My future efforts to end the achievement gap – advice?

I’m an English major, and my career goal is to be a high school or middle school English teacher. This term, on the suggestion of an academic advisor, I am taking a lower division education studies class, to get a feel for the program and to get a better idea of some of the struggles teachers encounter. Right now we’re talking about the achievement gap, which specifically relates to the standardized test score differences between affluent Caucasian and Asian students, and everyone basically. Most of the attention is geared towards the differences between the Caucasian students and the African American and Hispanic students. Not so much attention is paid to the differences in test scores based on economic status, but I digress.

One of the questions posed to us as future teachers, is what do we plan on doing to eliminate the achievement gap and make minority students feel more comfortable at school so that their performance increases. I would really like to work in a school district that is urban and of lower funding. Part of my reasoning for this, I will admit, is so I can get some of my student loans repayment decreased, but I also want to be a teacher to help people, and the children that attend low funded urban schools are usually the most at risk for poverty later in life. What I would like to do to make minority students feel more comfortable is to expose them to literature written by minorities with minority characters. I also would like to give more historical backgrounds on why the novels I teach my students about are important, and so I am better equipped to do this, I’m taking a class on African American history next term.

My problem is, I’m a Caucasian woman from a lower middle class background. While I struggle with finances now as a student, and my family struggled sometimes while I was growing up, I’ve never experienced true poverty. I always went to school showered with clean clothes, and I always got enough to eat. I’m worried that my students may have issues relating to me, and that they may resent me for teaching them about their past and their culture. I also don’t want to come off as a well intentioned, bleeding heart, hypocritical liberal that does more harm than good. I would obviously like to do anything I can to prevent this. If anyone has any suggestions of approaches I could take with my future students, or if you think I’m going about things the wrong way, please feel free.