It's the Mission, Not the Mandates by Fast Amy;

Author:Fast, Amy;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

What the Public Wants

When we think of the public that public education is tasked to serve, we often think of community members, parents, and students. Yet, it was not community members, parents, or students who decided on the public school mission of helping U.S. businesses compete in the global economy. Ironically, it was not even community members, parents, or students who led the charge of closing the achievement gap between low-income and minority students and their peers.

Rather, these decisions are made by complex political processes, which are designed to represent the public interests. It is, however, worthwhile to invest in the unique needs and hopes of individual stakeholders and various stakeholder groups because they are the ones who operate in the trenches of the public school system, and without their buy-in the promise of our public schools stops at the steps of the capital building.

Families’ Desires

Let us begin by looking at the desires of our public school students. Largely, what students want most from their education is engagement. Essentially, they don’t want to be bored. In fact, engagement in school is the number one reason that students choose to stay in school. This is especially true for students living in poverty (Gallup 2015; Jensen 2013). Unfortunately, many of our students are disengaged from school.

In one large-scale survey by Yazzie-Mintz (2007), only two percent of high school students said they were never bored. Over thirty percent of the students said that they did not have day-to-day interactions with their teachers (that would foster personal relationships and increase engagement), and seventy-five percent said that school was not interesting or relevant to their lives. According to Shernoff, Csiksquentmihalyi, Scheider, and Shernoff (2003), the average high school student spends twenty-five percent of her day in a state of complete apathy.

Yet another study found that students as young as fifth grade spent over ninety-percent of their time listening to teachers lecture or working silently and independently at their desks despite their preference for hands on and collaborative learning activities. And, sadly, our students from poverty are the least likely to receive engaging instruction and curriculum (Pianta et al. 2007).

Engagement refers to students’ enthusiasm for school—it is the intrinsic investment and effort in learning; and student engagement is the number one difference between low-performing schools and high-performing schools (Gallup 2015). However, there are many factors that contribute to engagement beyond simply a student’s interest in the subject matter.

A student’s sense of belongingness, her feeling of competence, the amount of autonomy she has, and the meaningfulness of her learning all factor into her level of engagement. Competence, autonomy, and meaningfulness as drivers of intrinsic motivation are themes that have been discussed by Pink (2011) when he points to the will-drivers of mastery (competence), purpose (meaningfulness), and autonomy, as well. Students, it seems, are no different from employees when it comes to what inspires them to harness their passion and pursue their purpose.

Students feel a sense of belonging if the culture of the school is one that seems to care about their positive well-being.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.