Write an article for publication in your school magazine discussing the problems faced by your school
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When those of us of a certain age lament the loss of public education's good old days, we forget—or perhaps never knew—that when we were in school, there were large numbers of youngsters who dropped out and went to work. We didn't think of them as dropouts. They had no trouble finding jobs: there was plenty of work for semiskilled, even unskilled, workers. Today, however, as those jobs have been exported to other countries and as the U.S. knowledge economy produces proportionally less employment for those who lack a sound education, students who leave school without skills have meager prospects. Unlike in the past, today we have to educate virtually everyone for higher education or for the modern workplace. And because the demands we place on our school system are greater than in the past, the challenge of improving public education is more acute than ever before, too.
Urban schools, in particular, seem trapped in a spiral of poor educational performance. They have 24 percent of all U.S. public school students, 35 percent of all students who are poor, and 43 percent of minority students. A massive survey of urban education released last year by the respected publication, Education Week, concluded that "most fourth-graders who live in U.S. cities can't read and understand a simple children's book, and most eighth-graders can't use arithmetic to solve a practical problem." Slightly more than half of big-city students are unable to complete high school in the customary four ye