Urban Charter Schools Often Succeed. Suburban Ones Often Don’t. Charter schools are controversial. But are they good for education? Rigorous research suggests that the answer is yes for an important, underserved group: low-income, nonwhite students in urban areas. These children tend to do better if enrolled in instead of traditional public schools. There are exceptions, of course. We can’t predict with certainty that a particular child will do better in a specific charter or traditional public school. Social scientists, like medical researchers, can confirm only whether, on average, a given treatment is beneficial for a given population. Charter schools are publicly funded but not bound by many of the rules that constrain traditional public schools. Charters, for example, can easily try new curriculums or teaching strategies, or choose to have a longer school day.
Measuring the effectiveness of any school is challenging. This is so-called selection bias, the greatest challenge in evaluating the effectiveness of schools. Photo. 3 Ways to Help Rural Schools | US News Opinion. Urban schools command the vast majority of attention from policymakers and school reformers. With consistently poor performance and cross-cutting problems such as poverty, lack of health care access and hunger, inner-city schools have been the blinking light on the dashboard of American education for more than a generation. But it’s not only city schools that need our attention and help. One-third of American schools are rural, and they serve 11 million students. These schools face many of the same challenges that urban school districts do, including a high proportion of low-income students, low educational attainment among parents and low college attendance among high-school graduates.
In fact, students in rural communities are likelier than their peers to live in poverty and only 27 percent go on to college. One roadblock standing in the way of improving rural schools is that we simply don’t know enough about the unique challenges and opportunities they face. JennieSR. MLA Formatting and Style Guide. Coming Soon: A new look for our same great content! We're working hard this summer on a redesign of the Purdue OWL. Worry not! Our navigation menu and content will remain largely the same. Summary: MLA (Modern Language Association) style is most commonly used to write papers and cite sources within the liberal arts and humanities. Contributors: Tony Russell, Allen Brizee, Elizabeth Angeli, Russell Keck, Joshua M. The following overview should help you better understand how to cite sources using MLA eighth edition, including the list of works cited and in-text citations.
Please use the example at the bottom of this page to cite the Purdue OWL in MLA. Creating a Works Cited list using the eighth edition MLA is a style of documentation based on a general methodology that may be applied to many different types of writing. Thus, the current system is based on a few guiding principles, rather than an extensive list of specific rules. Here is an overview of the process: Author Said, Edward W. Number. Title I - Improving The Academic Achievement Of The Disadvantaged. Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (20 U.S.C. 6301 et seq.) is amended to read as follows: TITLE I--IMPROVING THE ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT OF THE DISADVANTAGED The purpose of this title is to ensure that all children have a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to obtain a high-quality education and reach, at a minimum, proficiency on challenging State academic achievement standards and state academic assessments.
(a) LOCAL EDUCATIONAL AGENCY GRANTS- For the purpose of carrying out part A, there are authorized to be appropriated — (1) $13,500,000,000 for fiscal year 2002; (2) $16,000,000,000 for fiscal year 2003; (3) $18,500,000,000 for fiscal year 2004; (4) $20,500,000,000 for fiscal year 2005; (5) $22,750,000,000 for fiscal year 2006; and (6) $25,000,000,000 for fiscal year 2007.
- The Future of Children - How Can Urban School Districts Improve the Quality of Their Teachers? Urban districts have tried various initiatives, ranging from recruitment to retention to professional development, to improve the quality of their workforce. Some programs take a free-market approach to encourage more teachers to enter the profession; others rely on more prescriptive regulations or guidelines. Many policies target specific types of teacher candidates (for example, those from elite colleges, or with particular language skills, subjects, or grade levels), while others are broad in scope. Despite the many reform initiatives, however, researchers have gathered little evidence on the effectiveness of these programs. Supply-Oriented Strategies Many of the most common strategies focus on increasing the supply of teacher candidates. Higher Salaries. Improved Working Conditions. Yet another way to attract and, especially, to retain teachers is to change the structure of the teaching career.
For Public Schools, Segregation Then, Segregation Since: Education and the Unfinished March. Fifty years ago last January, George C. Wallace took the oath of office as governor of Alabama, pledging to defy the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision prohibiting separate public schools for black students. “I draw the line in the dust,” Wallace shouted, “and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever” (Wallace 1963).
Eight months later, at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Martin Luther King Jr. set forth a different vision for American education. “I have a dream,” King proclaimed, that “one day right down in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.” Wallace later recanted, saying, “I was wrong. They ought to be over, but Wallace’s 1963 call for a line in the dust seems to have been more prescient than King’s vision. The diversion from integration toward compensatory education Embed. On Teacher Pay, City vs. Suburbs Isn't That Simple.
For the last five months, the union representing New York City teachers has been peppering newspapers, radio and prime-time television with advertisements that make a powerful argument for raising salaries: city teachers earn a whopping 25 percent less than those in the surrounding suburbs, the ads say. The union is preparing to negotiate a new contract with the city, and it is hoping to rally public support with the $3 million worth of ominous ads. One claims that as a result of the salary gap, ''many experienced teachers in New York City are being cherry-picked'' by suburban school districts. Another declares that the salary gap is ''why we are facing a crisis of unmatched proportion,'' a reference to the union's prediction that 54,000 teachers will leave city schools over the next five years. But the facts are more complicated than the advertisements let on. The average entry-level salary in those counties was $34,068 in 1998-99, compared with $30,203 in New York City.
