Disadvantaged

About: Disadvantaged is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 17050 publications have been published within this topic receiving 337157 citations. The topic is also known as: disadvantaged person.

A Troubled Dream: The Promise and Failure of School Desegregation in Louisiana.

Abstract: Despite decades of effort to reverse such trends, disproportionate numbers of African American students continue to grow up in poverty, in single-parent households, raised by adults with limited education and skills - characteristics that are widely acknowledged as detrimental to academic success. The attempt to improve academic performance by merely rearranging the racial mix through desegregation has proven to be an overly simplistic and inadequate means of providing disadvantaged children with the skills and support they so desperately need. In fact, it appears that coercive desegregation efforts have actually caused school systems to re-segregate, by driving out large numbers of middle-class white students. Using extensive interviews and a wealth of statistical information, this text examines the failed desegregation efforts in Louisiana as a case study of how desegregation has followed the same unsuccessful pattern across the US. It shows that the practical difficulty with desegregation is that academic environments are created by all the students in a school from the the backgrounds that all the students bring with them.

Effects of personal background and training on work values of the hard-core unemployed.

Abstract: This study described how work values of 110 disadvantaged persons differ from those of 180 unskilled and semiskilled employees, identified biographical correlates of work values, and examined changes in work values following training. When compared with regular employees, hard-core trainees placed less emphasis on the tendency to keep active on the job, taking pride in their work, and subscribing to the traditional Protestant Ethic, but placed more emphasis on making money on the job. Significant relationships were found between background characteristics and work values of the hard core. Changes in work values of disadvantaged subjects after 8 weeks of training did not differ from those of 2 52 controlled subjects (insurance agents and college students). Persons classified as disadvantaged or hard core represent a subculture of our society with an indigenous life style and value system. One aspect of this value system that is of particular interest to social scientists is the concept of work values-—an individual's attitude toward work in general rather than his feelings about a specific job. Many authors have speculated about the development of attitudes of the hard core, but they have presented few data to support their conclusions. From a series of intensive interviews of 600 middle- and working-class families in Chicago, Davis (1946) identified three factors that may produce the behavior and set of values characteristic of the ghetto subculture. First, the necessity for survival forces the child of the lower-class family to seek immediate gratification of the most basic physical needs (food, clothing, and shelter), and it inhibits his striving for less urgent goals. Second, Davis argued that when a person becomes

Placing Immigrant and Minority Family and Community Members at the School's Centre: the role of community participation

Abstract: Schools alone cannot reverse the high rates of school failure in the poorest communities in Europe; they need the contributions of the entire community. Coordination between families, the larger community, and the school has proven crucial to enhance student learning and achievement, especially for minority and disadvantaged families. However, families from such backgrounds often participate in their schools only peripherally because the schools take a ‘tourist’ approach, call parents to inform them about school projects and teachers' programmes, or consult them about decisions to be made by professionals, rather than engaging them in their children's education. In contrast, the INCLUD-ED project studied schools across Europe whose students are culturally diverse and from low SES backgrounds; here, the communities are deeply involved in the schools and the students do well academically. This article focuses on three strategies used by these successful schools to engage immigrant and minority community members in more active, decisive, and intellectual ways and thus have greater impact on the school and the students' learning. It also describes some specific practices of involvement grounded in those strategies and the improvements they generate. Though the schools studied use different practices, the three strategies have been found to contribute to a transformative result in all schools: moving minority and disadvantaged families from the periphery of school participation to the centre. The opinion of the community is what moves things forward. — Laura, head teacher of a primary school