Essay compiled by TCiccone
Self-fulfilling prophecies are seen through many lives of students across the nation. Most of them feel as though they are not capable of completing school or achieving goals higher than their peers. When it comes to this, most students begin to hinder their own futures by for better words “not believing” in themselves. Although this is true for many students, there are those students who reach for the highest stars and disregard any negative thoughts that they might hear.
Studies prove that there is a strong statistically significant correlation between self-esteem and academic performance. Low self-esteem in students proves to contribute as both the cause and effect of low academic achievement. Many argue that low self-esteem keeps students from achieving the strategies necessary to tackle difficult academic tasks. A student’s lack of confidence causes them to take fewer risks academically and this proves to have a significant effect on that student’s performance
throughout their academic career – a career often cut short as a result of their poor performance.
This problem is also affected by the limits imposed by tracking systems in the educational bureaucratic framework. Students that are struggling in the academic system are often pigeonholed into remedial classes, with teachers who often attest to using busy work to more or less baby sit students the school system has relegated as problems rather than students. The students are thus never challenged to truly apply themselves and become active in the learning process.
This obviously brings about a psychological factor in the students’ mind. Where school is meant to engage them, they feel more confidence in being less engaged, and oftentimes when offered the opportunity to move up into a more challenging academic tract of the school, they choose to stay where they are out of fear of the social implications that come with having to be associated with a different group of students they were under the impression they were not smart enough to be a part of in the first place.
This ties into another important dimension of our discussion concerning social disorganization as a principal indicator of poor educational performance and behavior. It suggests that the presence of negative peer influences, crime, violence and a lack of community outlets and resources have a chronically debilitating effect on a community and one’s ability to attain a formal education. These influences negatively affect mental outlook, academic skills and cause students to care increasingly less about school. They are simply too pervasive and overwhelming to overcome in many low-income areas.
Dropout Prevention by Kim Pearson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.