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Why do the poor do badly in school?

Why do the poor do badly in school?


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reefedjib

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We recently talked about some of this in another thread. I am curious what others think are the driving factors for why the poor, both urban and rural, do so poorly in school.
 
It just occurred to me that I am generalizing and that there may be many poor that do well in school. I don't know what the mobility is from poor to middle class, as a result of doing well in school. I don't know the number of poor, percentage-wise, that earn scholarships to university, or otherwise make it into university to work their way through school. I did know many guys in the Army that made it out of the projects and earn a degree, so there is obviously some level of mobility.

However, I think for a majority of the poor, they end up poor as well. This could presumably be attributed to generational poverty.
 
i'm guessing socio-economic factors. for instance, they'd be more pressed to get a job and help support their family than to get a proper education, and stuff like that.
 
School quality is a big thing. It's hard to get an education when schools are having gang issues and so on. Schools in poor areas tend to have fewer resources, and I suspect it's harder to attract worthwhile teachers. Poor parents are less likely to instill in their kids the value of education. When kids do not value the education, they tend to be disruptive in school, and make it harder for those who do want an education, which leads back to the first thing. And so it goes, round and round.

It's a hard problem to fix because you have to change so many things, many of them outside of the control of any one but the parents and students themselves.
 
I said:

  1. lack of motivation
  2. urban schools don't attract talented teachers
  3. rural schools don't attract talented teachers
  4. gang culture (urban)
  5. socio-economic factors
I ranked my answers. I think motivation is the primary issue, by a long shot. Second to that is lack of talented teachers.

I don't know how to motivate the poor.
 
School quality is a big thing. It's hard to get an education when schools are having gang issues and so on. Schools in poor areas tend to have fewer resources, and I suspect it's harder to attract worthwhile teachers. Poor parents are less likely to instill in their kids the value of education. When kids do not value the education, they tend to be disruptive in school, and make it harder for those who do want an education, which leads back to the first thing. And so it goes, round and round.

It's a hard problem to fix because you have to change so many things, many of them outside of the control of any one but the parents and students themselves.

I really should have included the bold as a choice. That one is huge, at least in considering my life. I just knew I would go to college, even if I took a detour through the Army.

Do schools truly have fewer resources? I mean, if kids are disruptive and cannot appreciate the resources schools already have, then what exactly is missing that could make a difference?
 
I really should have included the bold as a choice. That one is huge, at least in considering my life. I just knew I would go to college, even if I took a detour through the Army.

Do schools truly have fewer resources? I mean, if kids are disruptive and cannot appreciate the resources schools already have, then what exactly is missing that could make a difference?

To be honest, I cannot document it, but I am pretty sure it is true. Several factors involve lower tax base in the area, state funding based on head counts on certain days, and schools in poor areas tend to have a higher percentage of absenteeism. I think there is probably more to it than that, but I am not sure.

The problems in poor areas for education are so diverse, it's hard to get a handle on all of them. It's also to my mind the number one social issue right now. Unfortunately, there are no good answers for it to my knowledge.
 
To be honest, I cannot document it, but I am pretty sure it is true. Several factors involve lower tax base in the area, state funding based on head counts on certain days, and schools in poor areas tend to have a higher percentage of absenteeism. I think there is probably more to it than that, but I am not sure.

The problems in poor areas for education are so diverse, it's hard to get a handle on all of them. It's also to my mind the number one social issue right now. Unfortunately, there are no good answers for it to my knowledge.

This paper seems to be often cited: Ameican Schooling and Educational Inequality: A Forecast for the 21st Century. It has a very interesting opening paragraph which I am unable to copy here. Check it out. (It says racial inequality will lesson, but socioeconomic inequality will gain ground).


Another paper that cites the above paper, from here: Differences in Urban and Suburban Schools: Disparities in School Facilties and Funding. It says:

Public education is funded primarily by the federal, state, and local governments with the local and state governments providing the bulk of the proceeds. Most states and local communities support public education by using property tax revenues. Also, school districts in many areas can levy extra taxes in accordance to state and local guidelines (Marx, 2006).

