I believe that the most important thing that K-12 education needs is more dedicated teachers.  Just as i saw in the movie Waiting for Superman , statistics show that good teachers that teach up to 150% of the required cariculum produce students with higher learning levels.   In any other company, small business or workplace employees are promoted for working hard and doing their job to the best of their ability, and those who don't are let go.  Unfortunately for students across the country, this is not the way that careers in teaching are set up.  There are thousands of teachers who barely even teach 50% of the cariculum, yet they have no penalties due to regulations and laws protecting their jobs.  Because of these laws,  many teachers are able to teach nearly nothing and still keep their jobs.  I think that changes need to be made in the school systems so that teachers are rewarded and promoted for doing their job well, and fired or disciplined for skating their way through the system and doing the bare minimum for their students.  Better teachers make better schools, better schools make better students, and better students move on to be successful and make a difference in their community and the country.

Both Gilyard's Essay on The Arts and Humnanities in Schools, and the NEA article on Arizona's Latino History Program brought up valid points about problems in the educational systems in the United States.   Throughout my experience in K-12 schooling, the classes that are the most inspiring to me such as art, drama, or music seem to be the first ones to get cut from the schedule when there is a lack of funding.  Personally I believe that there can be other more effective ways to cut spending rather than take away the classes that are anything other than basic science, history, math or English.  Although these classes are considered to be "more important" than humanities classes I strongly disagree.  For many students including myself it is hard to do well in a subject that doesn't have some sort of significance to personal interests, and by cutting art or music classes, school districts are taking away the place where many students excel the most and pushing them into an academic box of sorts that limits their posibility of finding their passion.  These articles are important in Unit 3 of this class because we are looking at what is most important in K-12 schooling in our opinions and preparing to write a paper that backs up our opinion.  In these articles we read about the loss of underestimated classes that are actually the most important in the long run, and this helps to gather more ideas and form an opinion on what we think is most important in educational systems and what can be changed.