Answer to Question #284865 in English for fatima

Question

Jacobs (2010) states “To move our school structures into more open, fluid, and correspondingly inventive forms, we need new forms, not reform”. Based on her work and your own perspectives, what do you believe this means for classrooms of the future?

Answer 1

Jacob uses semantics to create a case for reform; for example, she claims that reform movements in education have existed in the United States since the beginning of formal schooling. Although the motivations for reform have differed, it might be claimed that many of these changes have simply taken an existing practice and tweaked it, resulting in the same basic form. She justifies her position by pointing out that most of our schools use the same school year, schedule, student grouping (by grade level), teacher organization, and virtually the same building structures as in the 1890s. I feel Jacob misses the mark in her attempt to reinvent, re-version, and reform education at this point.

When someone says the word "reform," it raises the inquiry, "Why do we need change?" While Jacobs provided a variety of reasons for the reform, the fact that we have been generating children capable of poor performance when measured against students from other nations for the past 30 years or more is noticeably absent from the list. At first glance, it appears that the teachers are to blame; but, after much research, experts believe that the issue is a disparity in curricula, i.e., what our pupils are learning is vastly different from what students in high-performing countries are learning. Differences in student performance on the new exams may be mistakenly attributed to differences in the quality of the students' teachers rather than differences in the curriculum to which the students were exposed.

If future classrooms in the United States are to generate high-performing kids, it is imperative that they adopt the same curricula as those in high-performing countries. Many countries, such as China and Japan, have longer academic school days, as well as longer school years and a school week that runs from Monday to Saturday. Many countries also require a basic understanding of science, as well as the traditional skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic. He goes on to say that in today's China and India, students are taking algebra, chemistry, and physics classes as early as seventh grade, whereas in the United States, one basic science course is frequently enough to pass high school.