Rise to Greatness

Colby Wegter

Rising to Greatness Blog

There were a lot of concerns for me about this article because it has so much impact on me as a student of the system my entire life. As I prepare to be a teacher I had a lot of questions as to how Iowa could have fallen so short in the last 10 years and as I think about the future words I write I still don’t know. These were my thoughts:

There is a over a 20 point difference in proficiency for students that don’t qualify with a free and reduced lunch and for those that do. So if kids are eligible and they can technically not have to worry about if food is on the table then why is there still such a big difference? What are the possible other factors? Does the parents marital status effect it, or the amount of children in the household, maybe the neighborhood in which they live in, their race, or if they are from another country, or is it a combination of some or all of these things.

Some questions that I don’t know the answers to but were thinking as I was reviewing the article were: Is Iowa not doing well educating minority students because they are 82 percent white? Is it that there are few role models that are of the same ethnicity or race of the minority students? Is it because crossing races, as a teacher is less effective than if a teacher was of the same skin color as the students they are teaching? Have the results not caught up with the numbers yet since minority students are rising and their test scores are not?

When Jason Glass said “… [it’s] not embarrassing…it’s intolerable” that says to me that there is not enough effort of Iowa teachers on the classroom as a whole. This makes Iowa teachers seem lazy. The gaps in proficiency for race and those with disabilities is annoying and pathetic that Iowa has fallen so much in the last 10 years. Especially with reading, when I saw that Iowa was leading in fourth grade reading in 2001 and are now 13^th I couldn’t believe it. Since reading is my focus I don’t see how it could have dropped so much in 10 years. This makes me wonder if this is for lack of schooling for prospective teachers. It could be that or it could be some form of jurisdiction or legislature is faltering but it shows that there is not nearly enough resolve in the Iowa school system to begin fixing things like this. A steady decline for the last 10 years is pitiful. NCLB was 10 years ago so maybe it does have some form of a legislative issue but as a student of the Iowa school system for the last 16 years and a future teacher this has a lot of concern for me. I don’t want to be a part of a state that can’t keep up with a changing world because it’s only going to continue to change.