Why Watching Television Is Forbidden When My Mother Was Not At Home Essay

Imagine growing up in a small town where everyone knows everyone's business and the nearest Wal-Mart is almost an hour away; then imagine attending a school where the amount of student attending is the same number of people who occupy a small town. The size difference is substantial and plays an important role. When I was younger, I had attended both a small town school and a school in the city. I have had the chance to experience the different lifestyles of these two variations of living. The development of who I am today was because of my surroundings. In the city, I noticed there was different opportunities. The opportunities seemed more readily available depending on funding and sources; which are dependant on the location. Education, development, and opportunities are widely known to be affected by environmental factors; thus, people who live in the city have a different experience than those who reside in small towns.

Geography played a huge part in my experience with K-12 education. In the study titled, The Geography of Inequality: Why Separate Means Unequal in American Public Schools (2012), Logan, Minca, and Adar noted that inequalities of performance between schools that have a majority of minority groups and found connections between the performance of school when looking through the lens of race and ethnicity. Key findings included that African American, Hispanic, and Native American students were most likely to attend a school that averages between the 35th-40th percentile (Logan, Minca, Adar 2012). Three types of high poverty schools were outlined; location in city center, majority African American and mixed location, and majority Hispanic (Logan et al., 2012). The school district that I attended for my K-12 education experience was nearly 95% white, located in the suburbs, and had low poverty. My education experience directly counters the education experience that my student engage in on a daily basis. This has created an internal motivation to

The educational system of the united states is not capitalizing on the full potential of its people. Jonathan Kozol in his article “Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid”, discusses the drastic difference in the quality of education based on a family’s income. Kozol discusses how economic disparities usually coincide with race, but focuses on the economic gap of education. Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast “Carlos doesn’t remember”, gives a story and a personal touch, to the issues low income students face. Kozol writing and Gladwell’s podcast, both show that the quality of a child’s education is pure chance. A lottery of being born into a high or low income family dictates the outcome and capitalization of a child’s future.

Additionally, my parent’s substantial economic and social capital was a great asset in my career path of finding a better education outside of my community. Professor Abrego explains that one’s social location shapes an individual’s identity and how one experiences how the world treats them (Abrego, Lecture 01/06/16). In my case, there were not as many resources that my social location offered, for this reason, my mother was determined to find another high school for me to attend, away from South Central. To emphasize, my local high school carried a bad reputation of teen pregnancy, gang violence, and lacked many resources, therefore, due to my mother’s strong social capital she managed to obtain a fake address in order for me to attend a better

Robert Putnam’s argument in Our Kids is that family structure, parenting styles, quality of schooling, and the community all affect a person's upward mobility. He also argues that socioeconomic

The United States, as many believe, is the land of opportunity, however, when looking at individual states, towns, and cities, this popular slogan may seem false to some. Within each state, all schools, such as middle and high schools, may not receive or offer equity. In an effort to revel inequalities within school systems, I will discuss the differences between schools in my town, the apparent lack of public concern about schooling inequality, and what changes could be made in an effort to reduce schooling inequality.

A conversation ingrained in my memory involved two adolescent boys from San Antonio Independent School District (SAISD). When asked about their future ambitions, one student casually responded that he would “go to prison like his father.” The other expressed a desire to rise above his inner city milieu, but had little sense his abilities or of his options. In stark contrast, students from Alamo Heights, an affluent neighboring district, held ambitions to become doctors, lawyers, and politicians, and demonstrated an understanding of the prerequisites for their desired career path. The graduation rate of Alamo Heights stood at 98% while SAISD’s graduation rate lingered around 60%. The contrast between these two districts grows more disturbing when considered through the lens of racial equality. While SAISD’s population is 98% minority, the Anglo population in Alamo Heights totals slightly over 55%. Yet, 74% of Alamo Heights graduates achieve a four-year college diploma, while only 4% percent of SAISD alumni attain a bachelor’s degree. An opportunity gap results from this discrepancy, ultimately proving detrimental to social mobility.

