Here are the questions you are to answer for each paper:
What does the writer do well in this assignment? (List one or more aspects, paying attention to thesis, audience, purpose, organization, and development). Also, please write the writer’s main claim or focus (thesis) according to what you have read.
What part(s) of the essay were a bit confusing? Why?
What specific suggestions (3 or fewer) do you have for revising the unclear parts of this writing? Please identify the paragraph for your suggestion. Below is a list of suggestions to give you ideas.
What would you like to know more about the topic that can enhance the essay and that supports the thesis?
What specific details do not work with the essay (e.g., doesn’t support the thesis) or can be moved within the essay?
Overall, what new information have you learned or how are you thinking differently after this reading?
Lett 2 Julie Lett Professor Williams Freshman English A 16 April 2020 Lowering the Drinking Age in the U.S. Lowering the drinking age to 18 in the United States would solve many problems. It would stop most illegal sales of this product and stop most underage binge drinking. Also, when you turn 18 you are considered a legal adult in the eyes of the government therefore you should be able to make your own choices about drinking. The age of adulthood in the U.S. is 18. So, when you turn 18 you are legal allowed to buy lottery tickets, join the military, vote, etc. So, by being able to make the choice of joining the military and risking your life for your country you should be able to make the choice of whether you want to drink or not. In other countries around the world, their legal drinking age is 18. We are one of the only countries to have this law in place. Adults should be able to make their own decisions about topics such as this. There are fewer drunk driving accident and fatalities in countries with their drinking age set at 18. In the US, 31% of car accident deaths involve alcohol, which is higher than other countries including France at 29%, Great Britain at 16% and Germany at 9%. Lowering the drinking age would get rid of this thrill of breaking the law to get a drink. When something is illegal till a certain age, it has a certain appeal to it which makes it more desirable. It will make drinking less of a thrill seek. Since lowering it would make it less desirable in a minors eyes, it will make it easier to normalize drinking as something done responsibly in a safe environment. When we grow up we aren’t taught about the dangers of alcohol as much as we were taught about the dangers of drugs or texting and driving. We were never sat down as a child or teenager in a classroom, like we were taught about sex ed, and were taught about alcohol and how dangerous it could be. Teenagers get into high school and never really understand the effect alcohol can have on you and your friends. Because we aren’t taught these things, we don’t know how to control it or to know when you’ve had enough to drink, which can lead to binge drinking and alcoholism. Not only are there many pros to lowering the drinking age but there are some cons that come with this topic as well. Alcohol consumption can affect with the development of frontal lobes. This can affect emotional regulation, planning and organization but the human brain isn’t fully developed until 25 so having the drinking age set to 21 isn’t stopping this problem. Drinking is not a right but as adults we should have that right to make our own choices about things like this. Lowering the age would give high schoolers easier access to alcohol but what we fail to realize many of these high schoolers have older siblings or they know and are friends with people of legal age that would buy them alcohol if asked, even some of these kids parents will buy them alcohol. It is also said that the drinking age being 21 prevents underage binge drinking but in my experience it doesn’t. If you go to any high school party or college party, where most of the people attending are under 21, people are binge drinking. It doesn’t matter what age you are at that party; you end up drinking. Lowering the drinking age would just allow anyone between the ages of 18-20 to go out and buy their own alcohol instead of asking someone to buy it for them illegally. It would reduce many problems we have with underage drinking. Smith 1 Smith 4 Chelsea Smith Professor Williams English A April 14, 2020 In the Brown V. Board of Education trial the Chief Justice of the US Supreme court said (at the end of the trial), “Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. … We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” The proposed changes to the state of Arkansas and LRSD policies will be detrimental to the racially charged tensions between community members and leaders because it shows resegregation and it doesn’t allow kids that need to be in the better schools aren't able to. Segregation was always something that has in America for years. Jim Crow laws were the reasons why colored people and whites were not able to go to school with each other. These laws started in the 1880s. Close to the time of World War I, the places of empolyment were segregated it wasn’t until after World War II that Jim Crow laws were combated head on. The first incident with Jim Crow laws, in 1950, was that the Supreme Court said that the University of Texas should admit a black student, Herman Sweatt, into their School of Law saying that the state was not providing an equal education