Students at Risk – An American Epidemic

EDU 490: Interdisciplinary Capstone

Shmeka L. Williams

June 27, 2009

Abstract Socioeconomic status is a very real problem for children in American society. It affects many areas of their lives, but most importantly, it affects their education. For this reason, it is imperative that parents, teachers, administrators, and communities ban together to ensure that at-risk students from low socioeconomic backgrounds are given the same opportunities as those from a higher socioeconomic background. We can do this by eliciting the best teachers, quality schools, and administrators to instruct these disadvantaged children. We can also do this as parents by making sure that we have educational attainment as our goal for our children by providing different instructional avenues in the home to facilitate learning and desire for learning by our children. If all of these parts of the puzzle can be put in place correctly, then at-risk youth at least have an equal opportunity to succeed in this world of inequality that we all live. Equality in the public school system is a joke. In other words, it does not exist. There are certain criterion that must be met before schools can even start to be considered equal: “equal access, common curriculum, differential curriculum, desegregated schooling, and equality of results” (Riordan 2004, p. 2). In some underdeveloped countries, certain people are excluded from an education, from the poor to the women, it just depends. Another extent to where people are excluded is common curriculum. Even though this was set out for the benefit of all children in school, it proved to not be equal because blacks were still segregated. Even under the guise of the “separate but equal” doctrine, the school system was still anything but. Differential curriculum is where