EDU 205

Ryan Burnette
Nov. 9th, 2017
Essay #3

The Effect of Social Class on 21st Century Education:

Most would think that in the age of technology and the cyber revolution,
students would have an easier time than their parents and grandparents did in
schools., but this isn’t quite the case. Today’s students are faced with some of
the same pressures and challenges faced before the advent of the internet,
before the first computer, and even during the dawn of the 10th century- these
issues are as old as education, and even with all of our knowledge and
resources, we haven’t been able to solve them. I don’t know if we ever will, to
be completely honest. But the first step to repairing the society that has led to
these problems is acknowledging and understanding what we’re faced with.

We could write massive books on each and every problem our children
have to contend with in schools, but one of the most pressing issues has to be
the divide between our upper and lower classes in America, and specifically the
challenges faced by the latter group. According to one source, the lower class
makes up roughly 20% of the American population, not to mention the bottom
percentile of the 60% making up the middle class, which would still have many
of the same problems as the bottom 20% of society[1]. So if we assume that adds
up to about 35%-40% of the American population, that means we’re talking
about roughly 130 million people, living in situations ranging from living on
government assistance, or just barely keeping above the poverty line, all the
way down to homelessness and sitting on the brink of starvation. And along
that entire spectrum, there are children, hopefully going to school, dealing
with the complex issues of poverty while expected to keep up with their peers
from wealthier families.

The issues related to poverty can further be broken down into several
distinct social issues. Among many others things poor students have to face
are, of course, financial disadvantages, homelessness, and often having to
“grow up too soon,” but also a higher risk of abuse/neglect in the home,
bullying, substance abuse, teen pregnancy and STDs, and gang involvement.
These can be loosely grouped into issues at home, issues at school, and peer-
related issues. Obviously, there are some overlaps between these groups, but
classifying them in such a way makes it easier to understand the effect on
students.

The first set, issues at home, will directly impact school performance, as
the child at school is a mirror of the child’s home life, often times. This can
show up in many ways, and while some of these things are not necessarily
always caused by poverty, it is a large factor in many of these pressing issues.

Arguably the easiest to understand would be a child who literally has no

home- either living in a shelter, on the streets, or just having no permanent
place to live. For these children, school necessarily becomes a second priority,
compared to making ends meet. It doesn’t take a lot of thought to realize how
these students are affected in the classroom, either; between ridicule from
classmates and difficulty keeping up with classes, (or even getting to school, if
they aren’t staying near a bus stop) homeless students have a lot of additional
struggles that other students wouldn’t think of having. And that’s if they are
able to enroll at all, without unnecessary obstacles. According to an article by
educator, Hope Gibbs, “...some administrators fear that these children will impede
or obstruct classroom progress, possibly increase the dropout rate and lower
standardized test scores, all of which are used in assessing how well a school
performs.” [2] It is this stereotyping of homeless students, especially in high
schools, as illiterate delinquents, which presents an unfair disadvantage to
students with every right to learn as a student with a home. Getting financial
aid for college is also a hard process for many, even if they make it through
high school without significant difficulties. I know from experience that filling
out forms like the FAFSA without any tax paperwork from parents, which is a
requirement until the age of 23, is horribly complicated, and the process for
independent status (which bypasses the under-23 rule) is tedious and
unpleasant, putting yet another barrier in front of students who may not live
with either parent, or who don’t know how to fill out the paperwork.
Homelessness is a very real problem in our schools, and it’s often an
overlooked one.

Fortunately, we have specialists who work with the school system to

provide a safe and beneficial learning environment to homeless youth, and
there are options for homeless teenagers, such as career/technical programs,
both through the schools, and federally (such as Job Corps). However, while
these are good things, the fact that we need them shows a severe deficiency in
our ability to, as a nation, ensure that no matter the living conditions of a
student, that student will be educated equally. In an ideal world, the school
would be able to provide all necessary materials, ensure transport to and from
school, bathing facilities, and optimally, some sort of stipend to help the
student’s family get to a better living situation. Unfortunately, that is just not
the reality we live in, but I believe schools could still be making more of an
effort in this regard.