Poverty leads to insufficient opportunities, especially in college education. For instance, according to U.S. Department of Education, students who do not enter college or drop out of their classes are “predominantly persons from low-income families.” In support of this argument, the article states that “only 21 percent of those with family income of less than $25,000 were highly qualified for admission at a four-year institution” compared to the 56 percent of students with family income above $75,000. Therefore, students with bad economic conditions struggle with attending university even after entering it. The problem is that the African Americans race gets the harshest disadvantage from their poor economic conditions. U.S. Department of Health & Human Services publishes that almost 40 percent of African Americans under 18 are below the national poverty line, which is three-times higher than their white counterparts. This explicitly proves that unequal economic conditions are the main reason for inequality in education; African Americans are the most disadvantaged. Furthermore, the correlation between poor economic conditions and a lack of education among African Americans creates a chain of inequality. The poor economic backgrounds of African Americans obstruct their children from attending colleges and subsequently, the lack of higher education makes

One thing that I experienced due to where I lived and my parent’s social class was the fact that I got to attend a good school district, with updated technology and books. My parents’ success and lifestyle were all the reason to me to be hard worker and do well in school. After high school, I took a break in my education, which set me apart from many others whom I had previously been societally grouped together with. This was the cause of many judgments against me, which was difficult at times. Society’s idea of “normal” is to attend college directly after graduating high school, but society’s normal wasn’t going to work for me as I had became pregnant right out of high school, and felt the need to focus my direction on working and making more money in the immediate.

her research on the studies of Geoffrey Wodtke, a national science foundation graduate research fellow who’s found out just how much growing up in a horrendous neighborhood can harm a child and hinder them from attending the most prominent grade school of them all, High school. This unfortunate reality of underprivileged neighborhoods lingers over many young men and women today and have been for many years. These underprivileged neighborhoods consist of many poor, single parent families with

All of the protagonists’ experiences are based on living in a lower socioeconomic status. Researchers named Selina Mcoy and Emer Smyth found that “The middle-classes have more to lose by not staying on in education since they risk social demotion, whereas young people from working-class backgrounds may see less benefit to staying on at school”,3 thus revealing that living in poverty or having a lower socioeconomic status is, therefore, difficult to have a good quality education. Researchers whose names are Heather Wyatt- Nichol, Samuel Brown and Warren Haynes discovered, “The widening gap between the rich and the poor contributes to economic segregation among neighborhoods, perpetuating the problem of inequality in the education and criminal justice system” (190)2, thus explaining the hardship the protagonists faced in their personal experiences. It is evident their lower socioeconomic status affected their education, and it is a crucial theme

In the United States of America, a child’s zip code often determines the quality of the child’s education. A myriad of social, economic, and political factors contributes to this tragic truth. This article, however, focuses on the staggering, discriminatory effect that Unequal School Funding has on our nation’s youth.

Income inequality plays a major role in the education disparity present in communities such as West Chelsea. The economic hardship several families experience affects the way a child grows up and the certain education they receive. As seen in Class Divide, more privileged children can attend schools such as The Avenues where they are given opportunities to grow and learn, while less privileged students are

In “Inequality by Design”, the argument is made that social environment affects where individuals end up, not individual talent or market capitalism (Fischer et al 1996). This social environment includes advantages and disadvantages we get from our parents, the resources our friends share can share with us, quantity and quality of schooling, and the historical era we are born in (Fischer et al 1996). The argument made in “Inequality by Design”, is closely related what shapes one’s trajectory into college. Though college may not be the final destination in “where we end up” as stated in the argument, college is a large contributing factor to where we end up and the social environment affects has a large effect on one’s trajectory into college. When looking back on my trajectory into college, I can see that my social environment had a large part in shaping my path to college, however some factors of the social environment had a larger role than others. In Gregor Aisch and his colleges article “You Draw It: How Family Income Predicts Children’s College Chances” (2015), it is shown that this is true not only for myself but also for children who were born around 1980. The income percentile of children’s parents, which is a factor of the child’s social environment, is closely related to whether or not the children attend college. Within this paper we will discuss the advantages and disadvantages that my social environment gave me on my trajectory to college and how parent’s income

“Chapter 5: Community” of Robert Putnam’s Our Kids deals with growing opportunity gap within American communities. Inequality and class segregation are major factors when honing in on communities. Families with more wealth have more resources and are better able to shield their children from stress and the hardships of life. Eleanor and Madeline went through some tough times between the divorce of their parents and their father’s depression. But, the resources found in the well-off Lower Merion Township allowed the girls to still do very well compared to other children in nearby towns. Prosperous and educated parents enjoy the benefits of “weak ties” (198), which are acquaintances in different social niches such as psychiatrists, friends of