Education Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words - 1

Education - Essay Example In addition, US government supports education to reduce illiteracy, criminal activities, and drug abuse behaviours that are prevalent with the uneducated. This paper discusses education in the US as a social issue. The two theories quoted in literature trying to explain or predict student’s performance include needs theory and expectancy theory. According to Geiger and Coopers, â€Å"expectancy theory suggests that motivation to act is a combination of the perceived attractiveness of future outcomes and the likelihood one’s actions will lead to these outcomes† (Geiger and Coopers 1995). This means that to motivate a student to work hard depends on their perceptions of the academic performance and in their beliefs that after hard work they will yield great results. The second traditional that attempt to explain academic success suggests that motivating students to perform depends on their intrinsic individual needs. Individual student’s motivational behavio ur is influenced by their desire to achieve, to dominate, to belong to a certain affiliation, or autonomy. The two theories differ in that motivation from students may come from some needs in the subconscious mind or by a conscious choice. A concern on whether educational opportunities are equal to all lingers many minds. According to Collins, â€Å"Social reproduction theory argues that schools are not institutions of equal opportunity but mechanisms for perpetuating social inequalities† (Collins 2009). Researchers have associated three perspectives in the analysis of the emergence and development of social reproduction, which include economic, cultural, and linguistic. Despite different analysis to understand how social inequality results from the interplay of schools, classrooms, and the wider society, no solution exists yet (Collins 2009). Conflict theory believes that the society is full of a community with different values and social rewards. It views relations in socie ty as based on exploitation, oppression, domination, and subordination. Teachers equally behave in the same manner whereby they use traditional teaching curriculum and expect students to get some support from their parents in the evenings but this is not normally the case. The state gauge knowledge passed to its students via the curriculum, which in most cases does not make sense to the students. Structural functionalism views institutions of education as gateways that keep order and meaning to a society. Through socialization, the society produces citizens after equipping them with knowledge, attitudes and values the need. These theories together with political arithmetic helps one understand the structural mechanism in educational inequalities. Implicitly, schools have central role of assisting immigrants in adapting to the new lives they find themselves. This is where immigrant students start their integration with working life as they share the same skills with the native studen ts. However, this is not the case in America since equality in schooling inputs is no longer enough to assess equity in education. After accounting for the social-economic factors of the parents of the students, PISA mathematical scale discovered that immigrants still rage behind by 30 score points to their native counterparts (Schleicher 2006). Researchers shows that immigrant students attend schools with poor learning conditions such as student-teacher ratio and that they lack in other