Students in Low SES Schools

In the middle of all the adults involved in education you’ve gotta remember the students! You can get sidetracked a bit sometimes and look at all these fancy theories about learning, but in the end you have to remember that students aren’t just statistics they are real people and they are the backbone and future of our society.

      What they aspire to is incredibly important. Their aspirations dictate how our society progresses. And an unfortunate truth is that students don’t feel that they can aspire in Low SES schools.

There was a study done by Polidano, Hanel & Buddelmeyer this year.  And what it indicated was that there were significant differences in aspirations of High SES school students and low SES school students. We’re talking 19%  in differences between how much a low SES student aspires to.

That’s not good.

     It could be argued that maybe they don’t aspire to much as they have less money and poverty is a cause of this. To some extent it may influence it but what Polidano et al. found was that this really wasn’t the case, the main difference between Low and High SES schools is the factor of aspirations.

     Students don’t think that they can achieve because they are told that they cannot achieve. There is this negative stigma around low SES schools that they are basically dropkicks. Everyone kind of thinks they just disrupt classes, pull out knives and show a disregard towards other students as well as teachers.

      Amongst a students aspirations for life they are constantly conflicted with negativity provided by the community, teachers, parents and even themselves. Kids take their problems from home to school and flood the school with knock on negativity. This can be through bullying or more generally a disinterest in school.

Knock-On Effect

I am told I cannot succeed ->

I cannot succeed ->

Others cannot succeed either ->

Telling others “do you actually believe you can succeed?”

Low SES schools are operating in unhelpful environments :(