School wealth has a direct relation to student success, both in student access to advanced learning techniques and student class size. Wealthier schools, including private schools and schools in affluent neighborhoods, enjoy smaller class sizes, increasing the amount of time each teacher can spend with each student. Poorer schools suffer from larger class sizes, allowing students to get overlooked or unnoticed by teachers. Additionally, poorer schools suffer from the lack of some teaching aides, such as computers, televisions or updating teaching resources. These differences force students, who often suffer from poor socio-economic advantages at home, to suffer from the same disadvantages in the classroom.
Families influence student success both in their ability to interact with children and influence children based on the family’s perception of economic problems. A low socio-economic family, such as a single parent home where a mother must work outside of the home to support the family’s basic needs, is limited on the amount of additional help she can give her child to support his educational needs. Additionally, a low socio-economic family often suffers from a poor educational history, preventing parents from helping their children with homework due to the parent’s lack of understanding of the material.
A student’s peer group plays a socializing role in a child’s life. Within a low socio-economic community, student disinterest and student discouragement can be a byproduct of a general lack of hope for any future economic changes. Essentially, as parents begin to feel as though their current economic situation may never change, they can transfer these feelings to their children, who in turn communicate this feeling throughout the youth community through peer influences. This discouragement convinces young students that academic achievement is less important and leads to an increase in general disinterest with the classroom.
While each student has the right to attend a public school, schools are not uniform in their ability to provide extracurricular activities to interested students. This includes student’s access to food at lunch, access to extracurricular sports equipment or access to academic extracurricular activities, such as debate teams, dance teams or academic groups. Some low socio-economic schools are unable to provide these activities, or if these activities are available, schools are unable to provide similar funding for these activities in comparison to private schools or wealthier schools.