In a different way, children coming from abusive or neglectful living

situations will also have a lot of trouble adapting to the school environment,
both in terms their mental state, and being able to stay in school. There is an
established correlation between victims of child abuse and depression,
attempted suicide, and various personality disorders[3]. Students in these
situations may not always be easy to identify either, which makes helping the
child, before too much permanent damage is done, that much harder. While
child abuse can be found in any type of home, it is statistically more likely to
happen in poor communities[4] which means teachers in such schools will need
to be extra vigilant in spotting and identifying signs of child abuse. A student
who is being abused at home (whether physically, verbally, sexually, or
emotionally) will not be able to learn effectively in school, and this often leads
to a higher dropout rate, and students failing classes, which can often only
worsen things at home, creating an awful, vicious, cycle: the student fails
classes because of abuse at home, and is then punished for failing classes,
resulting in more abuse. It’s a sad but very real truth, and these students need
extra attention from teachers and counselors alike, in order to best get them
from such an unsafe situation into a better one. However, in communities with
limited resources, there may not be a counselor able to work with the child and
Child Protective Services. In such cases, it falls on the teachers to contact
administrators if child abuse is suspected, but in underfunded schools, the
administrators are busy with many other things, and teachers are working
hard to teach, and may not notice when a child is in need of help. Thus, the
problem remains, because there just aren’t enough resources to spend
checking out every case of abuse or neglect. The best solution to this, aside
from repairing the community’s larger problem of poverty, is making sure that
every school has easy access to high quality counselling, and training for
teachers on how to recognize victims of abuse. Only then can we give each
individual case the attention they really need.

In school, poor students have to face bullying related to their social

status. Granted, bullying is an issue entirely on its own right, but as it relates to
poverty, children are targeted based on their clothing, personal hygiene, lack
of luxuries, the car their parents drive (or the lack thereof), and aspects of their
home life (alcoholic parents, living in a trailer park, sharing a room with
several siblings, etc). It can be surprising how observant even younger kids are
of these differences, and when their parents reinforce negative stereotypes of
poor people, it creates an environment in which poverty is shamed and kids are
bullied over something they have no control over.
And it isn’t just the better-off students bullying the poor kids- according
to a study published by the American Journal of Public Health, while victims of
bullying are statistically likely to be from a lower socio-economic status, the
bullies themselves show no significant correlation to class.[6] Based on that
data, it can be assumed that while poor students are at greater risk of being
bullied, the bullies come from all social classes, meaning students are being
bullied by both the wealthier students as well as other impoverished students.
Obviously, this isn’t good, and it is a very complex and difficult problem to
solve in schools, whether the bullying is related to financial status or not. The
best thing for schools to do is to take a more proactive stance on bullying, by
identifying repeat-offending bullies, and offering them counselling and a sort
of bully’s rehabilitation program. It may also help to educate students on
misconceptions about poverty- this would potentially lead to more acceptance
and a better understanding of what it means to be financially disadvantaged,
compared to one’s peers.

Another school-based issue linked with poverty would be high rates of

teen pregnancy and STD transmission in high school students. These problems
may not seem, at first, to be related to the school itself, but they really are, at
the core level. In many rural communities, particularly in the south, schools
are still teaching “Abstinence-Until-Marriage” sex education, while avoiding
the topics of contraceptive use, safe sex, and transmission of STDs[7]. From my
personal experience, taking the one-hour sex ed course given at my middle
school (my high school never even touched on sex ed), we never actually
touched on anything related to sex. It’s no surprise that many students went
on to contract numerous STDs, and some students I went to school with had
two or more children by sophomore year of high school. It seems that there is a
significant correlation between lower-income, more rural, areas, and poor
sexual education, which in turn leads to these damaging issues. Without
proper sex ed, students won’t know how, why, or when, to use protection, and
the dropout rate will increase, as it’s very difficult to raise a child while still
essentially children themselves. The solution really seems to be mandating
that schools must teach a more expansive sex ed program, rather than just
telling students not to have sex. They’re teenagers, they’re going to do it
anyways, the least our schools could do is teach them the right way to go about
it, before they end up stuck with a child, or an incurable disease. However, the
problem here is that some parents would have a moral opposition to any form
of sexual education that isn’t strictly abstinence-based. Thankfully, this view
has declined since the late 1990s or so, but it is still a common enough idea
that changing the curriculum needs to be done with great caution, so as to
avoid causing unwanted conflict and controversy over the issue (which often
tends to end in those parents pushing their ineffective prevention strategy
even harder, possibly at the expense of the school losing its sex ed program
entirely.)

