Socioeconomic Patterns Of Attainment And Reasons For Attainment Gaps

One of the major causes of underachievement is the lack of economic capital, proposed by Pierre Bourdieu (1984), that a working class family possess. As item A states, ‘sociologists claim that factors outside the school, such as parental attitudes and parental income, are the main causes of working class underachievement.’ Children who belong to a working class background may not be able to afford the necessary equipment or meet the

The data is compared to those students come from affluent socioeconomic status and backgrounds. The data is sourced from several diverse locations in order to give the broadest view of the disparities that exist. Howard (2010) compares data in reading, mathematics, SAT results and disciplinary rates. This data is a formidable beginning to the content of the book because it provides context for the reader to better understand the achievement gap.

How should society handle the perceived differences between races when it comes to education? The goal of both researchers is to narrow the academic gap between white and black students. Both authors attribute the gap between the academic scores of black and white students from opposite sides of racial identity. As Dr. Beverly Daniels Tatum, President of Spelman College and clinical psychologist has written an article entitled “Why are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” Her approach is from the perspective of the student and how they perceive their role and upper limits while maintaining their place in their peer group's expectations of their race. Dr. Diane Ravitch, a research professor of education at New York University, has written an article entitled "The Facts about the Achievement Gap.” Her approach is from the perspective of how schools and society implicitly or explicitly cast students into achievement tracks based on their race. Both approach the same idea about racial identity, but they have different solutions, such as peer groups, the school board, and who is right about the solution.

According to Bynner and Joshi (1999) class differences have persisted since the late 1950’s. It can be seen that all studies carried out by various theorist came to the same conclusion that middle class pupils tend to do a lot better than working class in terms of educational achievement. Pupils from middle class backgrounds tend to pass more exams, stay on at school for longer and are five times more likely to go to university. This gap in achievement widens with age as right from nursery school to university, processes like labelling or the self fulfilling prophecy take

The United States is a country based on equal opportunity; every citizen is to be given the same chance as another to succeed. This includes the government providing the opportunity of equal education to all children. All children are provided schools to attend. However, the quality of one school compared to another is undoubtedly unfair. Former teacher John Kozol, when being transferred to a new school, said, "The shock from going from one of the poorest schools to one of the wealthiest cannot be overstated (Kozol 2)." The education gap between higher and lower-income schools is obvious: therefore, the United States is making the effort to provide an equal education with questionable results.

In Gillian Evans’ book of ‘Educational Failure and Working Class White Children in Britain,’ she mainly draws attention between the link of social class and education. Children, who have been brought up in a working class background, do not really have much of a head start in education in comparison to children who come from middle/upper-class backgrounds (Evans, 2006). Educational and economic status of parents plays an essential role on the road to success for their children. What’s more, her chapter proposes that children from working class backgrounds are innate to possess a low level of intelligence, but it can still be argued that a minority of children who come from working class backgrounds do tend to get great results (Evans, 2006). The author has illustrated an outlook on the social structure of intelligence and the way in which a child’s and parents relationship can have an impact on their level of understanding (Evans, 2006). It is commonly known that children tend to always pick things up and the learning process is

“The socioeconomic achievement gap in education refers to the inequality in academic achievement between groups of students. The achievement gap shows up in grades, standardized test scores, course selection, dropout rates, and college-completion rates, among other success measures” (Ansell, 2017). Typically, when discussing the achievement gap, educators are comparing the academic progress of African-American students or Hispanic students to the progress of white students. More-often-than-not the white students will have more educational achievements than their non-white colleagues (Ansell, 2017). The most widely accepted theory as to why students with higher socioeconomic status (SES) do better academically is high parental involvement, access to economic resources and access to highly qualified teachers (Huang, 2015. Pg.6). Students of low socioeconomic status often live in poverty. This means that the student may not have sufficient school supplies or even someone at home to help him with his homework. There are numerous children in the United States’ school systems that are failing due to the achievement gap. These students are at a disadvantage because the school systems and teachers do not notice or even care about their home life and how it comes into play in their education. It is important for our nation to not only understand the achievement gap but take steps toward correcting it.

Education does not just take place in schools. Classrooms are places where many forms of discourses come together. Students and teachers with various forms of knowledge and ways of communicating interact together and unfortunately some ways of knowing and communicating hold more value than others. Sometimes researcher should stop looking at the bigger picture; capitalist economies and the true nature of society should become more of a focus in education research. You cannot hope to understand why students from lower socio economic areas do poorly compared to students whose parents are more affluent unless more is done to understand the prior.

