Low Income And Lower Class Families Struggle With Providing Their Children

Who are America’s poor children? How many children in America are poor? What are some of the hardships that face poor children in America? These are only a few questions that we can ask ourselves when considering children who live in poverty in America. Children face monumental hardships in our country because of poverty or the condition of not possessing the means to afford basic human needs. The economic crisis that we find ourselves in today threatens to cause a dramatic increase in the number of America’s poor children; however poverty in America has long been a crisis that has faced the children of our nation. This essay will investigate the previous asked questions and research

All this information goes more to proving that the real problem is that the lower classes are more often stuck with teachers that are not motivated enough to teach students the complete curriculum because they don’t believe the children will amount to anything more than their parents.The lack of motivation could be caused by their low pay, crowded schools or maybe the location affects the students and teachers to a point that eventually no one cares and this compounds over the years.

This article says, “Too many of America’s most disadvantaged children grow up without the skills needed to thrive in the twenty-first century. Whether in educational attainment between income groups or racial/ethnic groups or across geographic locations—inequality persists.” This creates long-term problems within that community. Meaning people who start out with disadvantages, usually don’t have the skills that the upper class more privileged kids do which help them eventually get jobs and maintain this middle to upper class community. The disadvantages people receive bad jobs and

However, these minute problems can be fixed over time and with care. To do this, we must first start by addressing the fact that some teachers need an incentive to give more to their students. By not helping teachers out, it is highly likely that they will not give their all in order to educate students. As a result, students fall behind and can not help themselves through the system that was initially designed to weed out the weak. The education system as it is, makes it excruciatingly difficult for students to do well because they do not fit into what is required of them. Although this may be the case, the system is not broken, and in turn, it can be fixed by first addressing the fact that teachers are not as valued as they should be. Although some teachers make it their mission to educate their students, some have a hard time putting in more time than is required of them. In doing so, students cannot get extra help if they need it and eventually end up having a hard time passing. In order to fix the system, we must first deal with the small problems that could cause a large ripple if they are

For example, when interview, William Cooper at the age of 10 “had no time to go to day school,” (Document 1). Because of the lack of education, Cooper would not have been able to go on to work as a teacher or a doctor in order to support a family or better society. Instead, he can only read, but not write. Because he was illiterate, he couldn’t write resumes, he couldn’t read and understand complex texts, and he couldn’t think thoroughly, which hindered him by keeping him from receiving any higher paying work that could raise him from the working class into the middle class. Moreover, without a decent supply of money, one would have to live in the slum areas, where typical workers would have to live.

Hardships have the power to make a break a person, as Roman poet, Horace, once said, “Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant”. Everyone has or will have to face adversity at some point in their lives, it is a universal truth. Although misfortunes usually have a negative connotation, depending on the struggle and how one deals with it, it is likely the person will come out of misfortune better prepared for the world. Contrastly, if a person never experienced any hardships, they would lack a sophisticated understanding of the world and lack the ability to handle difficult situations. Adversity gives people strength they can not obtain with success.

For instance, when it comes to mathematics, teachers prefer to teach students the steps to a problem rather than to find the theory behind it- explaining why a specific formula may be used. Teachers are negligent and decide to take the “easy way out” and instruct students to use a method and solve it with the given steps. Similarly, English classes are taught in the same manner as Mathematics. Typically, students are enforced to read and learn how to use proper grammar- identifying where to insert commas, quotations, capitalizations, etc. With the education students receive in this school students, they will not have the sufficient knowledge to obtain a desirable job in the future. The students from the working-class will only have the capacity to achieve blue-collar employment because they were trained like robots to become an employee rather than become somebody’s head employer.

Schools are sometimes described as sorting machines which categorize students based on their skills and interests. This process can perpetuate inequalities.

Getting a “good” job is not straightforward as it used to be. In past generations, someone in an entry-level position could work their way up the ladder simply through hard work and determination; whether or not one had credentials or a diploma mattered very little. This is not the case today. Higher education is now critical to obtaining a better job because the demand for skilled labor is rising. For this reason, the value that a degree offers is higher than that of one’s actual intelligence or merit. Furthermore, workers without college degrees will quickly be outpaced in position and salary by degree

Poverty is a human services issue that is spread throughout the nation and world. ‘The percentage of children who are poor is more than three times as high in the United States as it is in Norway or the Netherlands.’ (Porter, 2016) The trend since 2000 is that there is an increasing amount of families, and in turn children, living in poverty. Poverty has been defined as the state of being extremely poor. But what does that mean? Poverty is the lack of financial, emotional, spiritual, mental, and physical resources. Children cannot change their situation because they are dependent on adults to provide for them which makes poverty easily passed from generation to generation. “Poverty directly and indirectly affects

Dual enrollment, four year universities, community colleges and trade schools. I’ve seen people with college educations that have terrible jobs and no real prospects, and I’ve seen people without degrees, or with technical certificates, that are wildly successful and happy with the choice they made. Yet we continue to see the disparities between those that have vocational training or a two or four year degree, and those that do not.

This is due to several factors. Engle and Black explain, “children growing up in poverty experience “double jeopardy.” Not only are they directly exposed to risks in their homes and communities, including illnesses, crowding and family stress, lack of psychosocial stimulation, and limited resources, but they often experience more serious consequences to risks than children from higher income families” (3). Children in poverty tend to live in low income areas which have high rates of crime and very few academic opportunities. Schools in these low income areas as well are underfunded, poorly staffed, and do not have the resources to provide a good quality education. Engle and Black note a solution that has worked, which are programs that sponsor poor families that live in low income areas, and move them to higher income areas. Children who move to higher income areas made significant progress on their academics, and became more confident in their ability to succeed. Karl Marx’s conflict theory argues that individuals of different social classes have an unequal amount of resources, and those that have more resources, the upper class, exploit those who have less (Krogen 16). Conflict theory can explain the educational and lifestyle disparity

They also have social capital; social networks, which help them in getting accepted into better schools. Therefore working-class young people are disadvantaged for many reasons; consequently educational achievement is a lot tougher for them than middle and upper-class young people.

On the other hand, the wealthy people are able to keep climbing the social ladder because they can afford to be successful, and in turn their children will also become successful due to their parents social status.

During the past several decades, “ranking system” became an important factor of the way to measure people’s success or failure in the United States of America. This ranking system is applied to sports teams and companies in the world. This system makes them competitive, so teams and companies are able to gain more profits from those competitions. And it does make sense when ranking system is applied to sports teams or companies because their purposes are earning more money or being famous using competitions. However, this ranking system can be cruel to people who got lower ranking. According to the author Frank Bruni, problem is that this system is also applied to education system and this ranking system seems cruel. Therefore, high school students and their parents should keep away from the conventional belief that their success or failure in the future is already determined by their college rankings because test scores are not going to help you anymore in the real world.