Poor Academic Performance (Essay Sample)

Poor Academic Performance Name: Institution: The United States Education System has come under strict scrutiny in the last few years following a general low academic performance in public schools. People attribute the overall low performance to different factors. The academic performance is definitely multifaceted in the sense that it is a function of multiple factors. However, some of the factors have been understated during policymaking debates. From a critical point of view, students from certain ethnicities, backgrounds, and regions show higher average performance than others. There must be forces responsible for such performance discrepancy. This paper considers the impact of racial segregation and poverty on the academic performance of students from diverse backgrounds and ethnicities. It is logical to assume that the segregated and discriminated students will struggle to perform at the same level as the other students. Racial segregation relatively limits the academic performance of some races by creating inequalities. This claim may seem invalid considering United States Court has been committed to ensuring equality in all services supported by the federal government as evident in the abolition of racially separate schools. However, some studies have proved that segregation is still in existence despite policy reforms. There are context, scale, exposure and process dimension segregations which are not yet eliminated. Each of these dimensions is capable of creating segregation. Assuming there is a correlation between education quality and racial composition of a school, segregated school systems will lead to academic performance disparities. If for instance, the students of color tend to live in separate neighborhoods with the white students, then there is a high likelihood that the two groups will attend different schools. Students will prefer enrolling in schools within their neighborhood. Acknowledging that the residential areas of the whites and people of color tend to be concentrated in separate regions, some schools will be dominated by the white student populations while others are dominated by the students of color. At the same time, schooling resources such as teachers are not uniformly distributed but are distributed in favor of the dominant race. In such contexts, academic performance between the two ethnic groups is expected to vary not because of different potentials among the ethnic groups but due to social structures. The government reforms to privatize schools are ignorant of the segregation effect (Ravitch, 2013). If the segregation is the main reason for low relative academic performance in some ethnic groups especially the minorities, government privatization efforts will not yield the expected fruits of enhancing balanced average performance. The main reason for relatively low academic performance is not necessarily racial segregation but other factors tied to different races. This claim is clearly illustrated when student performance from the poor backgrounds is compared with the academic performance of students from rich households. On average, students from wealthy families tend to perform better than those without adequate financial support. The few students of color from rich backgrounds have shown high performance comparable to that of the whites. The direct relationship exhibited by income level and level of academic performance is self-explanatory. Students without adequate financial tend to utilize part of their academic hours in paid work while the rich counterpart receives the support directly. Note that poverty is concentrated among the minor races and thus explaining their relatively low performance. There are wide socioeconomic gaps across different ethnic groups. The whites or the dominant ethnic groups are generally wealthier as compared to any other race. The market-oriented suggested reforms on education sector such as privatization are likely to worsen the racial segregation aspect because the best schools will tend to attract students from rich backgrounds. When the education sector is commercialized, the private investors interested in profit making will possibly disregard equality standards (Ravitch, 2013). Therefore, the reforms on education sector are ineffective in terms of addressing low academic performance among minorities. Reformers only claim to care about poverty. However, they don’t seem to take the expected restoration measures but are emphasizing on private management of schools. There are not practical proofs that the public education system has been a failure. Consequently, the root causes of unacceptable low academic performance of minor and poor students remain unaddressed. Having noted that segregation effect in education system creates inequalities, the government needs to eradicate inequalities to address the performance differences. “Only by eliminating opportunity gaps can we eliminate achievement gaps.” (Ravitch, 2013 p. 8). The minor ethnic groups need to be exposed to similar education resources for them to compete fairly with the students from dominant ethnic groups. Note that the funds allocated to different schools are subject to location of the school and resource distribution positions are dominated by the whites. The poverty condition among the minor ethnic groups worsens the situation in the sense that students from such backgrounds do not get similar parental and community support as compared to students from wealthy and dominant ethnicities. Note that the dominant race is relatively more enlightened and well informed on the importance of education and thus transfers such attr...