What are the major influences that shape urban schools?

After reading both of these books I can see many different factors that influence schools in the inner city. A few of them really stick out at me. The first one that is very obvious is history. When the decision was made on Brown v Board of Education, it was made official that we would no longer segregate schools. But this clearly was not completely carried out. An example of this is Camden. My parents grew up in Camden in the fifties and sixties, but it was very different that it is now. They tell me how it was a city in the fact that there was a lot of people living close together but it was not what an inner city is thought of today. They did not feel as they were in any danger on a daily basis and they felt they had many different opportunities. But as the sixties hit minority families began to move in and white families were scared. They spoke of property values going down and were just plain scared of change. Slowly but surely white families relocated to the suburbs and the city became very segregated. This continued and we can see what Camden is like today. It is a place that lacks opportunity and is very dangerous. This has happened in many American cities and contributes to the problems in the schools.

This leads to how the outside environment that has been created by history can affect the schools. Many factors such as gangs, violence, drugs, and overall poverty can hinder ones effort to obtain a good education. Education is supposed to be something that can help you in life for the long term. But many of the students in the inner city do not see themselves living very long and this does make getting an education seem very important. These environmental factors are what we are fighting as educators to make a difference. This helps shape the very schools that we will enter into shortly.

These problems that exist have become very apparent and the government is involved. There are efforts to raise test scores and acts such as No Child Left Behind. This is forcing the administration to have a big role in curriculum and lesson plans. The teachers do not have the freedom to teach how they want to teach. Instead it seems as though everything we do is teaching towards some test. We are focusing on large groups of students test scores and not looking at how each student is different from the one next to them. I feel as though the each student’s individuality is much more important than how a test represents the progress of a whole community.