The Importance Of Social Inequality In Education

Superior Essays
An individual’s pathway to success is crucially shaped by the class they are born in. Their class background and neighborhoods determine where their children go to school. While affluent students have options to go to high-quality public schools or private schools, low-income students have limited school options. From elementary school to high school, inequality has persisted through the lack of resources and lowered teacher expectations for low-income students. In college, low-income students still lack the resources necessary to graduate from college and get a job. The educational systems’ failure to change social inequality reinforces the inequality that is already there. Schools can disrupt these inequalities by accommodating the lower class in all stages of education. Elementary and secondary institutions are the first to fail their students as teachers stimulate the seeds of doubt in low-income students and lack the resources to support them. Teachers indirectly plant the seeds of doubt through their perception of their students’ family background based on their names: those with high-status names are more likely to be introduced to gifted and talented programs in comparison to students with similar test scores but with low-status names (Rouse & Barrow, 2006, 108). As a result, low-income students are not challenged enough because teachers believe that they are not smart enough to keep up with the rest of the students. Because teachers have low expectations for low-income children, they would be less likely to continue their education (Rouse & Barrow, 2006, 108). Low-income students become convinced that they are not good enough and therefore settle for getting remedial jobs rather than continuing their education. In Lower Richmond elementary school, most students read below grade level (Lareau, 2011, 18). However, in Swan Lake, another elementary school, most children read at or above their grade level (Lareau, 2011, 21). This disparity in reading levels is due to the resources that each school has to teach these students. In Lower Richmond, there are fewer resources so they are unable to provide the tools needed to improve students’ reading levels. However, in Swan Lake, they have more than enough investments from parents and resources to help students excel in reading. Middle-class families “comparison-shopped for kindergartens” and moved to areas with better schools (Khan, 2015, 97). Because of their financial resources, middle-class families are capable of moving to places that provide the best kindergartens to make their child prepared. Therefore, elementary and middle schools have trapped low-income students into a failing system. After graduating from middle school, students move on to high school where their access to AP courses, SAT Prep, honors classes, and extracurricular activities are conditioned on class and neighborhood. Because of this, parents either pay outside the school for these advantages or have to deal with their child being less prepared for college. High schools in low-income neighborhoods tend to lack resources, such as honors and AP courses, to adequately prepare students for college (Haveman & Smeeding, 2006, 136). Rouse and Barrow (2006) find that 26.2% of high-income students are enrolled in AP classes in comparison to 16.9% of low-income students. Due to a lack of AP courses, disadvantaged students would be academically less prepared than advantaged students and not qualify for college. Since low-income parents have fewer financial resources, they tend to live in impoverished areas surrounded by low-quality schools (Rouse & Barrow, 2006, 110). By not having enough money to move to flourishing neighborhoods, low-income families are forced to remain in these …show more content…
Elementary school teachers continue to praise some children and disregarding other children who could have the potential to continue on to high school. In high school, resources are disproportionally distributed so that schools in high-income neighborhoods have more money to push students to college than low-income neighborhoods. In college, the upper-class triumphs since they can use their connections to get jobs whereas low-income students are forced to either continue to struggle in college or drop out and work in remedial jobs. Some of the ways to at least make a stance against the inequality in education are having small class sizes, using charter schools so that students can be adequately prepared for college and providing mentors who can give encouragement and understand where low-income students come

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