Ryan Mason

10/30/16

Dear Mr. /Mrs. President,

The school systems in America are starting to be seen as a very negative part of our country. The school system issue needs to be addressed dealt with because we face issues such as student attitudes and behavior, funding, bullying, stress and modern technology, which contributes to distractions, another big issue. All of which fall into a category that contributes to the negative school environments in America. The school systems today have major impacts on students that attend them and those students are going to have an impact on our future society. The issues need more widely noticed and continue to be dealt with on an even greater scale so we can have hopes of improving our negative schooling environments.

To start, a major issue seen with schools today is the student’s attitude and behavior. If you walk into a standard high school for example, you can look around and tell someone’s attitude by just looking at them. You can tell by looking at some students that they might have attitude problems, maybe they don’t want to be in school or maybe there is just something bigger going on. A poll from the National Center for Education Statistics states “problems such as apathy, tardiness, disrespect and absenteeism posed significant problems for teachers.” Issues like this progress themselves to conflicts with the idea that students often have bad attitudes towards school. Students have a habit of putting themselves in bad moods since they look more on the negative side rather than the positive side. The interpretation of these ideas is simply to enlighten more people of the ongoing issues we face inside schools that lead to negative school environments and get moving on plans to fix these issues in hopes of improving internal school environments.

Building off the idea of bad attitudes in school, two big factors that affect attitudes are stress and bullying. Stress and bullying are major problems we see today, and with the help of technology and social media, things don’t seem to be getting much better. Bullying happens to anyone of any age but can affect them just as easily as the next person. Stress and bullying aren’t new to people, it’s been going forever. Bullying has the potential to mess with someone mentally; it forces them to feel weak and vulnerable to anything and it stresses them out. When you deal with problems like this, students have trouble focusing in school; they fall behind or don’t even show up some days. Even at home they can’t even be safe; with technology around they can always be reached and taunted by someone without them even being there. These issues facing students everywhere needs to be dealt with, when they are dealt with, student morality will go up and contribute to a more positive school environment for everyone.

Technology is another big issue that schools face today, more than years before as phones and other electronics weren’t as popular. Technology can be highly disruptive in schools if allowed to be but the idea of whether technology is helpful in schools or a distraction is still highly debated. Technology, phones more specifically, are the big issue that people see. Most students have cell phones and all of which are seen as distractions to some people and as an educational tool to others. Both are true and it all highly depends on the user, in an article written by Richard Freed called Why Phones Don’t Belong in School, he states that “more studies show however that schools that put a ban on phone use saw a substantial improvement in student test scores” and concluded with the idea that phones “can have a negative impact on productivity through distraction.” So clearly it’s debatable it’s important to make use of cell phones in school, or outside of school. Either way, whichever is more helpful, the use of technology needs to be more thoroughly taken care of, after we will see drastic changes in school’s environments.

The final main problem today’s schools face is the importance of funding. When you think of funding, you’d think schools are properly funded, which not to be confused, a lot are well funded. But the ones that aren’t show more diversity in the way the school behaves and works. When a school is properly funded, students have resources they need, the school is in good condition and it makes life a whole lot easier for everyone. But for the schools that receive less funding, they have a much lower student and teacher moral, it’s a much more depressed or sad area. Even some prisons receive higher funding than some schools. The objective brought out by bringing up the idea of funding is to emphasize the importance of higher funded school systems. When and if we get that, it’s guaranteed to improve the already negative school environments.

These issues we face with schooling systems need to be dealt with. These problems are often overlooked and not seen as a big deal when they really are. The issues of funding leaves schools often needing more, forcing whoever ever is in the school to be even more stressed then they already have been. Technology can be helpful or useful depending on who has it, but it’s up to the schools and teachers to make sure they are used accordingly and used to make a productive school environment. Bullying and stress are issues that will need to be addressed just as soon as any of the other topics. Student’s attitude and behavior need to be positive to make a positive, productive and a working school environment. These problems need to be addressed as soon as possible so we can start making our schools into better environments for our future generations.

10 Major Challenges Facing Public Schools:

By Grace Chen. "10 Major Challenges Facing Public Schools | PublicSchoolReview.com." PublicSchoolReview.com. N.p., 01 Oct. 2016. Web. 30 Oct. 2016.

“Why Phones Don’t Belong in School” By Richard Freed N.p., 04 Dec. 2016