The lower amount of lower-income parents is due to the fact that in typically lower-income neighborhoods, enrichment programs are harder to find and are typically too expensive to be feasible for most families. This is deeply connected to the fact that parents who did not obtain a higher education than high school, typically have lower yearly earnings than those who obtained a college degree (Pew). This interestingly directly relates to how they view their neighborhoods. Parents from lower or working class are more likely to rate their neighborhoods as “unsafe” or “a bad place to raise kids” than their middle-class counterparts (Pew). The upper classes see their neighborhoods as a “safer” area to raise their children as their presence can raise the value of the neighborhood, in turn raising the quality of the school (Perrin 3). Therefore, the greater amount of funds for those programs provides many children with the chance to participate in them, but only if that family resides in an area that is deemed “safe” and essentially worthy of enrichment. Simply, the effects of class reproduction manifest in the absence of enrichment opportunities as the more lower-income families reside in an area, the less funding is available for the local schools which …show more content…
By providing free programs, those children unable to attend them otherwise are at least in one aspect closer to the opportunities and life chances presented to other upper class children. Furthermore, I propose that if a large national effort is pushed for these free programs, a generation of lower and working class children with a different cultural value of education will rise. They will be able to understand the academic advantages that are intertwined in extracurriculars and employ the “concerted cultivation” mindset to the raising of their children, encouraging greater achievement which will in turn foster social mobility to a higher