Don't Take Valuable Space in My School

Don't take valuable space in my school

Jenny While / San Diego Union Tribune / February 23, 2008

Despite the push for a good education, and the increasing competition in careers and jobs – to the point that it seems you need a college degree to work at McDonald's – some students still are dragging their feet in school.

One would think that without the guarantee of a job and a future, every student would pay attention in school and stop slacking off. However, the fact remains that an ever present amount of students are simply space-takers – students who come to school for petty reasons and only take up space.

Not only are they an annoying addition to an already stressful environment, space-takers take away valuable instruction time when teachers either scold them for disrupting class or cater to their below-average needs.

Because of space-takers, the education of smart students who are actually in class to learn suffers. By the time the class is over, the space-takers might be close to the level of the smart students. However, the students who want to learn will get nowhere, having suffered through reviews of material they have already learned day in and day out.

These space-takers are required to take the same STAR tests as all students. So after a fun- filled year of doing absolutely nothing, they pick up a test they can barely read and proceed to drop the school's scores. When the results come in, teachers are replaced, standards are decreased and a label of “insufficient” is stamped on the school. Yet the space-takers remain.

A wonderful law, aimed at improving education, was passed: the No Child Left Behind Act. Yes, it did have the good intentions of bringing the below-average student up to par with the rest. It would create a smarter population because it would virtually destroy below-average students. It would create exceptional students in every single classroom.

However, this law has only ended up creating exceptional students who got frustrated while they waited for the mediocre students to catch up. Teachers must put the good students on hold while holding the hand of the bad students. When the law was first proposed, the hope was to raise the education level. However, based on observation at my own school, it seems that it has only weakened our education system.

In a class full of space-takers, I am forced to endure the teacher's jaded lesson, which falls on deaf ears. She is incapable of teaching the lessons she loves to the students who care. And some of us are denied our education because these students must be as good as the rest of us.

Communistic? In every negative meaning of the word.

Jenny While is a student at El Cajon Valley High School