Argument Analysis: Pushing Past The Achievement Gap

There is a perception that poor children of color, labeled “at risk”, do worse in school simply because they do not care enough. In truth, many poor students of color feel that school is a waste of time for them because they are not being challenged, and school feels useless. For people facing poverty, school is their ticket out. However, when they realize that it always does not work like that, many students lose faith in the school system. When students are constantly being told that they do worse in school than other White students, it can make a person feel insecure about themselves. By evaluating how the education system treats and compares poor students of color to their middle class White peers, we, as educators, can see how this negatively impacts students’ confidence and contributes towards the Achievement Gap. This is critical when trying to understand the unfairly balanced educational system in America. The easiest way to determine a student’s academic promise is by comparing him to his peers. If a girl in class finishes her exam faster than anyone else and still …show more content…
Many arguments as to why poor children of color do not succeed as well as White middle class peers is speculation by judgmental people. In “Pushing Past the Achievement Gap: An Essay on the Language of Deficit,” Ladson-Billings discusses some of the assumptions naïve people make about “at risk” students. For example, some people believe that, “these children are not ready” to begin school, and they cannot attend because they are not intelligent and educated enough (Ladson-Billings, 2007). Even if children are not prepared for school, they cannot be expected to just sit at home and do nothing as they fall further and further behind while their peers attend class. School is the perfect opportunity to get students caught up, no matter how far behind they