Improving Education

Improved Essays
A. We should be pessimistic that improving educational systems could eliminate the SES gap in achievement/attainment: I think we should be pessimistic in thinking that an improvement in educational systems would really help eliminate the SES gap in achievement and attainment. There are an abundance of other factors involved that contribute to the gap that do not directly involve the school, including the summer learning gap and home life differences between low and higher classes. Improving the educational systems would certainly be helpful, but we must be sure those improvements actually help rather than hinder all students of different socioeconomic classes. Even if there were an improvement for schools there would still …show more content…
Rothstein reports that lower economic status households cannot always afford to address health issues like paying for glasses or fixing cavities, and their health insurance is of little assistance. Higher SES students can afford to stay healthy and therefore are learning more than those who cannot. Inadequate financial resources hinder a student’s ability to get help when necessary if they cannot afford a tutor or study materials that other students can. These are a few reasons that merely improving schools would not eliminate the achievement gap between different SES groups. Many influential factors leading to the gap are not inside schools, they are outside, and those factors are not always put on the forefront of reformers’ …show more content…
The revenue for each school district is different because different areas have varying socioeconomic statuses, so that districts with lower property values have significantly lower tax dollars being put into the schools (Reyes & Rodriguez, p. 114). Because of this inequality, schools with less revenue are not able to get the resources that could potentially be used to decrease the learning gap. Also, what goes on at home is something schools cannot prevent. How people parent and the resources parents have to keep their child well, account for much of the reasons a gap was started and continues. We need to hold parents accountable for their children’s

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