Final blog- urban settings v rural settings

In my final blog I looked at schools in in urban settings and compared them to schools in rural settings. At first I tried gathering information about some schools near Oakland California. I wanted to compare an inner city school in Oakland and then the small town of Canyon California. What I found was that Canyon seemed not to exist in the eyes of the state. The state of California had no records for test scores for the school in Canyon, they had a chart displaying test scores, however, all the numbers were filled in with stars. As for the U.S. census, they did not recognize Canyon at all, not as a village, town or city. This puzzled me since the school had a web site with an address in “Canyon, California”. After my unsuccessful try I moved to to school a little closer to home. I moved onto Port Huron schools, on the east side of the state of Michigan, for my urban school. For my rural school I then moved north to a school that combines two towns, Croswell and Lexington. I found that the size of the city did not correlate to the number of families living in poverty, Lexington a community of almost 3,700 people had only 4.2% of it’s families living in poverty while Croswell, a town of 2500 people had 10.4% of it’s families living below the poverty level. Port Huron topped both with 13.4% of it’s families living in poverty. The smaller Cros-Lex school topped both Port Huron high schools in standardized testing results. Their subject matter with the highest percent of children at a proficient level was reading at 85%, and their lowest was Social Studies at 45%. While this may not seem so low at first compared to other subjects in other schools it is important to note that in both Cros-Lex high school and Port Huron
Northern high school there were more students in the advanced levels of social studies than in the proficient levels. Port Huron high school came in with the lowest numbers for all three schools in each category. Testing 33% proficient in math, 59% in reading, and 50% in science. Cros-Lex school tested 61%,85%and 75%; while Port Huron Northern tested at 50%,71% and 62%. Since all three schools are in the same area of the state I felt they all had some of the same advantages. To name a few would be the historical value of the area, their proximity to Canada, and (most important to me) an art district in Port Huron that is making a revival of sorts. There are an assortment of museums dedicated to Thomas Edison who had lived there as a child as well as nautical museums about the areas rich maritime history. The closeness of Canada I feel could be an asset simply because of the opportunity to reflect on the educational process’ similarities and differences. Like I said the rebirth of an art district in the town is what really excites me. As a future art teacher it is an invaluable resource to have working artists in the area who can talk to your students about how the subject relates to life outside the classroom. This also provides the opportunity for field trips that don’t have to take you all the way to Detroit to view art. In that respect both areas are close enough to Detroit that a day trip to the DIA is always an option.