Cultural Background Analysis

Cultural background affects a student’s academic achievement by limiting the child’s preparedness for school. Cavanagh points out that how far a child succeeds in school is determined through the “achievement-oriented values, goals, and norms” that the child comes in with. Though the values and goals a student has directly come from his or her family, culture, and what they learn at home. American students who come from families who are immigrants or prefer speaking their own language at home, grow up in a household where English or educational things, like books or learning toys, are limited. “Having at least one parent with more than a high school degree, and attending a school with higher academic press [are] positively associated with”

I myself grew up as the daughter of two Vietnamese immigrants in a family of even more immigrants; my older sister was the only one who knew how to speak English. Due to this, I had grown up with Vietnamese as my first language and English as my second, so when put into school it proved to be very difficult for me. It was not because the school standards were too hard or that I did not have enough help, but rather it was because I had never been exposed to these skills that my peers had been exposed to. These standards felt impossible for me to reach, but easily attainable to my native-born peers. Also, going to school with poor English and being in ELL, I was not able to make any friends and asking for guidance was hard. Having that lack of support from friends and feeling as though I could not match up to my native-born peers caused me to have a decreased encouragement for school because I had already made up in my mind that my background had put me at a disadvantage

Yet, some may argue that this is not due to the differences in culture and background, but rather due to the student having a bad teacher. Although it may be true that good teachers would not allow a student’s identity affect how they reach the specific student, it must be noted that teachers of students that have poor scores are “of about the same quality” (Strauss) as those students who score very well. Therefore teachers cannot be a deciding factor in child success or otherwise there would be a discrepancy in the ability of teachers where there is not. Plus, it must be pointed out “how well some of [the] students are doing,” (Strauss) if poor teachers were really the cause of the bad test scores of some students then all the students in that class should be scoring equally bad, but this is not the