Teaching Adolescents |
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In the article “Social Capital and the Achievement Gap,” Kayla Zeisler (2012) presents the achievement gap in education as being a result of what she calls an “autocatalytic process” that almost ensures that students with little social capital (or with negative social capital) will not have access to the best types of education, while the “haves” will continue to pass their social capital down to subsequent generations (p. 28). Ziesler compares this reality to the theory of “geographic luck” explored in Jared Diamond’s 1999 book Guns, Germs and Steel. Diamond’s theory of geographic luck attempts to explain how “certain cultures developed faster than others due to the resources that were available to them” (Ziesler, 2012, p. 5). In comparing the resources that students have access to, such as “income, parental education level, community influence, health, race, school quality,” to the resources a civilization has access to and how that access (or lack thereof) impacts the group’s upward mobility, Ziesler presents an interesting perspective on the causes of the achievement gap (2012, p. 6).
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