Minority Students In America's Schools

This part of analysis is to focus on the factors that contributed to the negative academic performance of racial and ethnic minority students in America’s schools, in correlation to the movie and other reading materials. These factors are gang violence, lack of parental involvement, quality of teacher and their expectations of the students, and inadequate funding. Each issue is equally important in not preparing students for high school graduation and competing in the working world. The first factor that hurt the performance of minority students is gang violence. Conflict theorist sees gang or gang violence as a pattern of struggle, domination, and submission between those who are living in poverty and those who aren’t. This social conflict …show more content…
If you have passionate teachers then the changes of their students succeeding are higher because they put in more effort with unbiased point of views. In the movie, Growell’s quality of teaching was unique and exceptional because she didn’t quit on her students even though they didn’t care about learning in the beginning. She was very creative in finding various ways to bond with the students and to peak their interest in learning. However, her colleagues viewed that majority of the minority students weren’t fit to learn and would drop out of school eventually. This in turn created biased and unfair opinions about the students, and more often teachers graded them poorly based on these false beliefs. Students will not get a fair chance to show the teachers their real potentials in learning. Symbolic integrationists focus on face-to-face interaction. In examining what occurs in the classroom, studies have found that student performance tends to conform to teacher expectations, whether they are high or low. Sociologist Ray Rist indicated that each child’s journey through school was determined by the eight day of kindergarten (Henslin, 2010, Chapter, p.511). So having a good teacher is critical to adolescents because first impression is …show more content…
One can observe that the factors which contributed to the negative academic performance of racial and ethnic minority students in America’s schools are gang violence, lack of parental involvement, quality of teacher and their expectations of the students, and inadequate funding. As the most advance country in the world, America should find effective ways in fixing the school system because young people need a good education in other to compete in the 21st century. Without a fair chance, minority students will be left behind. Since this country is becoming more diverse every day, it’s in our best interest to help students find their untapped potentials so we can make more progress as a