Stage 3: Single-Sex Schools

On Saturday, February 2, 2013, the Austin Statesman published an article title Plan for single sex school in East Austin is another pricey experiment, in this article the writer is discussing about how the Austin school trustees voted to approve single-sex schools last week for Garcia and Pearce middle schools. The audience for this article are the parents, homeowners and taxpayers because they deserve more serious discussions about how decisions of single-sex schools will affect the bottom line, the article talks about how Pearce and Garcia have also been rated academically unacceptable by the state of Texas in three of the past four years and they need to do something about it.

  The writer of this article does make a point that is not a good idea and it's not the solution to improve the academic performance because the new research shows that in the classroom, separating the two sexes may not be the best way for either gender to learn and grow and I agree with that but we also know that

single sex education has a successful track for many decades and it has worked for private schools so why can't the same plan work with public schools? But another suggestion that has worked in urban school is moving to small classes that way the teacher can help them out even more.

The solution should be that they should allow the student to choose which type of learning environment they would like, however, the cost for all the same sex schools are larger. Single sex schools only seem better because they're usually in areas with lots of money or private.

Stage 2: The Budget Battle

The article I would like to introduced is "The Budget Battle: Week One:" and how Republicans will spend more but they don't want to spend it on schools is written by Erica Grieder in the Texas Monthly website. It was posted February 11,2013.
There were many cuts across the board in 2011 but the the cuts to education had been more controversial than most, even parents had seen the effect in their children classrooms and they think that the state has failed to "educate" the kids in Texas and  because of that the state is currently facing several lawsuits because the Texas constitution requires the legislature to make "suitable provision" for public schools which means that the State Board of Education  have to set aside a sufficient amount of funds to provide free textbooks for the use of children attending the public free schools of this state.
What Republicans are saying is that the state has more money but in their view doesn't mean it should spend more money for education. This definitely helps explains why public education is going to be the focal point of the budget battles. I think it's important to read this article because it will affect us one way or another and in the future Texas public schools enrollment is going to grow and that means we would need more teachers and textbooks but who is going to pay for all of that? We just have to see what happens in this Budget battle.

If you want to read more about this article; click below.
http://www.texasmonthly.com/story/budget-battle-week-one