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More handpicked essays just for you.
Socioeconomic status and academic achievement
The relationship between poverty and inequality
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“The intent behind closing these gaps is to break the connection between race or family income and achievement while at the same time continuing to improve the performance of the top students. ”(28) Gaps between race and wealth have always been issues in schools. Historically, children living in poverty are more likely to score lower on tests than those
Savage Inequalities Book Review Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol is an in-depth analysis of America’s public school system and the problems that encompass it. Kozol’s book examines some of the poorest public schools in the United States and attempts to explain how the school or school district plummeted so far into the depths of poverty. Kozol believes that the biggest problem public school faces is segregation, which is still very real in many parts of the United States. Racism and a lackadaisical attitude toward the education of minority groups in America are the roots of the problems that public schools face.
Education Reality in America “All systems of the society are meant to serve the mind, not the mind to serve the systems,” by Abhijit Naskar. The Rhetorical situation in the essay “Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid” by Jonathan Kozol happens to be the differences in school systems by ethnicity rates. It is interpreted by the speaker that minority races are shown by the government they are not equally important because they have a lack of funding, old school buildings, and only are introduced to the races they see every day unlike the white schools who are introduced to various ethnic groups. The readers would refer to the speaker as passionate about the government making an effort to fix the school
The video “Tale of Two Schools: Race and Education on Long Island” presents David and Owen, two African-American students with similar backgrounds and grades who attend two different high schools in separate districts that have drastically different access to resources, community support, income, etc. Wyandanch Memorial High School is located in a poor district, while South Side High School is located in Rockville Center which is a more affluent and diverse district. The effects of the districts having varying levels of access to quality resources and diversity is exemplified throughout the video with regards to the way the students interact with each other, their grades, and their careers after high school. The lack of resources of Wyandanch
In the article, The Resegregation of Jefferson County, a wide variety of different sociological aspects are portrayed under the fight to separate the school, Gardendale, from the rest of the Jefferson County school system. Multiple different inequalities are discussed in different forms throughout this article specifically including income, institutional racism, and neo-racism. All of these forms of social stratification are still alive today. Social stratification is described as “inequalities among individuals and groups within human societies. (Giddens, Duneier, Applebaum, Carr, p. 194)”
When students are unaware of the history of social class, they begin to believe false information, such as, poor people deserve to be poor. Loewen does a great job of pointing out student’s misunderstanding of social status and strongly believes that it is the high school text books to
Mary losing her Pell Grant is another example of oppression Adeola discusses (Moore 17). The study outlines how “[the government] has long been raging war against poor people using a variety of weapons (Adeola 76). For Mary, she lost her grant after President Ronald Reagan passed a budget that gutted funding for the entire program (Moore 17). If Mary would have been able to finish school, a complete education could have been an expectation for Wes. To her son’s misfortune, the government actions that disrupted Mary’s educational career indirectly harmed Wes’s opportunities with the reinforcement of generational poverty.
In Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools, Jonathan Kozol exploits extreme inequalities between the schools in East St. Louis and Morris High in Rye, New York in the 1990s. The living conditions in East St. Louis were deplorable. There was no trash collection service, the sewage system was dysfunctional, and crime, illness, poverty, and pollution ran rampant. The schools in East St. Louis had a predominately black student population, and the buildings were extremely obsolete, with lab equipment that was outdated by thirty to fifty years, a football field without goalposts, sports uniforms held together by patches, and a plumbing system that repeatedly spewed sewage. In addition, there was a substantial lack of funds that prevented
There are certain tools that are essential in schools for the success of education. Whether it be reading, writing, comprehending, or problem solving; these are all tools that are advantageous to possess in one’s education. Unfortunately, not all groups are able to acquire all these tools as easily as other groups are. It is unequivocal that education plays a major role in one’s future, but certain students cannot achieve their ideal education because of the lack of a proper education system. This is what leads to the inequality in education for students of color who are from an underprivileged area, compared to students on the contrary.
Unequal Childhoods is an ethnography outlining the study done by Annette Lareau which researched how socioeconomic classes impact parenting among both white and African American families. She used both participant observation and interviewing. 12 families participated in this study where she came to conclusions on whether they displayed parenting styles of concerted cultivation or natural growth based of their socioeconomic status. Concerted cultivation is a parenting style where the parent(s) are fully invested in creating as much opportunity for their child as possible, but results in a child with a sense of entitlement. An example of this would be a parent who places their children in a wide array of extracurricular activities and/or actively speaks to educators about the accommodations their child needs to effectively learn.
Anyon article discussed students of different social class background is exposed to different types of educational knowledge. Anyon used four distinctive schools; working class, middle class, affluent and executive, located in New Jersey. The education the students received reflected the social class level. In the working class school, the principle had did not know the history of the school building. The teachers did not motive or believe in their student’s success.
These students don’t get equal opportunities as those students attending elite schools. Authors Toni Cade Bambara and Jonathon Kozol have written vivid examples on how working class students have been impacted by segregation in school. Working class schools
Americans, when they think of Civil Rights probably think of the Civil Rights Movement. During the civil rights era African Americans fought to be treated as equals by fighting segregated schools, for their voting rights, and for their basic right that every American has today. To say that education is our civil rights movement of today is inaccurate. Antonio Alvarez’s narrative “Out Of My Hands” focuses on a financially struggling family, but proving that they can succeed. David L. Kirp’s article “The Secret to Fixing Bad Schools” reinforces the idea that even though a community might be poor, that doesn’t have to reflect the quality of education students receive.
However, with diversity comes inequalities that people of color face throughout their lives. A particular issue in the United States, specifically in education, is unequal opportunities and treatment in regard to race. Research shows that students from single-parent black families had a high chance of dropping out and participating in illicit behavior (Hallinan 54). While the issue of race is a complicated issue to breach for
To Kill a Mockingbird Essay ¨Inequality is the root of social evil¨ (Pope Francis). In the book To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee shows that social inequality affects everyone. As the book goes on, Lee proves that racial inequality was one of the greater stresses in the 1930’s. Social inequality does not just exist only with race; it interferes with wealth, family backgrounds, age, and even your beliefs.