Thank you to Jessie for doing this interview with Equal Opportunities for Students! She was interviewed for the Tell Your Story series.
You can see what she had to say here.
Students who go to schools in high poverty areas are typically already at a disadvantage compared to students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds. Students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are less likely to go to preschool, which has a measurable effect on performance in the early elementary school years. Low socioeconomic students are also less likely to have the technology used in the classroom at home, which puts them at a distinct disadvantage compared to the students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds, who have more practice with technology like graphing calculators and computers. Low socioeconomic students are also less likely to have parental involvement than higher socioeconomic students, which is also shown to have a significant effect on school performance. When this is coupled with low socioeconomic students going to underfunded schools, which often have lower quality teachers, this becomes a serious problem for the upward mobility of low socioeconomic students. What could be done to better help low socioeconomic students?