The world as we know it is changing in leaps and bounds on a daily
basis. Our children are growing up knowing and using iPods and computers
with gigabytes of data storage for all their music and video files.
High-speed Internet has become a way of life where more young people
subscribe to www.myspace.com, read, chat, and communicate with friends
online than ever before. As the Internet marketplace continues to expand
rapidly, and technologies afford education access from the ease and
convenience of home, it is imperative that parents and educators
recognize the benefits involved in education online.
The public education system in the United States grew out of an
economy based upon single income workers, zero competition from outside
markets for internal education consumers, and more manufacturing jobs
than service jobs. The baby boomers born during the post World War II
era, enjoyed the benefits of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Serviceman's Readjustment Act or the GI Bill of Rights, which granted
affordable access to college education. The baby boomers of the United
States catapulted into growth as a result of this, enjoying an
unprecedented level of abundance and prosperity.
One of these baby boomers is President George W. Bush, who enacted
the No Child Left Behind Act (NCBA), offering the societal challenge of
making every child proficient in reading and math by 2012. A
schoolteacher for more than thirty years, who now runs a management
company for teacher training, described the resultant effect of this act
upon the public school system as one which far exceeded the
capabilities of what American public schools can currently offer. Despite the grandiose claims of the NCBA, actual school performance
began to decrease after the passage of the act and the United States,
as a whole, fell behind in education.
Supplemental Educational Services
In 2004-2005, there were more than 22 million children eligible for
"supplemental educational services", which includes tutoring. About 19%
of those students got those services, or roughly two out of every ten
students who were not proficient in core subjects, received aid. A good
analogy would be a physician telling the parents of ten children that
that they need medicine to cure an illness and only two out of the ten
children can receive the medicine that they need. The need for tutoring is obviously there. Why then is the current
method of tutoring inadequate? There are principally four reasons why
tutoring has been ineffective:
1) Schools can recruit tutors for students in rural areas and even
fewer for those students in those areas with disabilities. 2) School
districts do not tell parents that tutoring is available. When letters
are sent home they often arrive late and are hard to understand. 3)
Tutors are not allowed into schools and do not coordinate with teachers
or the curriculum in the classroom, leaving the student confused. 4)
State education departments do not evaluate the quality of tutors, as
the law requires. On one hand we have American schools and students failing and in
need of remediation, operating under an outdated system of education,
and money going to waste, and on the other hand we have an emerging
technology platform based on high speed broadband technology that is
leveling the playing field for people, and companies worldwide. This
technology is one that not only attracts our children, but also
captivates them, so that they return to computers and multimedia
repeatedly for entertainment.
Armed with this knowledge, how can we as parents and educators
remain blind to the changes within our own culture for learning and
acquiring knowledge and the ways in which our children are learning?
Tutoring programs such as www.TutorHaven.com take these tools and put
them to use to educate our children in a fun and engaging manner.
Business Developer
Web Site:-http://www.gyapti.com
Blog:- http://gyapti.blogspot.com
Email Id:-deepa.singh@soarlogic.com
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