The final set of issues is probably the biggest, just because in school, the
people a student associates with most are his/her classmates and peers of the
same age-group. Often, in poorer, more crime-ridden, communities, it is a
combination of peer pressure and cultural pressure that drive students to
things such as joining gangs, taking and dealing drugs, and generally just
giving up on school.

It can be very tempting to a student from a low-income family to join a

gang, especially if friends or family members are already in said gang. Often,
this is accompanied by a troubled home life, and poor performance in school,
leading the student to think that there aren’t any other options. For some, a
gang provides a sense of security and connection that doesn’t come from their
parents, not to mention a sense of purpose and potential source of income.
When school isn’t providing enough support for at-risk youth, joining a gang
may seem like the best choice, even when the benefits are weighed with the
consequences- being injured or even killed by other gangs, members of your
own gang, or law enforcement (in addition to chances of arrest and trouble
with the law). Some might say that just cracking down on suspected gang
affiliations in schools is the best solution, but perhaps a better, longer-term,
idea would be to provide more incentive for students to stay in school, and
teach them the consequences of gang involvement, through having actual
former gang members come in and talk about what made them choose that
path, and why they got out. Reactive enforcement of anti-gang policies will
just cause students to drop out of school- proactive arguments against joining
them in the first place will be much more effective, in the long term.

Similar to gang affiliation, students with little ambition towards

education, and with a less stable financial background, find themselves
involved with drugs and alcohol. This can take several forms, the most basic
meaning the students are using those substances, very likely because other
teens their age are doing it. And then, following that path, comes addiction,
which ends with high school students who come to class drunk or high, and
aren’t capable of doing their schoolwork, even if they wanted to. This gets even
more dangerous when one considers that in areas with more criminal activity,
drugs are often laced with more potent chemicals, either to create a more
powerful high, or to increase addiction (earning the dealer a new returning
customer). This, much like sex ed, is related to health classes in under-funded
schools- students are told to “say no to drugs,” but nobody ever tells them the
effect that various substances have on the body. And so, careless students wind
up addicted to prescription pills, or meth, or cocaine, and often flunk or drop
out of school, or overdose and die- none of which are good outcomes, and all of
which are avoidable with proper education on the effects of substance abuse.

On the other hand, extremely poor adolescents who are exposed to drugs
at some point, by their peers, or even a parent, can become involved in the
drug trade, which is equally dangerous. It’s not hard to understand why
someone would turn to selling drugs- it’s a profitable business, if you don’t
get caught or killed by some rival dealer. One of the smartest people I’ve ever
known, in fact, dropped out of high school and co-operated a business selling
marijuana and pills with his dad, to pay the bills. He could have done a lot of
things with his life, as intelligent as he was (and still is), but the school system
failed to provide him with what he needed to grow, and so he left. This is
tragically what happens to a lot of youth, and a fair amount of them are some
of the brightest, most gifted, students. It isn’t just the ones who have a hard
time in class that resort to crime; schools without funding, in crime-heavy
places, need enough options and material to stimulate the students who are
ahead of the class. Unfortunately, when resources are spread thin, it’s the
outliers on both sides that are left behind, and that’s when incredibly smart
students end up involved in incredibly stupid and easily avoidable situations.
And between the ones doing drugs and the ones selling them, school turns into
a place of business, not knowledge. And the hardest part is that schools can try
as hard as they want to keep drugs out of the school, but even with random
drug searches, and security checks at the front door, and other tests, persistent
teens will still manage to smuggle them in. The only real solution to the drug
problem in low income schools is to fix the drug problem in the community
around the schools, first, through rehab facilities and programs, and better
policing, in addition to decreasing poverty rates.

