Epidemic Of Poverty

Poverty Negatively Effects Academic Achievement

The epidemic of poverty amongst students has been shown to consistently have a negative impact on student’s academic opportunities and achievements. Sadly poverty affects a large amount of students found in the world today and to make matters worse poverty has the power to effect student’s progress even when it strikes in the most indirect of ways.
Poverty is affecting a significantly large amount of students worldwide and even though the United States is the richest nation on earth, poverty is currently having a powerfully negative impact; furthermore the numbers of those affected here are growing ominously. Author Ellen S. Amatea’s article states that in the United States alone, national
This study was conducted by researchers Gordon B. Dahl and Lance Lochner for the Cambridge, Mass. Based National Bureau of Economic Research. The data that was used was from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. They used this data to track both the reading and math progress of children who were living in poverty and then had the income increase. What they found was that both math and reading test scores resulted in higher scores after the $1000 a year income increase. Specifically math test scores were increased by 2.1 percent and reading test scores by 3.6 percent of a standard deviation. With the very straight forward nature of this study and it’s clearly stated results, it would be hard to deny that the presence of a higher income increases academic performance and visa-versa.
Student’s academic achievements in the United States specifically have been shown to be affected by their wealth or poverty more than in most other developed nations, according to the results of the 2006 Programs for International
The study resulted in American students ranking far behind the majority of all participating developed nations in both science and mathematics. This finding is relevant to understanding the correlation between poverty and academic achievement because the results of this test also concluded that 18 percent of the variation in American’s science scores were related to the student’s socioeconomic circumstances. This proportion of 18 percent was significantly higher than the average which was about 14 percent among industrialized countries, but even more startling was that the socioeconomic variation was more than twice as high as several of the highest performing countries that averaged at about 8 percent. As you can see by the results of this study the countries with higher test scores and higher academic achievements were the countries that had educational systems provided enough support to lower-income individuals that the economic circumstances of a student did not hinder or alter academic achievement. The findings in this study again bring you to better understand that the situation of poverty certainly does have a negative impact on a student’s academic achievements.
Students living in poverty encounter a number of added difficulties that students of higher-income status do not just because of the dynamics associated with their economic status. Such difficulties effect their ability to achieve academically. An article by Ellen