Educational Inequality

Introduction

1. Educational inequality constantly plagues our society. World leaders have been racking their brains, finding ways to overcome this unsettled problem.
2. What if I told you that this educational inequality gap between the rich and poor children in United States is narrowing? Yes, you’ve heard it right!
3. According to the National Centre for Education Statistics, the school readiness gaps, which is the differences in academic skills between the affluent and poor kindergarten children has been improving.  

1.  For example, the school readiness gap decreased by 10% in maths and 16% in reading from 1998 to 2010.

1. Today, I would like to share with you some key reasons that leads to the narrowing of educational inequality gap.

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1. Improvements in educational inequality between wealthy and poor children are caused by various reasons.

1. Firstly, this is due to greater accessibility of high quality and affordable preschool programmes for children of low-income families.

1. The poor children are starting to catch up with their rich peers as there are more publicly funded kindergarten programmes of excellent quality available to them.

2. For example, the number of pre-schoolers in government funded schools increased by 15% from 2002 to 2015.

(Transition: In addition to an increase in more reasonably priced preschools, reduction in educational gaps could also be due to changes in children’s homes)

1. Nowadays, children from both social classes are entitled to more educational materials and spend more time with their parents.

1. They are exposed to a variety of platforms ranging from internet web to computer games to enhance their maths and reading skills.
2. Most importantly, parents of low-income families are devoting more time to their children by reading, bringing them to libraries and also carrying out home-based activities with them.

(Transition: Now that we have understood how changes in children’s homes narrows readiness gaps, let us take a look at the third and final point.)

1. Improvements in school readiness gaps is due to poor parents realising the importance of cognitive development in early childhood.

1. Public campaigns and local efforts in cities help raise awareness of preschool cognitive development among parents.                                                                                                          
2. They are taught easy ways to help their kids build vocabulary and cognitive skills, which forms the foundation for success in school.

Conclusion

1. To sum things up, there is still a long way to go fighting this battle of education inequality. It is estimated to take another 60-110 years for it to be completely eliminated.
2. Larger social problems such as economic inequality and disparity among rich and poor children in terms of resources and quality of schools they attend still exist.
3. Policies should be implemented to tackle these social problems, otherwise, the progress that US has made towards education inequality will only be temporary.