Black-White Differences In Achievement The Importance Of Wealth Summary

In the article “Black-White Differences in Achievement: The importance of Wealth” it explores how wealth affect academic achievement, as well as explain why there is such a huge gap in test scores between black students and white students. The author argues that wealth is an economic capital that is beneficial to a child doing well in school. This means that wealth can be used as a financial resource and can be converted into cultural, social, and human capital. Social capital is a having a form of acceptance in a particular society, like buying Jordan’s because everyone else has Jordan’s. Cultural Capital mainly focuses on your social mobility with no use of economic resources, like self image, knowledge, and skill. Human Capital is having attributes about yourself that serves
Looking at this theory from a racial perspective, most children of color come from families that have little to no wealth (financial, social, and cultural capital) at all compared to white children who do. Since they have little to no wealth, they‘re not able to receive high quality schooling, educational resources at home, gain social status with other students, and expand their education by going to college. Due to the fact that they have a limited amount of wealth this could lead the child to having no motivation and low self esteem, which will have an effect on their academic achievement. The gap in test scores between black students and white student continues to expand as children progress through school. Research has shown that from grade 1 to grade 12, the gap in mathematics has widened by 0.18 standard deviations and the gap in vocabulary scores has widened by 0.23 standard deviations (Orr, 2003, pg.286).This means that black student who entered school with the same test scores as white students are most likely to have lower test scores than white students when they leave the 12th