Poverty And Education The Great Land Of Opportunity

Poverty and Education The peasantry, the serfs, the impoverished, the needy, the penniless, and the poverty-stricken: though their title changes, the disadvantaged remain. America, the great land of opportunity, is focused on eliminating poverty and to a certain extent they have been successful: according to the Central Intelligence Agency’s webpage â€Å"The World Factbook: United States†, America is in the bottom eighteenth percentile of population below the poverty line. However, those who are impoverished in the United States still face various obstacles. Some believe that the needy are granted all of the same opportunities as their well-off counterparts. However, the poor do in fact still face barriers in the area of education: namely,†¦show more content†¦. . current policy initiatives are misguided because they either deny or set to the side a basic body of evidence documenting that students from disadvantaged households on average perform less well in s chool than those from more advantaged families. Because they do not directly address the educational challenges experienced by disadvantaged students, these policy strategies have contributed little—and are not likely to contribute much in the future—to raising overall student achievement or to reducing achievement and educational attainment gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged students. (Ladd 204) Underfunded minority-predominated inner-city schools provide less educational opportunity than their more affluent counterparts (â€Å"Poverty,† par. 5). Because of the unstable work and housing situations that prevail in low-income districts students often move at very short notice and do not return their textbooks. Schools are unable to allow students to take textbooks home for fear of losing them (Robinson 561). The inability to study textbooks at home causes many students to struggle when confronted with harder subjects such as math and the sciences. In addit ion, poorer schools tend to receive teachers inexperienced teachers from no-name universities that are teaching there in order to build experience before transferring to â€Å"better†, wealthier schools that can pay higher salaries