What is it like to attend a low income school that doesn't understand that your education should be more that data and test scores? Well, as a product of those schools, I can tell you that their priorities are slightly different from others.
Most low-income schools are in areas in which minorities are the majority, and the classrooms are over populated. These schools are focused on providing the basic education that will qualify students to attend any college or university they manage to get accepted into.
The only problem is that while these low-income schools are so focused on making sure you take all the college prep classes, or at least the basic A through G required classes, they often times over look academic issues that will effect students later on in their college careers.
A common challenge that these schools face is that of language barriers; most of the students in low-income schools come from homes in which English is the second language, and often times it is hardly even spoken at home. So when these children enter school with little, to no English language background, they are left playing catch-up with other students that do know the language.
As a result these students spend the first two to four years of their primary education learning the English language, and often times they get well into their high school years before they are considered proficient. The real problem is that while these students are being taught a new language in their early education years, they are also missing out on the lessons native English speakers are being taught at the same time, such as grammar lessons that are usually taught throughout second and fourth grade.
These schools are so focused on teaching these students to speak and understand instructions in English that they often times over look the fact that these students are missing out on crucial lessons.
This is an issue that haunts these students, because while they learn to speak, read and write in the dominate English language, they do not know basic grammar rules that come naturally to native speakers. The students are more focused on not having an accent when they speak, proving that they can read at the same level as native speakers and formulating a written idea in English to realize that they have been cheated out of a crucial part of their education.
It is these students that go through high school thinking that they are bad writers because every time they were handed back a paper it was bleeding red ink with all the grammar revisions the teacher had marked.
The worst part is that most times these teachers do not know how to approach the student about these issues, and would rather pass them then to sit down with them and address the issue.
So these students will move onto their college careers and will turn in their first college essay, just to get it back full of the same grammar errors that continue to haunt them. Errors that no one takes the time to explain to them but, instead, ridicules them for not knowing basic grammar rules that they should have learned in primary school.
I speak from experience, because I am one of those students who was learning to speak English while everyone else was learning grammar lessons. I am still the student who still to this day constantly gets reprimanded for the mistakes I make, of which, for the most part, I am completely unaware I am making, and will continue to be haunted by those red marks on my papers.
So if you take anything from reading this article I hope that it is a little bit of patience, understanding and empathy for those students who are not at fault in this situation.
I hope that you admire their capability to speak, read, and write in more than one language even if it is not grammatically correct all the time.
Above all, I hope that you realize the struggle that occurs in low-income schools, in which the decision has to be made whether it is more important to teach students to speak the language needed to be educated, or whether it is important to teach them the right way to use commas.
