advocate

(disclaimer: this is a long rant)
Of all the roles Jesus plays in our lives, the one of the advocate has always stuck out in my mind. Being a teacher, we often get to be the advocate for our students in order to get them a better education. This is something I have known and, quite honestly, a lot of the reason why I feel drawn to teaching in urban schools. However, not being in an urban area right now, I can see that even these students NEED more than they're getting...

for other word-nerds like me, this is what advocate means:
ad·vo·cate (ād'və-kāt')
1. One that argues for a cause; a supporter or defender.
2. One that pleads in another's behalf; an intercessor.
advocate. (n.d.). The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Retrieved September 16, 2008, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/advocate

The education system in our country is deteriorating. With standardized test scores determining "good" schools from "bad" schools and how funding gets dispersed...
High test scores = "good" school low test scores = "bad" school
The "good" school gets rewarded for their high marks and received more funding... but wait... how, then,is the "bad" school going to get any better if their funding is less?
So flip it, give low-scoring schools more money and higher scoring schools less... but then what would be the incentive to get high scores on those standardized tests if they know they can get more funding for being "bad"?
In our country, everyone has the right to an education... but what if the things we are trying to do aren't working to get our students the kind of education we are proposing? Shouldn't that warrant change?
Anyone can teach to a test... just because students score high on tests doesn't mean they are actually learning.
What's more... is that our economy becomes more and more globalized, we need to be prepared to enter into that and survive. Just so everyone knows, the world becoming globalized doesn't mean that everyone is going to learn English for us. We have one of the only public school systems in the world that doesn't require foreign (or world, as they are now referred to) languages starting from Elementary School. Knowing more than one language is a skill that our children and our children's children are going to HAVE to possess in order to survive. So if this is the trend and most research points to the fact that learning another language gets a LOT harder as you get older, why is it that World Language classes in Elementary schools are the among the first things to get cut from curricula?
I don't understand it... but this ignorance needs to stop. We can't expect that the world is just going to be at our beck and call and do whatever they need to do to make our lives easier. If you haven't noticed, the U.S. is not the most powerful country in the world anymore...

So what am I going to do about this?
Don't think I haven't thought about it already. I'm not going to be one of those people who have strong opinions and beliefs about something but don't do anything about it. These ideas have struck a chord in my heart... why can't I be the advocate for our students? Why can't I fight for them? The idea that I have right now... is to get my master's degree in Early Childhood Development and advocate for World Language programs and Bilingual Schools. So that every kid will graduate from high school with a high level of fluency in another language.

...or we could just declare a second national language for our country. Then students would HAVE to know two languages.