Finding the Right School

Throughout this action project I use my own personal experience and information I found online about high school education in Chicago, to write on why it is so hard to find one that fits well for students. I want to express how hard it is to find a school that is a healthy learning environment and strives to pick all of its students up and teach them how to become good communicators in their communities. Some of the challenges that I faced while completing this process is finding that had a relative statistics. I ended up learning a lot about how not having a strong high school education can really make it hard later in life.

At 6:45 AM I unlocked my phone and open Facebook, I check my newsfeed to see what's going on in the first thing that pops up is a video of two high school students beating up one other student. After the boy was beaten half to death he was lying on the ground shaking and bloody. Keep in mind that this is all happening in the school cafeteria. I scroll down even further skipping a few images, and there is another video of two girls fighting inside the classroom and they end up hitting their teacher. Why is it so hard to be in a school where students are inspired to learn lift one another up and stop the outside world from tearing them down? It looks as if we have created a monster. School has become about who can fight the best and partaking in risky behaviors and not get caught for it. Many schools have created a toxic environment where Students will not be able to thrive and success is a mere afterthought.

However a lot of people may say teens will be teens but it is not all our fault. No matter where you go I can respect the fact that they're going to be kids participating in risky behaviors and bullying one another and not focusing on learning, but we have an opportunity to change that. The adults in these high school environments really need to step up and help change our school system. Chicago high schools have a graduation rate of 65.4% a little less than half of our high school students are even graduating. Graduation from high school should be a no-brainer for every student.

This way of thinking needs to start as soon as high school students hit the ninth grade, students who pass ninth grade are almost 4 times more likely to graduate then one who doesn't. This is why the adults in high schools need to make sure that they're creating a learning environment that is not too fast and not too slow and is a safe place where students can learn and ask questions. It also needs to be a place where issues are not ignored. Students should not go through their entire high school career feeling like just another number. The result maybe that the student fails and chooses not to finish their high school career.

MLA Citations 

contributors: Walter H. Dyett, Technical Advisory Committees 

last updated:August 14, 2013

 contributors: Kate N. Grossman 

Last updated: July 16 2015