difference. We need to make our number one goal changing our global reliance on fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. This will not be an easy task, but I believe it is a goal we can accomplish.

Many aspects of our daily lives rely on fossil fuels. We heat our homes with fossil fuels. Much of our electricity is produced by fossil fuels. Our cars run on fossil fuels. Plastic is made from fossil fuels. Almost everything around us relies on fossil fuels. While this is a big challenge facing our global community, I believe that change is happening. Their are companies that are innovating new technology that is lessening our reliance on fossil fuels.

The greatest challenge we Americans face in the twenty-first century is education. I would like to see American youths lead the world in math and science scores. We have been losing ground every year and at this point we have fallen too far behind to be satisfied with our current education system. We need to have education reform. We need to make education our number one priority.

The students of today are the inventors and leaders of tomorrow and we are letting these students down by not making education our priority. We need to set education funding and not rob from it when tax revenue falls. We cannot say that it is a real priority if we cut our education budget every chance we get. It is easy to make cuts across the board, but we don't need leaders who can make the easy decisions. We need leaders who are willing to sacrifice in order to ensure that the long-term good of the nation is being met. We need leaders who believe that education is the key to our country's future.

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Education Reform?

Earlier this week, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said that the state needed to change policies that spend more money on prisons than on the state’s education systems. On Thursday he signed a major school-reform package. The plan calls for California's lowest-performing schools to be targeted for a sweeping overhaul and it enables the state to try to get piece of $4.35 billion in federal Race to the Top funds.

I agree that our school system needs to be reformed and I do not know enough about this plan yet to make a decision on it. our schools need more funding. I truly believe that funding is necessary for education improvement. We can't be so quick to cut school funding the minute we get into a difficult budget situation. I believe that we should establish a set budget per student and that amount should never be decreased.

California's education spending per student is about 14% less than the national average. As a matter of fact, California ranks 44th out of the 5o states and Washington DC. On K-12 achievement, California ranks 39th and again falls below the national average. I think we can see that there is a positive correlation between education spending and student achievement. The two top performing states, Massachusettes and Maryland spend at least 10% more than the national average per student on education.

We have a long way to go in California to get our school system back where it belongs. I have a real problem with the state taking over schools that are not meeting the state mandated performance levels. The reason I am against the state taking over schools is that they automatically reduce the curriculum, eliminating science and history education to focus on language and mathematics. In my opinion, this is just a band aid that will help the schools get back to the mandated level over time. If you focus more time on language and math, it naturally follows that your scores in those subjects will eventually improve. The problem is that these students will be behind in science and history when they enter middle school.

The plan also enables parents to hold their schools accountable, demand change and may even allow them to move their child to another school. I do have a problem with this part of the plan. The schools that perform the best in an area do so because the parents are more involved in their children's lives. They are more involved in their children's education. Allowing a parent to move their child to another school can have sweeping ramifications.

First. The higher performing schools could experience increased class sizes and maybe even over crowding. This would lead to less individual attention from the teacher which would lead to lower performance.

Secondly. Some of the children who move to these schools might not have the level or parent involvement in their lives that the other students do. This may make them fall behind which would then drop test scores for that school.

Thirdly. If all of the children whose parents have even a little bit of involvement in their lives leave the lower performing schools then what will their student populations looks like? The students who are left there would have virtually no parent involvement in their education. This would lead to a lower performing school. This would create an even larger gap between the high performing and low performing schools.

It is proven that children who receive more individual attention from their teachers and parents perform better in school. They have better test scores and are more well rounded students.

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Parent-Teacher Conference

I am so proud of Meg. Last night was her parent-teacher conference and her teacher had nothing but great things to say about her. She said that Meg is a quite leader and that she is really well behaved and scholarly. Wow! I was about to tell her teacher that she acts totally different at home, but decided not to.

I told her teacher that Meg is still interested in math and that I want to help her keep progressing before she learns to hate it like most kids. I asked her how best to do that. Her answer was not what I was looking for. She mentioned a website to go to that has math games and that was about it. Meg has played those games at school and seem uninterested to do so at home.

I am going to have to really start working with her on her times tables. Then, we need to keep working on her addition and subtraction. I really want all of it to be second nature to her so she does not get frustrated and start to hate it. I wish I had worked harder when I was younger so that I was faster with my math. Helping her should also help me, so it is a win-win situation.

Meg is very strong in the language arts. She really likes to read, has great penmanship and likes to write. Her teacher said that is her strongest area, and I agree. We need to keep encouraging her to read so she loves it like Tina does. I go throug reading spurts, but I would not go as far as to say that I love it. I wish I did, but I just don't. More on the book I am currently reading in a later post.

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