The biggest challenges involved with poverty in education are essentially

just related to the general difficulties associated with attending school in a
poor community- affecting both home, school, and students’ social groups.

Coming from one of the poorest counties in North Carolina (Vance

County has a poverty rate of 28%- the average for the United States is 14%) I
can say with confidence that there is a world of difference between a high
school in my hometown of Henderson, North Carolina, compared to say,
Brevard High School, or one of the schools in the nearby city of Durham. There
weren’t enough textbooks for every student oftentimes, and both the
technology and the books were outdated. According to data collected from
various American schools, the amount of financially disadvantaged students at
Southern Vance High School is 99%. Poverty is a very real issue there, and it
can be seen easily- many students drop out of school to join the workforce, or
to sell drugs, in order to support their families. The bare minimum
requirements for North Carolina’s secondary schools are met, but not much
else. And in such a place, where violence and substance abuse are
commonplace, and teenage STD and pregnancy rates were at a national high
several years ago, a proper education is hard to achieve. It’s incredibly eye-
opening for me to see how schools in financially stable communities function;
many of the resources my county can’t afford, or under-prioritizes, these
schools take for granted.
 I’m giving this depiction of the school I went to, only to make this point:
Vance County is not alone. Many schools across the country are in similar
situations, especially in places like inner-city Chicago, Detroit, and Compton.
When poverty is so rampant in a community, the schools suffer first, and the
hardest. How can students focus on learning, with drug searches and threats to
their safety distracting them? How can students think about their education,
while working two part-time jobs to put food on the table for their single
parent and siblings? These are the things students living in extreme poverty
have to deal with on a daily basis, and these are things that teachers need to be
aware of and thinking about. These problems are more pronounced in rougher
schools, but even in your average high school, it is almost inevitable that
several students will be balancing schoolwork and dealing with the
responsibilities that come from growing up with less.

The problem extends beyond the individual, into the school system as a
whole: funding is given to schools based on successful standardized testing.
Studies have shown that poor schools perform significantly worse on these
tests, compared to more affluent schools[5]. This means a school with more
funding to start with is more likely to continue to succeed, while a school with
less funding is likely to languish. It is a system that handicaps the schools most
in need of funding, while giving more money to schools that are already
extremely well-equipped. It makes little sense- if a farmer only watered the
most healthy looking cabbages, and ignored the ones in desperate need of
water, he would grow half as much cabbage.

I firmly believe that if we could stop basing our funding for schools this
way, we would see growth from the impoverished schools, which would in turn
improve the community around the school. They say it takes a village to raise a
child, but when the children grow up, they become the villagers- and educated
villagers raise more educated children. That’s the kind of growth we need, as a
country, but because bureaucrats and politicians view education as a Cold War-
era competition with China, we have a backwards system of funding, in which
necessary resources are used as a reward. It’s like giving water to a dog as a
treat for not being thirsty, and being surprised when all you get is a dead dog.
Our schools can’t thrive when they aren’t allotted equitable resources.
 Overall, between the effects of poverty on home life, social life, and
school interactions, the biggest common solution seems to be pulling the
community out of the bottom rung, and letting financial stability birth more
financial stability. If you eliminate the need for the issues, they will become
less commonplace, and eventually, may be eliminated altogether. For instance,
with better funding for schools to accommodate homeless students,
homelessness could be drastically reduced, and by getting rid of the financial
need that results in students joining gangs and selling drugs, they would have
no motive to turn to crime- their families would, at least in theory, be making
enough to get by, if the community were improved. Which is really the key- the
quality of the school is only as good as the quality of the school district; to have
better schools, we will need better communities, and to get there, we need
better funding to better educate the next generation, in the hopes that they will
continue to improve society for the generation after theirs, and so on.
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