With that being said, because the homes in the suburbs tend to be worth more and those living in the suburbs tend to be more affluent, more tax revenues can be collected from them. This in turn means that schools in the suburbs tend to generate more income than those from the inner cities.

More funding means more competitive educator salaries, smaller class sizes, more access to technology within the classroom, cleaner and more advanced facilities, newer books and classroom resources, and even healthier and more nutritious foods. It also means that those who have access to more money tend to get better access to more desirable educational opportunities (Gamoran, 2001).

In other words, students at suburban schools tend to have a much more enriching educational experience than those from the inner-cities. It is not a great coincidence why they tend to outperform their urban counterparts.

It further states:

Finally, as the issue of race slowly transitions into a matter of economic discrepancy between the haves and the have-nots, it is important to understand that education is still the number one predictor of economic and social upward mobilization (Gamoran, 2001). Thus, inequalities within the educational system of the United States severely hinder the image of the United States as the rags to riches capital of the world. Horatio Alger would be very disappointed; but on a more serious note, this can further widen the gap between the affluent and the destitute.
 
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Lots of poor people-lots of valid answers

1) people who have hard working parents have examples that inspire them to work hard in school. People who don't have say a father at home don't get that support

2) cultural reasons. Some ethnic groups -even when they were the target of oppression-overachieve because their culture values education. Other groups do not have that advantage


3) schools that are infected with people who don't give a damn and teachers who either don't care or have given up caring. An environment hostile to educational achievement is not going to turn out as many good students as a school system full of kids who want to get into UCLA or Duke
 
1) people who have hard working parents have examples that inspire them to work hard in school. People who don't have say a father at home don't get that support

If I was to rank them, this would probably be the top reason, though I would add peers along to it. If your parent(s) and peers don't provide positive feedback towards the importance of school, you are not likely to value it.

Quick note: the military is a great equalizer, and I wish we could get more poor people interested in it.
 
I chose:

Lack of motivation - poor can't study way out of poverty
This is a major factor, I think. Our scientists have made so many technological advancements, even in the last 10 years, let alone 50, and yet it is Hollywood and professional sports that get the million dollar salaries. So what's the point of being smart if being pretty or being athletic pays better and you don't have to try so hard?

Thing is this will never change. While I know it's unfair, I agree that life isn't fair, and so there will probably be very little that can be done about this.

Schools are underfunded - don't have special programs to help poor
I don't think it's that schools are underfunded - I think that it's students who are underfunded. What I would really like to do is pass a federal law that will take 5% of all educational funding away from school programs, teacher pay, educational administrator pay, and every other fund from public school and use that money to pay students for getting good grades. That way, students from a very young age can learn that doing hard work pays off in school and does in the real world as well. I mean think of it - we tell kids that they should apply themselves to get good grades "just for the virtue of it" instead of for money - but we, as adults, don't apply ourselves and work our jobs just for the virtue of it and refuse to get paid. So it seems hypocritical of me that we ask kids to do it. So let's start giving students cash incentives to apply themselves to get good grades. Personally, I think Republicans would love this because instead of dealing with the bureaucracy of government programs, such as school lunches, the students themselves will determine how their money should be spent.

Socio-economic factors
I think this is another major point. I think that poor people, not having much wealth, don't know how to acquire it or how to manage it. I mean if all a poor child/teen sees is his parents working hard and spending rather than saving and investing for later, all he'll know about money is to work hard for it instead of wise management and investment. Maybe what we could if we implement paying students for getting good grades we can offer them to speak with a financial and investment adviser so they can start to learn good money management at a younger age.

Gang culture
Gang culture is another part of it too. It is in the best interests of gangs to use sociological manipulations to deride socially-accepted forms of education. What I mean by that is that gangs want intelligent people - however, they want those people to use their intelligence towards criminal enterprises. So while a poor person may be poor and do badly in school, they can still be intelligent but used it towards socially unacceptable endeavors. And they do so because it's a relatively easier way to make a living than to deal with the bureaucracy of legal business ventures. Young people in gangs may be in it for the thrill, but those who stay in gangs are in it for the money to make a living. That's one reason why many of the things we have criminalized, such as drugs and prostitution, I feel should be legal just so it can come under government regulation rather than be controlled by gangs and the mafia. It's not necessarily that I think those things should be commonplace - it's that I think legalization and regulation would control those things better than criminalization and law enforcement do so currently.

