New Academic Programs?

Within Brian Crosby’s blog, “As many as 1,000 parents, teachers unleash frustration at Palm Beach County School Board meeting,” Crosby brought up the argument about new academic programs, and whether or not these programs are too intricate or too simple. In Crosby’s blog he linked a news article titled, “School board members respond to crowd protesting new academic programs with pledges for change.” Within this link, news reporters wrote about the Palm Beach County School Board meeting, which was an argument about whether new academic programs are needed in schools.

While reading the news website that Crosby had linked, the question, “Does our school need a new academic program,” came to my mind. In my opinion, I think new academic programs help us sometimes, but not all the time. In many cases, schools need a new academic program because the program they have right now isn’t working out so well. By creating a new academic program, the schools that are doing horrible can become successful. However, sometimes schools are already successful. So if we were to apply a new academic program to a school that is already successful, the school would not benefit from the new program because they are already doing really well. So, does Arapahoe High School need a new academic program? In my opinion, I believe Arapahoe High School doesn’t need a new academic program because Arapahoe is already doing a really great job at preparing students for college and the future. If we apply a new academic program, I believe that we would be creating a very complex high school. If most students are already doing well at Arapahoe High School, then that means that Arapahoe does not need to consider making any changes to program that’s being used today.

If we were to apply a new academic program to Arapahoe High School, many classes would become more challenging to students. This is because the new program that was issued would set higher standards for students’ learning. Classes like English, Math, and Science would all become very difficult classes to pass. If classes like these were made more difficult, many more students would fail these classes. Then as more and more students fail classes, more students begin to drop out of high school, which isn’t good. All these horrible ideas of failing and dropping out of high school were created just by applying a new academic program. If we are going to apply a new academic program, we must make sure that it benefits the students and the teachers in some way. If we don’t take the students and teachers into consideration when creating a new academic plan, then the plan will fail. New academic plans are great strategies when you are trying to create a successful school, but we have to recognize the pros and cons of the plan before applying it. Otherwise, the plan will only destroy the school, not help it succeed.