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According the article by Blume Butrymowicz’s (2013), the majority of high school dropouts and students who graduate from school by meeting minimum college-prep requirements are blacks and Hispanics. Conversely, students who successfully graduate from traditional high schools without transferring to alternative schools or/and dropping out are dominantly whites and Asians.
Why do these achievement gaps exist? Lareau (2013), the author of "Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life”, argues that parents deliver cultural capital to children based on their parenting styles, which strongly correlate with the social class of parents. To be specific, middle-class parents tend to use “Concerted Cultivation” while the low-income families are more likely to employ “Accomplishment of Natural Growth”. Lareau noted, “role of race was less powerful than I’d expected” (240). Rather, social class of parents exerts stronger influence on kid’s life chances, implicitly and explicitly.
Parents of different social classes treat the pastime of their children significantly dissimilar. For instance, children from middle-class families are more organized, and tend to spend their free time engaging in sports activities, having a private tutor for academic improvements, or playing musical instruments. Children from low-income families, on the other hand, often waste most of their time watching TV and playing computer games.
In addition, the speech and vocabulary of children can vary depending on their parents’ social class. Middle-class parents teach their children negotiation and reasoning skills, and explain the principles of well-mannered speech using full sentences and appropriate words. On the contrary, children from working class or poor families learn language from their parents, who use it “as a practical conduit of daily life, not as a tool for cultivating reasoning skills or a resource to plumb for ways to express feelings or ideas” (146).
Furthermore, Lareau (2013) argues that middle-class families provide their children with more opportunities to gain "institutional skills”. This creates a large educational achievement gap between social classes. It is problematic because the disparity is gradually getting worse. Middle-class parents try to interact with their children’s teachers as much as possible, and sometimes criticize them, whereas parents of a working or low-income class respect the instructors’ expertise and high level of education.
“The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People’s Children” by Lisa Delpit reveals concerns regarding the effectiveness of “skills” and “process” approaches to writing for students from different backgrounds in terms of social class. Delpit argues that “the culture of power” is majorly dominated by white middle and upper class students who have “cultural capital”. Students in power generally demonstrate good academics results and do better in school. In contrast, students without “cultural capital” are more likely to suffer because they have not learned implicit rules and codes that many white middle and upper class students already have. Therefore, in order to obtain power, they should be told explicitly the rules. It should be noted that many of those who have power tend not to notice it. Additionally, Delpit encourages teachers to be “liberal", although this type of power is hard to obtain for them. Further, Delpit claims that despite changes in approaching students without cultural capital are important, those students need to try finding their own “expertness” as well. Then, schools and educators should be willing to help them to establish their expertness. Delpit concludes that people in power should take action "in order to initiate true dialogue" because "to provide schooling for everyone's children that reflects liberal, middle-class values and aspirations is to ensure the maintenance of the status quo, to ensure that power, the culture of power, remains in the hands of those who already have it."