You enter this world as nothing more than a dependent being. Early on, your fate is determined by your parents, your race, and your socioeconomic status. Hopefully, you will grow up to fulfill your dreams. Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone had equal opportunity for success? Success starts at education, and education starts from the moment you are born. As unfair as it seems, a child’s family background remains the clearest predictor of whether or not she will graduate from high school or college. However, there is always hope for an individual, and some important programs are working to change the odds.

You are given life not by your own choice, but by the decisions your parents made when creating you. Your parents also created a path that you innocently stepped upon that would eventually lead you to a destination. True, these paths are not always intentional, but nevertheless, they are authentic. Some children are fortunate to step on a path that leads to success, wealth, and power. Others are lead to a destination of homelessness, addiction, and poverty. When you are born into a family, you are born into a class, a race, and an environment that creates the culture of which you become a part.

A child born into a low-income household suffers great academically. The lack of money makes it hard to provide the appropriate learning utensils such as books and computers for the children. Kids also need the positive influence of their parents to push them toward success. In underprivileged environments, the families have a hard time devoting a healthy amount of time to parent/child interaction.

Although financial instability creates an obstacle in education, an even greater barrier to a child’s academic success comes from a lack of direct parental involvement. More specifically, academic success occurs when the parent creates a home environment that encourages learning, sets academic goals that are realistic yet challenging, and shows direct involvement in their child’s schooling. For example, children raised in low-income homes suffer immensely in terms of vocabulary development. According to Eric Jensen, “Children from low-income families hear, on average, 13 million words by age 4. In middle-class families, children hear about 26 million words during that same time period. In upper-income families, they hear a staggering 46 million words by age 4—three times as many as their lower-income counterparts”. This separation creates a rigid barrier in the classroom between students of different economic backgrounds. The image below illustrates the gap in a child’s vocabulary and the levels of a mother’s speech to her child. Frequently, the underprivileged kids will fall behind the rest of the class early on in their education and never quite catch up. By the time they reach high school, they are too removed to even dream of graduating and going to college.

Your family background represents everything you came from, and often times, dictates everywhere you will go. According to Dr. Cozart, “The political Economic System ensures that most persons remain in the class to which they are born”, and that “there are few persons who are truly socially and economically mobile.” Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule. There are thousands of success stories about people climbing out of poverty and working toward a life they can be proud of despite the troubled past from which they came. Often times, these success stories are made possible through incredible programs that provide help for underprivileged families.

Now that there is an understanding on how family background effects educational achievement, it is important to observe what types of things are being done to aid these children. Looking at the information above, we can determine the two keys to achievement that every child needs most to succeed. First and foremost, students need the essential materials (books, paper, pencils) to actively participate in school assignments. Secondly, and most importantly, children need reassurance and encouragement from other supporters outside of school. Across the nation, there are several programs set up to help give support in these two areas. There are programs that vary from simple donation-based philanthropy to hands-on volunteering.

Viewing this issue from a local standpoint, it is clear that poverty and low academic achievement is prevalent in Athens, Georgia. A staggering 19 percent of adults in Athens Clarke County do not have a high school diploma. Being fascinated by these facts, I decided to look specifically at all the volunteer based programs here in Athens. I came across The Thomas Lay Foundation and learned that this program was created to help the underprivileged families in Athens Clarke County. It is set up as an after school program that provides academic support through volunteered mentors. According to one of the mentors, Brooke, “At Thomas Lay, school comes first. We always spend the first half of the day completing any homework assignments that a child must do and then reading books in the library. It is important that we show interest and compassion in their schoolwork. Once we finish with the academics, we play with the children and give them all the love we can offer.” Brooke, along with thousands of other volunteers, freely offers her time to better the lives of others. Without people donating time and money, many children would have never had the opportunity to graduate from high school and college.

People come from a variety of homes that tell many different stories. Each experience makes a person unique, and everyone’s past helps mold them into the individual they eventually become. Success in this country is not merely a refection of hard work, but also, a reflection of everything in one’s past. Furthermore, the socioeconomic status of a child’s family serves as an important precursor to the chances of high school and college graduation. Amazingly, there are numerous volunteer foundations and programs to help better students’ chances at success in the future through educational achievement.