African-American Students Falling Tendency

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Why African-American Students Academically Tend to Fall Behind Their White Counterparts in the same school?
Introduction
The objective of this essay is to provide an in-depth, comprehensive discussion as to why African-American students are predisposed to lag behind white students in the same school. For instance, on average, black high-school seniors perform mathematics and read at the same level as thirteen-year old white students. “Black students have made slight to no progress at all in twelfth-grade reading scores since the year 1994, and they continue to fall behind white students. The achievement in math has also remained flat, and the gap between African-American students and white students continues to widen” (Wiltz 2). In the United States, black students are inclined to perform poorly compared to white students within the same class.
Over the last 3 decades, improved academic achievement data have provided unparalleled insight into the weaknesses as well as strengths of the education system in the United States. One of the most worrying and striking findings has been the extent to which black students fall behind white fellow students. By virtually all measures of academic performance as well as attainment, African-American students happen to be on the wrong side of a staggering and wide divide (Kirp 5). At present, African-American students score lower compared to white students on math, reading, and vocabulary tests, and even on tests which measure scholastic aptitude as well as intelligence. It is notable that this gap appears even prior to the children entering kindergarten and continues into adulthood (Fryer & Levitt 1). Thesis: black students tend to lag behind their white counterparts because of (i) their home environments;(ii) childrearing or how mothers relate to their children at home; (iii) poverty, socioeconomic status, and income; as well as (iv) lowered expectations of black students.
Reasons for the gap
Home environments: a research study conducted by Fryer and Levitt (4) revealed that generally, African-American children were being brought up in circumstances or home environments that are less likely to be conducive to academic attainment compared to the home environments that white students experienced. Some refute that home environments is not a major issue and does not affect student academic performance. Nonetheless, studies have shown that black students have fewer children’s books in household, which is a major disadvantage. In their study, African-American students in the sample size had 39 children’s books within their homes, relative to an average of 93 books amongst whist students. This greatly contributed to the significant difference in the mathematics and reading test scores between white students and black students. Addressing this disparity reduces the black-white gap in test-score to less than ¼ of a standard ...