Other
Lack of opportunity
I think that the poor don't have a lot of opportunities that those who are wealthier have. For instance, let's say you have two people of the same intelligence, but one is wealthy and the other is poor. The one who is wealthy has an instant advantage because he can afford to go to better schools to get a better education, while the one who is poor won't be able to afford the same kind of school. That is unless he's able to take out enough loans to pay for his schooling. However, that puts him so deep in debt that he may not actually get out of poverty - rather than having a high-paying occupation and going from poverty to wealth, he'd have a high-paying occupation and stay in poverty to pay off the debt to get the education he hoped would get him from poverty to wealth.

Another factor is that those who go to schools of wealth will be able to make connections with those with wealth, which will help them network with people to be potential investors. This means that people of poverty will have a tougher time making those social connections needed to help establish a thriving business network to sustain them. This may be less of a factor thanks to internet social media, but even I think it will still be a factor.

Unrealistic expectations
I think we have unrealistic expectations of Americans. We expect everybody to be able to pull themselves up by their boot straps and earn enough to afford a home, a car, and a few modern conveniences. The truth is those expectations are unrealistic. Those who are poor, and who have jobs the poor work, need those things but at a level affordable to them. For example, the poor don't need help getting mortgages they can't pay for but rather housing they can afford with a low-paying job. They also need better public transportation to get around not only their local communities but also across the nation.

No appreciation of middle-class jobs
Our country doesn't appreciate tradesmen enough. I think our culture has developed some kind of notion that if you aren't the best then you're not worth anything. I think this has made Americans believe that unless they are the wealthiest they can be, they have no worth.

This means that people focus on those occupation that will only pay the most, rather than some other job closer to their talents and abilities. There's all kinds of needed technical jobs out there - however, they get no appreciation because there aren't any movies, tv shows, or pop songs written about them. After all, right now there is an intense demand for nuclear scientists to handle our country's stockpile of nuclear missiles. We'll also need them for advances in nuclear power, which we may have to rely on in the near future. There's all sorts of areas where we need expertise - the only problem is that they go unappreciated in our country, and therefore people don't know how much they are really worth.
 
1) people who have hard working parents have examples that inspire them to work hard in school. People who don't have say a father at home don't get that support

Two parents can work hard as immigrant farm laborers and still be poor.
 
Two parents can work hard as immigrant farm laborers and still be poor.

yeah but their kids are going to have an advantage over a kid whose mother is a drug addicted welfare recipient who was impregnated by a man she hasn't seen in years and is doing time in USP-Terra Haute
 
If I was to rank them, this would probably be the top reason, though I would add peers along to it. If your parent(s) and peers don't provide positive feedback towards the importance of school, you are not likely to value it.

Quick note: the military is a great equalizer, and I wish we could get more poor people interested in it.

Professors of mine who had gone to Harvard, Yale, etc on the GI Bill said that was true and made going to college a dream for more men that became true

BBL
 
yeah but their kids are going to have an advantage over a kid whose mother is a drug addicted welfare recipient who was impregnated by a man she hasn't seen in years and is doing time in USP-Terra Haute

Then you should say that children with one parent who's a drug-addicted welfare recipient and the other who's in jail is at more of a disadvantage, not children from poor single-parent households. Huge difference between the two.
 
Quick note: the military is a great equalizer, and I wish we could get more poor people interested in it.

I'd prefer it if some other civilian agency that wasn't military was available to the poor so they can get a college education and occupational training.
 
I grew up poor, but I was a straight A student and was the second one in my family to go to college. I graduated college with honors.

I think it has a lot to do with them thinking they can't do better than their parents. They think they can't go to college because they don't have the money (I used loans and scholarships). I assume they just think they'll live like their parents, so why even try?

I wish I could vote for more than one...
 
Environment is a big part of it, it affects motivation.
When a group of siblings have the same parents, and attend the same schools, and assuming fairly equal smarts, the only thing left is motivation.

