I'll ask my brother-in-law about it tonight. He is the first one from his family to go to college and he worked his way through a Masters program in Aeronautical Engineering. Very smart guy.
I learned some interesting things tonight. My brother-in-law, Joe, grew up on Staten Island and was a member of a gang. They didn't do much crime, he said, but were more into hanging out in the neighborhood and going to clubs to hear death metal!
He got zero support from his mother toward school and his father he saw rarely, and got little support, since they were divorced. His grandparents showed interest and support and in the early years they lived together, so it was a daily thing then, but in junior high they moved and he saw them only once a week.
He was a C student in high school. He was very short on math, having only taken the minimum up to Algebra 2. He had bad teachers. However, he had decided he wanted to be an inventor and needed to go to college to get a degree. He wanted this badly. When he spoke with his guidance counselor and told him he wanted to go to college, his guidance counselor encouraged him, even with "C"s. When Joe told him he wanted to go for Engineering, his counselor laughed in his face!
Joe went on to engineering at City College of New York, Staten Island. His gang members didn't give him any ****, but actually started college the year after. Many didn't make it but several got business degrees. Years later, when married to my sister, Joe entered the Masters program in Aerospace Engineering and completed it.
Now Joe is a High School teacher in Fairfax County, VA. He is the technology instructor and teaches drafting, general engineering, engineering design and several other courses. He won the State Teachers Award for Engineering/Technology Program, which he has built from the ground up.
His school is in a heavy Hispanic neighborhood and he has many Hispanic students at the school, although not many take his classes. Still, he has many under-performers. The single biggest difference in students performance is the involvement of parents.
His good students have parents that monitor their homework and assignments. They show up at teacher conferences to see how their kids are doing. They punish their kids for misbehaving.
His bad students have uninvolved parents. They don't go to teacher conferences. When Joe calls them to discuss the students performance, he gets a perfunctory phone call. Once they hung up on him. The parents work late and do not monitor progress. They do not punish. They don't care.
He does have kids that struggle with material, but many times this is not due to lack of intelligence, but lack of preparation from other classes - and bad study habits if any at all.
The Hispanic kids are the worst.