The Impact of Socioeconomic Disadvantage on Education

Throughout decades, education inequality is still one of the most deliberate and controversial issues in the United States. Thus far, the privilege or right to receive education has not attained the level of equality throughout the nation. Poor districts obtain less educational funds while rich districts obtain more, which create an immense gap between the quality of schools in poor and rich areas. In other words, the education gap is the root of inequality in America. Inequality in education is linked to the major problems in the society. The need for studies to be done to find ways of overcoming these inequalities is very inevitable. The means of mitigating these inequalities are important for the entire world. This is something of great interest due to the fact that children need quality education which is a pillar for a guaranteed future. Generally speaking, the distinctions among races, genders, and classes in the society have caused the educational inequality in America.

Education is provided to people who come from all economic backgrounds. However, not everyone is able to use the education system to the best of their abilities. For example, children who live in poor situations might not be able to focus only on their studies such as taking up a job to help support their families. Moreover, it’s a fact that the areas that have a higher income generally often have a better schooling system. This might be arising from donations from local families and from a better economic structure in the area. A higher social class has advantages to access to resources such as tutors, private lessons, private schools and higher quality public schools. On the other hand, children in lower socioeconomic classes might live in impoverished, stressful environments with fewer resources.

There are many people throughout the world that are born into different socio-economic status. In the United States there are 3 typical socio-economic statuses, upper class, middle class, and working class. The majority of people are born into the working class and try to make their way up. The main way people believe to go up a class in America is through education, but how does socio-economic class play a role in the amount of education one will receive in their future?

For the first century of the United States, Congress had a restricted but active position in education, which expanded after the Civil War in 1865. At that time, the federal government mandated new union states to offer free public schools and established an early form of the Department of Education. From the late 1930s to the early 1990s, the Supreme Court's opposition to congressional power decreased, clearing the way for a greater federal role in education. The federal role in education increased as Congress provided funding for the construction of schools, teacher salaries, and school lunch programs. However, this assistance was geared toward wealthier school districts, which negatively impacted poorer, urban schools (Martin, 2012).

On the 8th-grade math test, just 23% of New Mexico’s children tested as proficient or above, placing it ahead of only three states: Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. All of the worst performers nationally share one central characteristic with New Mexico: they all have high rates of child poverty. The achievement gap between poor and non-poor students is growing. Among children born in 2001, the achievement gap between high and low-income families is 30 to 40 percent larger than among those children born 25 years earlier (“Alleviating Poverty,” 2014).

Although the United States is one of the most highly industrialized nations in the world, students in many other industrialized nations are outperforming U.S. students in various academic areas. As a result, the U.S. has implemented standard-based reform, and its educational costs have soared. No longer are American graduates competing with each other for jobs, in the present global economy, they also are competing with graduates from other industrialized nations, many of whom are preforming at higher academic levels in reading, math, science, and problem solving as measured by their performance on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) (“FactSheet”1-2). The PISA is an assessment that is administered every three years to fifteen year old students in OECD (Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development) countries. The OECD consists of the world’s highly industrialized nations that comprise more than 85% of the world’s economy. (West 2) The PISA was first administered in 2000, and it has been administered every three years since that time. This assessment measures student performance in the areas of reading, mathematics and science. The 2003 and 2012 administrations of the PISA also measured students’ problem solving. On the 2009 administration of the PISA, U.S. students preformed below average in the academic areas of math and science compared to students in other OECD countries (West 2). In math, the U.S. trailed seventeen OECD countries and

A good education is vital in succeeding within many industries in the UK, from Business to Medicine, Politics to Art. It unfortunately does not come as a surprise that only 58.6% of students attained 5 or more GCSE’s at grades A* to C (Department for Education 2012). In comparison, albeit falling this year on previous years, 94.4% of students in private schools attained the same results (The Independent 2012a). Following the recent recession, Social mobility has begun to decline and is lower today than it was thirty years ago. It is now less likely that a child of parents in a low-income bracket will rise to the top-income bracket than it was in

Throughout the world, there have been continuous attempts to reform education at all levels. With different causes that are deeply rooted in history, society, and culture, this inequality is difficult to eradicate. Although difficult, education is vital to society’s movement forward. It promotes “citizenship, identity, equality of opportunity and social inclusion, social cohesion as well as economic growth and employment” and for these reasons, equality should be promoted (Shrivastava,67).