Who are Urban Students? Cultural and Linguistic Diversity America's two largest cities, New York City and Los Angeles, highlight the diversity of urban populations relative to the nation as a whole. Inner-city schools and colleges are ethnically diverse. Compared to the national average, a greater percentage of the urban population is foreign-born, or first-generation American, and speaks a language other than English at home. Thus many urban students lack a shared linguistic and cultural definition with that of their peers and their instructors.
This cultural and linguistic diversity is one of the greatest challenges that an urban instructor faces - what analogies will work for the class as a whole, what topics will engage all students, and how can assignments best assist English language learners? Economic and Pre-College Challenges. Disparaties. Sociology Differences in Urban and Suburban Schools. The disparities between urban and suburban schools are abundant. Taking a closer look, one will note that the educational differences as well as the educational facilities, are as diverse as the children who attend these schools. Upgrades to highway systems right across the country back in the 1960’s to the 1970’s, allowed middle class to upper class families to relocate to the suburbs. They left a host of school districts for what they deemed ‘greener pastures.’ Thus two completely different types of school systems emerged, one for the inner cities and another which took care of the suburbs.
So different were these in regards to funding that a myriad of people cried, “inequality!” The public school system is primarily funded by the state, federal and local governments. With more funding we note competitive salaries for educators, class sizes drop enabling children to have more one on one educational structure. Discipline comes into the equation when classes are too large. - The Future of Children - A Portrait of Urban Districts and Schools What is an urban school? For many Americans, the term urban school evokes an image of a dilapidated school building in a poor inner-city neighborhood populated with African American or Hispanic children. How accurate is that image? By definition, of course, urban schools are located in large central cities.
But although these communities are often characterized by high rates of poverty, poverty itself is not unique to urban areas and can be found, in particular, in many schools in the nation’s rural areas. In this section I highlight key features of urban schools and school districts that distinguish them from both rural and suburban districts. I then show how those features contribute to the staffing challenges faced by these districts. The statistics shown in table 1 present a detailed portrait of urban schools and communities. Poverty, as noted, is a feature of rural districts as well as urban districts.
Sizing Up Test Scores. One of the basic critiques of using test scores for accountability purposes has always been that simple averages, except in rare circumstances, don’t tell us much about the quality of a given school or teacher. The high scores of students in a wealthy suburban New Jersey school will reflect the contributions of well-educated parents, a communal emphasis on academic achievement, a stable learning environment at home, and enriching extracurricular opportunities. Likewise, the low scores of students in an inner-city Newark school will reflect the disadvantages of growing up poor. The urban school might have stronger leadership and a more dedicated teaching staff, yet still score substantially lower than the suburban school.
As a result, in the past decade researchers have grown interested in ways of measuring and comparing the gains in academic achievement that a school or teacher elicits–in other words, a school or teacher’s “value added.” •Measured gains are noisy and unstable. Rural Education. Published: August 9, 2004 Updated June 15, 2011 The plight of inner-city schools has long garnered attention among education reformers. But rural schools, and the large chunk of the nation’s students who attend them, face challenges every bit as daunting as their urban counterparts.
More schools were in rural locations than in either cities or suburbs in 2009-2010, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Those high numbers, combined with the potential advantages of small schools and the challenges that rural schools face in meeting certain mandates of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, have prompted experts to realize that rural education merits increased attention and policy consideration. It is important to keep in mind that rural schools differ greatly from one another. However, the nationwide picture obscures achievement levels that, in fact, vary greatly from state to state. Rural schools have long struggled with attracting and retaining teachers. Williams, D. d03234. Large Urban-Suburban Gap Seen in Graduation Rates. It is no surprise that more students drop out of high school in big cities than elsewhere. Now, however, a nationwide study shows the magnitude of the gap: the average high school graduation rate in the nation’s 50 largest cities was 53 percent, compared with 71 percent in the suburbs.
But that urban-suburban gap, which in part is due to hundreds of failing city schools that some researchers call dropout factories, was far wider in some areas. In Cleveland, for instance, where the gap was largest, only 38 percent of high school freshmen graduated within four years, compared with 80 percent in the Cleveland suburbs, the report said. In Baltimore, which has the nation’s second-largest gap, 41 percent of students graduate from city schools, compared with 81 percent in the suburbs. New York also had a large gap, with 54 percent of freshmen graduating within four years from schools in the city, compared with 83 percent from suburban high schools. Continue reading the main story. Minority Student Recruitment, Retention and Career Transition Practices.
References Introduction In the aftermath of anti-affirmative action legislation, with the recognition of the value that diversity brings to higher education and the workforce, and with the looming shortage of workers to meet labor demands, institutions of higher learning, private and public corporations and organizations, and professional associations have a renewed interest in the best recruitment and retention practices and programs to prepare ethnically and racially diverse students to enter professional careers. As pointed out by Lee (1991) in a comprehensive review of the recruitment and retention literature, these issues are not new.
Indeed, the majority of the recruitment and retention issues discussed by Lee (1991) are still relevant to the recruitment and retention of minority students today. This paper reviews the literature and highlights some of the key issues related to the recruitment and retention of minority students and professionals. Demographics The Impact of Diversity.