Socioeconomic Status: A Significant Factor that Affects a Student's Education
The concept of socioeconomic status is a significant factor that can ultimately affect a student’s education. What is socioeconomic status? It is a status that is measured by many different variables such as gross assets, wealth and parent’s education backgrounds (Chapman and Ryan 2005). This is an extremely basic definition and leaves room for ambiguity, due to the fact it does not take other complicated variables into account such as mortgages, rent, home ownership, and other various financial details. There are two significant reasons why low SES can affect the correlation of how well a student performs throughout their schooling years (Cary 2012). These two reasons can be branched into two categories, being educational and social cultural. This paper will illuminate the issues socioeconomic statuses have on education and how this concept influences the student’s ability to learn effectively.
An educational reason to why socioeconomic status can affect a student’s performance at school is the concept of expectations from teachers. There are teachers in schools who lower their expectations of particular students due to their socioeconomic status. Numerous teachers in today’s schools come to the conclusion that students from a low socioeconomic background will generally not do well at school due to the fact that many of these students are not even present at school or have behavioural issues (Ryan and Watson 2005).
There are teachers in schools today who continue to embrace negative views on particular students (Comber 1998). This means that there are teachers who believe students from high socioeconomic backgrounds will have more learning potential than their disadvantaged peers, or the fact that their low SES will slow their learning (Ruge 2000). This is a terrible assumption, as it promotes the concept of labelling where students will automatically accept the label they are given from their teachers. These assumptions stem from stereotypical views of SES
An educational reason to why socioeconomic status can affect a student’s performance at school is the concept of expectations from teachers. There are teachers in schools who lower their expectations of particular students due to their socioeconomic status. Numerous teachers in today’s schools come to the conclusion that students from a low socioeconomic background will generally not do well at school due to the fact that many of these students are not even present at school or have behavioural issues (Ryan and Watson 2005).
There are teachers in schools today who continue to embrace negative views on particular students (Comber 1998). This means that there are teachers who believe students from high socioeconomic backgrounds will have more learning potential than their disadvantaged peers, or the fact that their low SES will slow their learning (Ruge 2000). This is a terrible assumption, as it promotes the concept of labelling where students will automatically accept the label they are given from their teachers. These assumptions stem from stereotypical views of SES
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