The literature review addresses the following question: Does social class inequality affect higher education? The theoretical paradigm that is considered for this question is the Critical paradigm, in which is mainly qualitative and inductive. Critical paradigm is appropriate to answer this particular question because it involves inductive reasoning that begins from a specific observation to a more generalize. The paradigm also looks at how people are at a disadvantage when it comes to obtaining a higher education and incorporates observations and interviews that cultivate a conversation and the interviewee’s reflection. By interviewing people in different social classes and asking how it affects their education, researchers are able to identify the affects social class has on higher education.

Throughout the article, she is ultimately against the education policy and is bringing forward the contradiction between the allegations and the actions the president has taken in the education system. In response to poor testing grades of students across Mexico, Lloyd says that the government has directly blamed teachers, and have taken repercussions on restricting education as a whole. This claim is directly aimed towards the parents, as Lloyd is raising awareness of the extreme measures the government has taken, because after all, these actions affect the education of their children. Lloyd claims that these measures are too extreme, because she believes they are ineffective. She aims to pass this point across through powerful emotional appeals and language such as describing the government’s actions as “villainizing” and describing the teachers as “culprits” in the poor performance of students. This harsh and critical description of how educators are treated is aimed to strike an emotional chord in the audience, and develop the same anger Lloyd has towards officials trying to cover Nieto’s

Latin America currently has an education system that faces significantly low performance and pressure for education improvement by local, state and national authorities. (Chafuen, 2014) In 2012, PISA ranked almost every Latin America countries below the global average for participants. Chile in particular, scoring ten percent lower that the average, was the highest-ranking country in Latin America. (PISA, 2012) (See Appendix III) Leaders of Latin America have identified economical factors as the leading cause of educational inequalities and lackluster overall academic performance by the region. Furthermore, leaders of the region like, Herald Beyer, push the government to help economically disadvantaged people by providing additional funding and merit-based scholarships. (Crellin, 2012) By pushing the government to provide these economic resources, leaders look to afford people of low economic status

“Education leads to a brighter future.” Quite a clichéd phrase, actually. So popular, that people tend to forget the true significance of it. It is known that Latin America faces numerous problems that makes looking into the future a discouraging view; but we fail to realize the lack of education may be the root of these issues, including violence, unemployment and poverty. Even though education is widely available in Latin America, people are not yet engrained with the idea that education can be a facilitator for a superior life. Economic issues that stem from unemployment and poverty have led to the notion that education is wasted time that could be better spent

Education is one of the biggest, most important factors that must be addressed in order to improve all current conditions in Mexico. In recent times the Mexican government has made efforts to bridge the enormous gap in education, such as the “Oportunidades” program. However the results of their efforts have been very minimal. Statistics show that “just 21 percent of Mexicans aged 25-34 have completed high school, compared with 95 percent of South Koreans” and only about “8 percent of Mexicans 18+, holds a Bachelors degree” (Jackson, 2005, 17). Education amongst the elderly population is even scarcer, the percentage of people aged 55 to 64 who have complete secondary school in 2005, was at about “5% for Mexicans who had only completed

|The purpose of this essay is to analyze these three main causes of poverty in Mexico. |

When each child gets equal access to education, the result is always a working and productive portion of the country’s population. With the state having a large percentage of working people, there is a remarkable improvement realized in the economy due to the high revenues collected by the government. For instance, if the low performing would have hard better measures to ensure educational equity, each would have