Discussing the factors that tend to produce a significant effect on academic achievements of schoolchildren, James S. Coleman pointed out that they are numerous and very diverse. To be more precise, such factors could cover a multitude of aspects of children’s life both at school and outside of it. For example, some of the factors that impact a child in a classroom may be the teachers, the other children, the subjects that are being taught, how they are being taught, and even the physical environment (desks, chairs, rooms). When it comes to the external factors that influence academic achievement, they may involve the level of income in the students’ families, their ethnic background, family composition, languages dominant in their homes, and the attitudes of their parents toward the curriculums.
In his report, Coleman focused on comparing the environments in which African-American and white students typically obtain their education. One of the factors discussed was the quality of professional education of the teachers that most commonly tend to work in the schools where the majority of students are African-Americans. In particular, Coleman’s statistical data showed that white students tended to attend schools where the teachers had a higher level and quality of education than the professionals working in Black-majority schools.
In addition, Coleman took into consideration the salaries and teaching experience of the teachers and found that the practitioners in the white-majority schools had better determinants that their counterparts from schools attended by average African-Americans. A similar tendency was true for the level of education in the students’ families.
This factor is just as relevant and true today, as it used to be in the 60s when the research conducted by Coleman took place. In particular, African-Americans are more likely than white Americans to come from low-income environments and attend schools with poorer funding. The schools located in low-income districts may be understaffed or employ teachers of poorer quality due to their limited resources.
One more factor discussed by Coleman is in direct relation to the resources possessed by schools. In particular, the author specified that average African-American students tend to go to schools with more restricted funding; and as a result, they do not have access to multiple courses that require specialized equipment (some of such courses are languages, science, and physics). This is the case because the laboratories and materials for such courses are rather costly and the schools with restricted and poor funding cannot afford them.
Today, the problem of poor funding of schools is one of the most frequently discussed issues in the United States. Also, it is possible to theorize that in addition to science, physics, and language courses, the subjects that suffer from the lack of sufficient funding are informatics, computer programming, and technology. Knowing that the importance of technologies as part of education is growing, one may notice that the lack of funding is a very serious disadvantage for the schools and the students who attend them because the future college opportunities are extremely limited for such children.
In conclusion, the current limitations and challenges faced by the educational system in the United States share some common features with the difficulties experienced several decades ago in the 1960s. Unfortunately, these limitations translate in the quality of education provided by the affected schools; and due to the socioeconomic situation in the country, the non-white minority groups tend to be the most vulnerable to the outcomes of these problems.