How Racial Bias Hinders Positive Student Outcomes
A student can largely rely on their teacher’s expectations. The expectations or beliefs of the teacher about any particular student can fix the standards of their performance while motivating or demotivating their academic pursuits. At present, we can see this in high school graduation when students thank their teachers who fostered them and kept confidence in them when they were truly in need of it.
Over the years, the educator of the year award-winners and other teachers of similar recognition have justified that teachers have to set high expectations. High expectations are examples of believing in the student’s capacity.
The Practical Situation for High-School Students
For many students, racial bias first becomes apparent in high school. During elementary school and middle school, there wasn’t much differentiation between where every student would be going later. This is because the majority of school districts use location instead of merit to divide school progression.
However, as students prepare to finish high school, the division between students aiming low and those aiming high becomes clear. At the time of graduating, lots of counselors try to help students, especially those with a minority background, to go with practical options.
Institutions, which are likely to admit everybody, don’t set very high standards for any student. Realistic environments are in no way realistic, and they many times eternize the continuing format of racial bias in academic pursuit.
If you assess schools like UCLA, you can easily identify that the composition doesn’t mirror the primarily Latino community surrounding the school. Therefore, should the counselors practically advise students to select alternatives? When lots of students from the Latino community live near UCLA, it’s natural for them to want to attend it. The institution is close to home and has garnered an impressive reputation. But if the assumption is that they cannot enter, what’s the point in trying?
It Just Takes One Person
It just takes one administrator, counselor, or educator to have confidence in a student and describe the pushback they experienced from another adult. Telling a student that they should never allow people to obstruct them can make a difference in educational achievement.
Much of the belief is that students having a minority background are considered less capable by the teachers. Another factor is that these students are more presumably belong to locations below the poverty level. Moreover, there’s a 30% lower probability that their mother has attended college.
Let’s try to understand the differentiation. Many times, white teachers may feel that they need to be “realistic,” as described in the aforementioned example. Does a place of caring generate this idea? Commonly, teachers who help students choose schools with less competition or easier to enter schools report that they’re attempting to make students’ disappointment less painful. Nevertheless, BAME teachers often link optimism to success and the requirement to develop a structure of support encompassing students needing it most.
The objective is to develop a self-fulfilling prophecy. And administrators or teachers, regardless of their background, can develop this opportunity. Teachers should help motivate students to attain as much education as they can with no racial bias on their abilities.