Use of Servant Leadership in Teaching Disadvantaged Children Essay

The achievement gap in education is the civil rights issue of our time. The achievement gap, which is derived from the standardized test scores of students, is typically representative of the statistically significant dichotomy between racial minorities (specifically, African-Americans and Hispanics) on the lower end of test scores, and whites on the higher end of test scores (edweek, 2004; NAEP, 2014). A similar divergence is thought to exist as a construct of socioeconomic status – that is, children of a lower socioeconomic status perform worse than individuals of a higher socioeconomic status (edweek, 2004). In order to understand why the achievement gap exists, Sylvia Briscoe conducted a research project to analyze children in disadvantaged neighborhoods (2015). She determined that one of the contributing factors that leads to a failed education, crime, unemployment, drug addiction, and alcohol abuse is the fact that children who live in disadvantaged neighborhoods are lacking in social capital (Briscoe, 2015). Social capital is defined as â€Å"an accumulation of social interactio...