Bettering the Community with Education
Cara Price
October 8, 2014

Bettering the Community with Education There are many reasons I would like to become an educator. One of the most important reasons is bettering the community. The No Child Left Behind Program may have been a good idea in theory but it is forcing teachers to pass students who are not understanding what they are being taught. Children are being passed to the next grade even when they should have to repeat it. There are many people who graduate high school with the bare minimum learned and to me that is not what being a good teacher is about. There are many things in high school that I had to complete in order to pass but I do not remember most of them. I remember when I first tried to go to college. I was enrolled in a traditional university and one of my classes was chemistry. The first week I was in this class the professor told us that what he would be going over was just a recap of what we should have learned in high school. I quickly found out that I had never learned any of these things. I was having a hard time keeping up and started to fail the class rather rapidly. I was trying to get help from fellow classmates and other resources but it did not help me much. Because of the lack of knowledge provided for me during my four years in high school, I got scared and felt I had no other option but to drop out. I felt like high school did nothing to prepare me for college. I do not know how many people feel like this when they do make it to their first year of college but it is not a pleasant feeling. Some need comfort in knowing they have the information needed to succeed in college courses.
I have the desire to become a teacher and work in a lower quality high school so I can try to change these things. I would like to work my way up in the Department of Education so I can help children in the future. I intend to change the way they are making people teach certain things, and how they treat students differently depending on their level of knowledge. Anthony Cody describes this quite well in his online blog. Cody (2013), “I first started thinking seriously about national education policy when No Child Left Behind became law, and my school was labeled a failure. Our staff meetings began to be dominated by ‘data’, and experts told us to focus on the students who could improve our ratings, and ignore those who were too far behind to reach proficiency. I was not alone. Teachers and parents across the country became widely dissatisfied and raised their voices. NCLB became a ‘toxic brand’. The rallying cry then was to make sure teachers ‘had a seat at the table’ when important policy decisions were made” (1).
Cal Thomas with the Tribune Media Services stated, “With what we are spending on education, the adults deserve a better product and the kids are entitled to a better education, which is their best chance at a good life.” (Thomas, 2007, p. A17) This could not be truer. Everyone has to pay for education at some point. There are all kinds of different fees that need to be paid when signing your kids up for each school year. With the way schools are these days it is almost better to homeschool our children versus paying the ridiculous fees that