About Me- Katherine Swanson

I'm a freshman government & politics major and an associate of the CIVICUS Living & Learning community. I was born in Denton, TX and raised in Fort Worth, TX. I came to UMD because I wanted to be close to Washington D.C. and I wanted to live on the east coast. I have a mom, a dad, and a brother who is 10 years older than me. It's a lot like having three parents. My whole family lives in Fort Worth, so I'm pretty far away from all of them. I also have two weiner dogs named Rusty and Duchess - they're the cutest dogs of all time - and my best friend and room mate, Tessa, and my boyfriend, Ben.

Since I was six years old, I have known that I wanted to be an elected official. I want to have the power to improve the conditions of our country for all citizens. Though I have a long list of issues I would like to tackle once I make it in to office, education policy has become most important to me. After attending public school for 13 years in a state that is notorious for its terrible schools, I have decided that improving the US public education system through legislation is what I want my first priority to be, and I plan to enroll in UMD's BA/MPP Public Policy program after I've completed my sophomore year of college to get my masters degree in Education Policy by the time I graduate in 2017. I'm really excited to go on this AB trip and learn more about how I can make the public education system better for all.

The article I found is from the NY Times and discusses how public schools in urban areas are having to modify their curriculum and teaching methods in order to keep up with our college degree obsessed society. The author interviews several students in an urban environment about the pressure they feel to attend college and how their teachers and school systems have been helping them apply and, eventually, attend college. The comparison the author shows between affluent suburbs and urban areas in regard to college attendance and quality of education was interesting and a bit startling, the achievement gap seems to be quite large.