for him. Following this was the Brown V. Board of Education decision that was made in 1954. Just to bring it closer to home, the southern whites started to get violent so federal troops were issued to help protect the blacks at Little Rock Central High School. The changes that are being proposed in the Little Rock School District were already done in other places. The NAACP pushed for the intergration which was fueled by the Brown V. Board of Education case which was ruled by the US Surpreme Court that segregated schools are unequal and unconstitional. Not only was the LRSD the only one who had problems with this but also PCSSD and NLRSD. In 1984, the district court issued a liability showing that PCSSD and NLRSD had failed to create a intergrated school districts and that they had committed unconstitional and racially discriminatory act that ended up becoming aubstainal segregation. The district court concluded that the only solution was consolidaton. Judge Henry Woods scheduled hearings to consider this to make the school dstricts into one. The district court then went on to say that the consolidation of the three school districts was needed and they also reaffirmed that the State Board of Education needed to make sure that further action to desegregate the schools. In 1985, the Circut Court of Appeals thought that the consolidation of the districts was going too far so they ordered that the LRSD boundary lines where to be equal to the city limits. Unfortuntally for the PCSSD it took away 8,000 students and 14 schools. In 1989, the Pulaksi County school districts, the NAACP, the attorneys for the state and the intervenors signed a settlement that the state would pay it was about $129.75 million to go toward soultions that will help desegregate the districts. The plans for desegregate the schools was approved by Judge Wright, meaning that LRSD should have been released from the federal court monitoring by 2001 but that didn’t happen. So, in 2002 Wright objected to the requests made by LRSD that the monitoring should end and the successsor Bill Wilson Jr., thought that LRSD needed to be monitored to make sure that the improvement of the acdemic achievement of black students. Later on the US District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas saw that NLRSD wasn’t all together and it made the PCSSD not satifisfed of the reqiurements of the unitary status in 9 of the 12 areas. Although we have gone through all of these things which lead some failures and also some success of the school districts, you can see that the LRSD has been removed from the federal monitoring now. Now that they are not being monitored and that they have built a new school they are rearanging their boundaries. If you take a look at the picture below it shows how the school district plans on making the schools resegregate. Central High will be taking all of the places by the river and most of Chenal which is predomitley whites and the new Southwest High School with combine J.A. Fair and McClellan which are predomitally blacks. Once this change is made is it showing that the schools will being going back to the way things were in 1984. The racism of today of black and brown people is that they are made out to be inferior. When students aren’t allowed to go to ‘good’ schools. A report from UCLA’s civil rights project and the center of education and civil rights found that in 2016 40% of black students were in schools with 90% of people of color nationwide. The government put in place for students to be able to go to better schools by implementing that magnet schools that will have a bus that will come to their house and pick them up for school. Another problem is that all of these charter schools are popping up everywhere which takes funding for the public schools away. UCLA’s research shows that when a school has almost of their students are on free and reduced lunch that the academic success rate lowers so if those students that preform higher if they were able to go to a better school it would be more challenging for them. School choice is also part of the problem in which the NAACP is also against. The school choice makes it to where if the parents don’t think that the school that is in their zone would be a good fit for their child they are able to change the school without having to move. With this there is a lot of segregation going on because if a parent has a problem with the number of people of color at a certain school they can just change it with the school choice. I understand that the federal and state governments aren’t the same type of government and that everybody doesn’t agree with my views. The federal government will not have anything to do with anything like this unless it gets pretty big they will leave it up to the state. The people that doesn’t agree with my views will say that all the school district is trying to do is change the boundaries to fit the new school in. However that is not the case, my mother who is a Special Education teacher told me that not only are they changing the boundaries that they are taking peoples jobs by eliminating the schools that are combining for the new school. She also said that the changes that are being made are keeping the students that are all on one side of Interstate 630 are going to a school and everybody else that is on the opposite side will be going to another school. The people that are against this are most likely fearing that they will not have a job or that they don’t see the problem that is