The Importance Of Socioeconomic Status In Catholic Schools

Literature on the effects of low socioeconomic status (SES) on one’s psychological well-being is well established. Prior studies show that low-SES not only impacts individuals’ mental well-being, but also affects their children’s developmental trajectories. This paper reviews one of these numerous studies and further discusses the influences of parental SES on one’s life outcomes, as well as intergenerational mobility and achievement gap through a developmental perspective.

For my Argumentative Essay “Modern Day Re-Segregation in Today’s Schools”, I will be addressing Professor Kelly Bradford and my fellow students of Ivy Tech online English Composition 111-54H. As I chose Martin Luther King’s “Letter from A Birmingham Jail” as my core reading topic, I have gained an interest in not only the fight for civil rights that Mr. King lead in the 1950’s but have gotten interested in how there is still a large gap in equality in education due to the current situation of not only educational segregation but social and economic segregation. Through my research I have discovered that not only segregation in the schools is on the rise, but that socioeconomic segregation exists and is fueling the decrease in academic success by impoverished students. Through my writing I want to demonstrate that the socioeconomic isolation and segregation not only affects those that are directly bound by it, but that it affects every American in some form or other. I am submitting my writing as a formal academic manuscript.

Amanda and Erica’s grades may differ for a variety of reasons. Studies show that the more academic activities a parent is involved in is significantly associated with their child having higher literacy achievement, lower rates of grade retention, and fewer years needing special education (Miedel & Reynolds, 2000). Amanda’s father’s income, education, and occupation also all correlate with her literacy abilities (Buckingham, Wheldall, & Beaman-Wheldall, 2013). Parental education has the strongest influence of the three (Buckingham, Wheldall, & Beaman-Wheldall, 2013).

To start, little is actually known about the importance and effect of timing of poverty on children’s psychological development. Economic deprivation during different phases and time frames of childhood can also alter the outcome of the child. Studies that have been done about children's early cognitive and physical development suggest that family income in the first five years of life has the most

Children in families with lower incomes at or below the poverty line have been connected with poor cognitive and social development in early childhood. The studies that I chose to use evaluate the cognitive and social development during early childhood using various surveys, evaluations, and observations completed by or with the children, parents, and teachers. Development of any kind is dependent on the interplay of nature and nurture, or genetics and environment. These studies draw from a child’s environment during the earliest years of development, specifically birth, pre-school, and early elementary school. The studies propose living in an impoverished environment as opposed to an environment above the poverty line imposes certain

The disparity facing African-Americans in education is cyclic in nature in that if a parent lacks the proper education required to possess a high earning power and as a result become another statistic of the lower class of the economy, hence being unable to provide their children with resources such as tutoring and other services that would help provide educational equity for them, these children are stuck lagging behind their upper-class peers that have access to these resources, leaving them with a lesser quality of education and limiting both their future earning power and their future children’s exposure to better educational resources, hence the cycle of educational disparity that plagues the African-Americans as a race.

Early childhood. During the 1990s, the nation was inundated with reports on the importance of the early years on children's brain development and later cognitive achievement. While some of the reports may have overstated the issue and understated the importance of a child's later years on development, evidence suggests that the early years may be a critical period of development in which family poverty has particularly strong effects on young children. As seen in Table 1, poverty occurring early in a child's life (age two to four) is associated with large effects on indices of child school readiness and cognitive outcomes.

Bearing this harsh fact in mind, it is worth remembering that the racial minorities, be it blacks, latinos or Asians, face an uphill struggle in overcoming the hurdle of residential segregation if they are to successfully and meaningfully assimilate into American society. The Catholic church places great emphasis on the dignity and meaning of every human life and it has a significant role to play in helping those who are less fortunate in the American society. Doing God’s work on earth is a holy cause.

Across Amercia, low-income black children’s isolation has increased. It’s a problem not only poverty but also race. The share of black students attending schools that are more than 90 percent minority grew from 34 percent in 1989 to 39 percent in 2007. In 1989, black students typically attended schools in which 43 perecent of their fellow students were low income. By 2007 this figure has risen to 59 percent.(Orfield 2009)ascd.org

Often times we seek motivation from those that are more successful than us. We put them on a pedestal and aspire to one day be a role model for younger generations after us. What we fail to acknowledge however is the time and hard work they put in before us. We overlook their journey and therefore miss details that could play a major impact on our path to success. Details such as their upbringing, social class, and education are things we should take a closer peek at when comparing their lives to ours. In her book Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, Annette Lareau follows Caucasian and African American subjects from poor, working, and middle class families to understand the influence of socioeconomic class and race on adolescents raised in various households. After studying her subjects over the course of several years in their homes, schools, and extracurricular activities, she comes to conclude the greater influence socioeconomic class has on the skills acquired by children during their childhood.

The development of children can depend on many factors, one of the important ones being socioeconomic status (SES). SES can be defined as a multidimensional construct, including measures of social factors such as power, prestige and hierarchical social status, and economic resources (Hackman and Farah, 2009). Child development can be studied from multiple dimensions such as physical, mental, social, and emotional development among others. For the purposes of this study, I will be focusing on how socioeconomic status affects child cognitive development.

One main reason behind students not being successful later in school is related to the readiness of the child when they enter school. “Evidence suggests that children’s academic skills at school entry are linked to their later school achievement (Entwisle & Alexander, 1993), and that test scores in the elementary school years are associated with long-run economic outcomes such as employment and earnings (Krueger, 2003)” (Magnuson, Ruhm & Waldfogel, 2005).

The lack of effort and performance children from low income families demonstrate is an incontrovertible issue. The effects that environment can have on adolescents can be devastating if the environment is inadequate to promote positive child development and success. Children experiencing poverty and neglect are more susceptible to lower performance in school and delayed development, resulting from “...many aspects of a child’s environment that can adversely affect maximum brain functioning. Two significant and negative environmental factors are poverty and neglect. Research substantiates the negative effects poverty can have on a child’s brain including development, learning and academic performance ”(Loughan,Perna). Loughan and Perna

Socioeconomic status (SES) is one of the most widely studied constructs in the social sciences. Several ways of measuring SES have been proposed, but most include some quantification of family income, parental education, and occupational status. Research shows that SES is associated with a wide variety of health, cognitive, and socioemotional outcomes in children, with effects beginning prior to birth and continuing into adulthood. A variety of mechanisms linking SES to child well-being have been proposed, with most involving differences in access to material and social resources. For children, SES impacts well-being at multiple levels.

About one in five children in the United States has the misfortune of living in a family whose income is below the official poverty threshold (Borman and Reimers 454). Poverty has harmful effects on a child’s academic outcomes, general health, development, and school readiness. The impact of poverty has on a child depends on many factors for instance community features ( crime rate in neighborhood and school characteristics) and the individuals present in the child’s life like their parents, neighbors, or relatives. It is clear that schools and outside environmental factors contribute to whether a child is successful or not in their academic life. A child’s family, neighborhood, and type of school effects that are related with poverty