The Bottom Line

 

Part 4 of School: The story of American Public Education'' was titled The Bottom Line in Education and covered between 1980 to the present day. As a whole, my group members and I came together one last time to discuss the final chapter of School. By doing so we decided to use the word, phrase and sentence strategy in order to depict a better understanding of the chapter. Throughout the process, we ranked our words as exit, alliance and importance. We chose to place them in this order because it exemplified how the evolution of education was coming to an end although it was very important to those involved. It was evident that the political alliance of business leaders, public officials, and educators have succeeded in standardizing the academic curriculum and requiring it of all students. It is important not only to families but also to faculty members that children receive the education they need. It has also been noted that American schools are working more toward producing fully prepared graduates who can perform well in the workplace by preparing kindergarteners for the first grade, middle schoolers for high school, and highschoolers for college. They prioritize the wellbeing of the future of each individual.

Phrases on the other hand were “ More competition exists among public schools,” “The Bottom Line,” and “Vocational education.” Here my group and I came to an agreement that “More competition exists amongst public schools'' was the ideal phrase to explain how it was difficult to attain a job while school districts have come to prize business savvy big-city school board, have abandoned educators and chosen from the ranks of former CEO’s top military officers, and high government officials. “The Bottom Line” was chosen as the second ranked simply because what better way to explain this particular part of the book. Last but most certainly not least, we chose three sentences that ended up causing a bit of confusion as far as being similar yet different at the same time. The sentence “Beginning in the mid-1970s, the decline of US workplace productivity, rising unemployment, losses in market shares to Japan and Germany, and swift changes in technologies led corporate leaders and public officials to try to determine the reason for poor performance of American economy” had much similarity to “Top industrialist expressed strong fears that the US products were losing ground to those made in Britain and Germany” in a away in which it emphasizes on the American poverty stricken economy. As a result of having a numerous number of people on unemployment and very low motivation at a place of work leads to a huge decrease in the economy where everyone suffers. On the contrary, the lastly ranked sentence reflected upon “The Lottery” documentary the most which was “The interest in finding alternatives to local public schools, rather than working to improve those schools, has raised some concern.” It seemed as if both sides concede that some public schools performed poorly. One side stated that public schools shall be repaired while the other argued that the solution would be to begin from scratch. I chose the image above to represent the ending of something, in this case it was the way education was provided.