@OldFashioned1 has a good point when he/she said:
“…This is a culture issue at all spectrums. Most low income parents don’t care; school is a baby sitter. And too many middle class parents care more about sports than honors and AP courses.”
My take on this issue is this:
It IS a culture issue. But it’s not necessarily a racial or ethnic culture issue. It has to do with the culture in each individual FAMILY, regardless of ethnic heritage.
Consider this - my kids go to a nationally ranked charter school. The high school made the top 10 public high schools in the country this year. Their school is ~43% minority and from a household income perspective, there’s a lot of variety. There are families who are very well off and there are families who are not. There are even refugee kids who attend this school, where the parents never graduated from high school and are doing menial labor-intensive jobs in order to put food on the table & scrape by. The refugee kids’ parents didn’t even speak English a couple of years ago, yet their kids are thriving.
So what is the common denominator?
All of the parents care a LOT about education. The parents do what it takes to help their kids get the best education they can. So when the school’s administration sends information home saying, “This is what you need to do at home in order for your child to be able to complete their homework,” the parents do it. They turn the TV off. They create a supportive learning environment at home. They make sure that their kids actually do the homework. They pay attention to what their kids’ grades are. When their kids are struggling, they reach out and talk to the teachers.
And, in turn, the school does whatever it takes to help those students succeed. In the case of 1 refugee family, 1 of their kids was failing. The refugee family got paired up with a refugee relief organization in town. That person, as it turns out, graduated from that charter school and he went with the parents to each teacher conference and acted as translator. The school arranged all sorts of extra help before and after school for the student and it worked.
This same school offers a study skills & organizational skills camp in the summer before school starts. If you can’t afford to pay for it, the school boosters organization pays for it for needy families. My DD was taught how to take notes, how to study for a test, how to organize your notebooks & your locker, how to be a responsible student.