We have to WANT to benefit from the education system available to us. All schools graduate kids ready for college, likewise all schools have dropouts.

Some kids want to learn on their own, and will do well no matter where they live...
 
All schools graduate kids ready for college, likewise all schools have dropouts.

And there are schools that graduate kids but don't prepare them for college. I made great grades in my school, but it was a small parochial school in a rural area. Despite it being a private school, it operated on a shoestring budget, and so couldn't afford things like new books on a regular basis. I swear, my physics book was 20 years old. I went to college expecting it to be easy, but I didn't have enough of the foundation I needed for college. I have learned more from reading wikipedia in my own spare time than I ever learned from my school.
 
And there are schools that graduate kids but don't prepare them for college. I made great grades in my school, but it was a small parochial school in a rural area. Despite it being a private school, it operated on a shoestring budget, and so couldn't afford things like new books on a regular basis. I swear, my physics book was 20 years old. I went to college expecting it to be easy, but I didn't have enough of the foundation I needed for college. I have learned more from reading wikipedia in my own spare time than I ever learned from my school.

High School level Physics has changed almost zip in the last 20 years....

But I agree with you about rural schools and low budgets. When my kids were still school age, the area we were in had a farmer mentality.
I heard a jr. high principal say "When farming is the local industry, our kids don't need algebra or any other "higher" math."
So she would handicap all those kids who parents don't have farms?
The local high school, under pressure from the parents, presented nearly the entire student body as "honor roll" students. They also had the "high honor roll" for the few who were actually worthy of the term. Graduates of the high school were often having to attend remedial classes in college to get them up to par with other HS graduates...
We moved away from there, when one of our kids was entering HS, the other entering Jr.HS.
 
i was surprised to learn while reading The Outliers that urban poor students perform as well as suburban elite students in school
... but only for the nine months that school is active
the poor students fall behind during the three months of summer each year
it was found that the affluent students are exposed to enriching experiences, camps, vacations, etc. which types of learning activities are not available to their poorer counterparts
the difference is barely perceptible early in their education, but after 12 years the accumulated delta is significant
the conclusion i take from that finding is that we need to abandon the present school calandar, one which was established during an agrarian age when kids needed to be home tending crops in the summer - we need year round schools
 
i was surprised to learn while reading The Outliers that urban poor students perform as well as suburban elite students in school
... but only for the nine months that school is active
the poor students fall behind during the three months of summer each year
it was found that the affluent students are exposed to enriching experiences, camps, vacations, etc. which types of learning activities are not available to their poorer counterparts
the difference is barely perceptible early in their education, but after 12 years the accumulated delta is significant
the conclusion i take from that finding is that we need to abandon the present school calandar, one which was established during an agrarian age when kids needed to be home tending crops in the summer - we need year round schools

I fully and totally support the change to a year-round school year. However, if we do so, I think that we should make Fridays a "free day" at school when students can pursue their own interests or get tutoring in subjects they're falling behind in. That way, kids won't have too regimented of a lifestyle and they'll have the time to pursue things the school may not cover.
 
I fully and totally support the change to a year-round school year. However, if we do so, I think that we should make Fridays a "free day" at school when students can pursue their own interests or get tutoring in subjects they're falling behind in. That way, kids won't have too regimented of a lifestyle and they'll have the time to pursue things the school may not cover.

There are still a few places where the local schools need to release kids for farming/harvest. I think Idaho still has a fall break for the potato harvest.
But for the most part, farming has become mechanized to the point that the kids aren't needed...
 
I think some of the above would apply but I picked other.

I believe it has to do with self esteem, poor parenting, gangsta rap, drugs, and sometimes plain old laziness.
 
I grew up poor, but I was a straight A student and was the second one in my family to go to college. I graduated college with honors.

I think it has a lot to do with them thinking they can't do better than their parents. They think they can't go to college because they don't have the money (I used loans and scholarships). I assume they just think they'll live like their parents, so why even try?

I wish I could vote for more than one...

Mellie, what caused you to be so motivated? Was it expected of you that you would attend college? Did your parents go to college? Are you now poor or did your education help you out of that?

You can vote for more than one option...
 
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