Education is always indispensable, and every development comes from education. For example, the progression of manufacturing or devising the robot, phone and computer all establish in education. Without education, people could not have an advantageous life. In other words, the developments, convenient substances and achievements are from education. However, the society has been converting into complicated, and some inequalities and issues from education relate to income and the situation of families and communities which will beget achievement gap. For instance, The Facts about the Achievement Gap written by Diane Ravitch, mentions: “The children at the wrong end of the gap are likelier to attend schools in overcrowded classrooms with inadequate

An equal and high quality education for all students in the United States is crucial to its economic progression. Access to a proper education leads to the acquirement of jobs and opportunities which overall will support the development of a society. Unfortunately, there is a large disparity between ethnic groups, regarding their ability to equally succeed and obtain the same opportunities as their counterparts. This is otherwise known as the attainment gap, which more specifically, refers to the distinct academic achievement differences between groups of students; often times between minority groups and their White peers. This is

One of the most epidemic problems that greatly affects the American public education today is the economic inequality and the resulting gap of academic achievement between rich and poor public schools. The problem started to exacerbate especially in the last fifty years as the gap is still widening and continue to be unsolved. Of course, poor students who come from financially unfortunate families are the main sect that feels its impact the most. Greg Duncan and Katherine Magnuson, a distinguished professor in education and the latter has a Ph.D. in Human Development and Social Policy, have showed the strong relationship and the inevitable relevance between the academic achievement of students and their families’ income. They noted that poor students from the bottom ten percent of the socioeconomic classes have been recorded to score at around more than a standard deviation lower than those from the top quintile in math and reading (47). In 1965, it was the first attempt from the government to propose, yet an imperfect, solution to the problem by issuing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Then in 1966, the Coleman Report had a major role in raising public opinion toward this issue and disclosing its real dimensions during the War on Poverty movement. Also, in order to understand the real size of this problem, we must consider all the major factors that contribute to this income achievement gap and its evolution over the

However social class is not the only factor influencing educational achievement; Girls achieve higher grades than boys in Standard Assessment Tests (SATs) and GCSE’s (Mitsos and Browne, 1998), in 2010 to 2011 54.3 per cent of black pupils achieved five or more A* to C grades at GCSE compared to 58 per cent of white pupils and 61.8 per cent of Asian pupils (Attew, 2012). Therefore educational achievement is also affected by gender and ethnicity.

sits the same exams up to the age of 16. So why are there marked

Efforts to reach this are the provision of schools, with entry on a meritocratic basis. Following the 1944 Education Act in Britain, the removal of fees from secondary schools and the provision of student grants, certain financial barriers to educational attainment were minimised. Whether we measure equality of access fairly is a debateable topic, however there is overwhelming evidence which confirms that social class origins are strongly and clearly implicated in educational success or failure. Halsey, Heath and Ridge (1981), in a study of 8529 males educated in England and Wales, found that a boy who was considered middle class, compared to a boy in working class had fourth more times of attending a public school, eighteen times more chance of attending a minor independent school and twelve times more chance of attending a direct grant school and three times more chance of attending a grammar school (Journal of Social Policy, 1981). So this study heavily implies that the pattern of unequal access to the more prestigious secondary schools remained, despite the post war education reforms ‘the probability of a working-class boy receiving a fair education in the mid-fifties and sixties were very little different from that of his parents’ generation thirty years earlier’ (Halsey,

Social disadvantage is hard to summarise in one single definition as there are a number of ways to measure it such as level of employment to health and life expectancy. However it is still problematic to solely conclude the existence of social disadvantage from measures such as these as Clegg and Ginsberg (2006:10) note how a family could have a good occupation and economic state, but If they reside in a poor neighbourhood it could have an effect on development. Due to the difficulty defining social disadvantage researchers have tried to distinguish between poverty status and SES (socio-economic status). Within this guideline three measures to determine it are taken into account: Occupation (often paternal), level of parental education (often maternal) and economic deprivation. The level of SES is therefore a useful way to determine the degree of social disadvantage, with low-SES being a useful way to define it. With this definition there has been an increasing level of focus on the issue of children from low-SES backgrounds displaying limited success academically than that of children from more socially advantaged backgrounds. In relation to language, this academic underachievement has been attributed to language skills inadequate for accessing the curriculum (Clegg