Rough Draft Workshop

Rough Draft Workshop

1.      For my research project, I am looking into the funding of our public school systems. This topic has been a very popular in the news with many initiatives trying to be passed to benefit our school systems. For example, in our state Initiative 1351 will help decrease class sizes in our state, which ranks 47th for having large classes sizes among the other states. This project will help highlight the benefits of funding for our schools and what the outcome would be and also go over where funding should come from and ideas to better budget. Questions that will be kept throughout the paper are: What would the effects be if funding was increased/decreased? What affects the funding of schools? Do cuts benefit schools or do they harm them? How would funding to schools be managed? What models could we follow to improve our school funding? What can individuals do to help improve funding? Improving our funding to public schools will benefit not only our students but also our society. Sources for my project will fall into the following categories support, background information and what the future of our schools could look like.

2.      The larger subject area was the issues with our public school system. I narrowed it down to funding because it has been in the news lately with many initiatives trying to be passed. Our education system has been under a microscope lately and I thought I would bring attention to why school funding should be increased.

3.      I narrowed my topic from the public school system to the funding of our schools, because I saw that many of the problems with our schools are linked back to underfunding and mismanaged money.

4.      The information I searched and collected for was mainly done through the online database through OC. I found this to be a lot more reliable than websites that I found from Google. The main sources I will be referring to in my paper will be from the sources I collected from the database.

5.      My main threads are support, background and the future. I broke my sources into these three categories because I thought it would give my audience the best understanding for this particular topic. To begin, the support category includes reasons why increased funding in schools should be supported. For example, the sources help me show the relationship funding has with education and also the effects lack of funding has on students. I find this to be important because I want my audience to not just see facts and numbers, but also the stories of students who haven’t been given a good education experience. Within these sources I found a source that counters all the others. This source talks about the positives that the recessions has had on the public school system. I found this important because it shows a perspective that many of us never would think of. With a lot of his points being valid and thought out, but I don’t know if over a long course of time this would have any positives. Most of the voices that occur throughout my sources are from educators themselves that have dealt with the education system.

My next category is about background information dealing with the public school system. This section of my paper provides more detail into what goes into funding schools and the way that process works. I find this to be highly important, because I want my audience to understand what is involved in funding a school and how it isn’t a simple process. For my audience to fully understand my paper and for it to build they need to understand on the way funding works and occurs. In here I include detail and even some loopholes that occur in funding and also the relationship that our school systems have with other systems. These are important to me because with this category I don’t want it to be cluttered with facts and numbers, but I want them to see other important factors that are considered and so on.   

My last category is discussing the future of our public schools. With all the discussion about facts and issues I thought I could give my audience a peek of what the future could hold for our schools. I find this to be a very important part of my essay because I tie everything together and I also introduce some new information. I give them an idea of what the future looks like when schools are better funded and also what we learn from our mistakes and look at a model that I think we could realistically do here in the US.

6.      I haven’t started my draft yet. But, I plan to include depth in places that I believe the audience will struggle in understanding and using quotes and examples. The one area I plan on doing this in is the background section of my paper. I find this to be important because this is where the heart of my paper is. If my audience doesn’t understand this they will struggle with my entire paper.