Essay on Education Inequality in America

Throughout decades, education inequality is still one of the most deliberate and controversial issues in the United States. Thus far, the privilege or right to receive education has not attained the level of equality throughout the nation. Poor districts obtain less educational funds while rich districts obtain more, which create an immense gap between the quality of schools in poor and rich areas. In other words, the education gap is the root of inequality in America. Inequality in education is linked to the major problems in the society. The need for studies to be done to find ways of overcoming these inequalities is very inevitable. The means of mitigating these inequalities are important for the entire world. This is something of great interest due to the fact that children need quality education which is a pillar for a guaranteed future. Generally speaking, the distinctions among races, genders, and classes in the society have caused the educational inequality in America.

There is strong evidence that points to a link between the way schools are currently funded and the disparity in student performance between the urban and suburban environments. The District of Columbia, which has 189 public schools, 5,000 teachers, and a Pre-K-12 enrollment of 79,000 students, spends $6,773 per pupil not including Special Education or English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL). In comparison, Montgomery County has 190 public schools, 10,700 teachers, and a Pre-K-12 enrollment of 136,653 students. Montgomery County spends approximately $8,688 per pupil. It should also be pointed out that the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) expenditures amounted to $807 million last year in comparison to Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS), which expects to spend an enormous $1.3 billion during Fiscal Year 2002. Without equal funding, the two systems already begin with an unequal playing field.

While NCLB appears great in principle, it is failing in actuality. The main purpose of the Act was to close the achievement gap between White and minority students, especially Black and Latino students, by increasing educational equality. The differences in the achievement gap is to be measured yearly through the use of standardized testing. As each student is unique, the use of standardized tests to measure whether students reach 100% proficiency is unrealistic. Teachers, principals, and school boards are so worried about being “proficient” that teachers are now teaching for the test, not teaching a rounded curriculum. With schools afraid that they may possibly receive sanctions, schools are now cheating the system by finding ways to bolster their scores to improve state AYP rates. Paul D. Houston explains in his article “The 7 Deadly Sins of NCLB,” that the Act relies on fear and coercion (2007). Teachers, school boards, and states are so afraid of receiving a failing grade that they are willing to skew results in their favour. Not to mention that states are allowed to choose their own statistical method to analyze their scores. Due to many unforeseen variables, these differences make it almost impossible to imply causation that students are reaching proficiency due to the NCLB Act.

The United States is a country based on equal opportunity; every citizen is to be given the same chance as another to succeed. This includes the government providing the opportunity of equal education to all children. All children are provided schools to attend. However, the quality of one school compared to another is undoubtedly unfair. Former teacher John Kozol, when being transferred to a new school, said, "The shock from going from one of the poorest schools to one of the wealthiest cannot be overstated (Kozol 2)." The education gap between higher and lower-income schools is obvious: therefore, the United States is making the effort to provide an equal education with questionable results.

The greatest country in the world still has problems evenly distributing education to its youth. The articles I have read for this unit have a common theme regarding our education system. The authors illustrate to the reader about the struggles in America concerning how we obtain and education. Oppression, politics, racism, and socioeconomic status are a few examples of what is wrong with our country and its means of delivering a fair education to all Americans.

There clearly is a problem right now in American schools. The gap in educational outcomes between students of different races and ethnicities is fairly substantial. Although there could be numerous explanations of why this inconsistency exists, I have chosen to focus on one issue stemming from an economic obstacle.

In what follows I first provide a history and explanation of the NCLB act. As well as the thinking behind this piece of legislation. Then, I show how the NCLB’s rules and standardized testing are destructive to teaching. Finally, I argue how the act is leading to the overall downfall of our educational system.

Opponents of NCLB, which includes all major teachers' unions, allege that the act hasn't been effective in improving education in public education, especially high schools, as evidenced by mixed results in standardized tests. Opponents also claim that standardized testing, which is the heart of NCLB accountability, is deeply flawed and biased for many reasons. That stricter teacher qualifications have exacerbated the nationwide teacher shortage, not provided a stronger teaching force. The NCLB law has set a 2014 deadline for states to make public school students proficient in math and reading, but each state decides how to meet that goal. are from achieving proficiency.

America was built off of the idea of civil liberties in which one is guaranteed freedoms that the government cannot abridge, either by law or by judicial interpretation, without due process. This idea was true for some, but for the rest was only granted throughout the struggles of which they had to endure to gain such rights. Our nation fought the English for our freedom and rights, but we gave those freedoms and rights back to only the white man. We as a nation continued to institute a policy of inequality; a society in which an individual that wasn’t white, wasn’t considered a human at all. The actualities of these founding’s would go against the origin of the nation’s foundation of equality and its language. This idea was implemented by

To many families coming to the United States, America is the land of dreams and progress, this is a narrative that has been retold time and time again. Many immigrate families come to the U.S. seeking a progressive life for themselves and their family. Many enter America being lower class citizens with the hope that hard work will bring them closer to that comfortable “American lifestyle”. This dream is arguably skewed or does not exist all together to many Americans. Why is this? America has built a nation on inequality. Covert racism lurks in many American institutions. And people are not adapt to recognize the privilege their race or socioeconomic status (social class) awards them. While all these conditions may seem bleak for the working lower classes of the United States, class progression is not

With the many diverse characteristics of the Unites States, perhaps the most troubling is the rising gap in the distribution of wealth. As the wealth gap in the United States rises exponentially, the gap in the quality of public schooling rises with it. For a country that prides itself in prestigious outlets of education, the system of public schooling seems to be miserably failing. Public education, a system that some fight to destroy while others fight to preserve, is perhaps the only source of academic opportunity for many individuals living in this country. The fact that someone can live in a certain area and receive a higher quality of public education than someone else living in a different area in the same country—even in the same state—is a problem that should not trouble a ‘progressive’ democratic society. Unfortunately, areas of lower socioeconomic status receive much less funding than areas of higher socioeconomic status, where property taxes account for 45% of funding in public school districts. Naturally, the impoverished residents of poor neighborhoods pay a harsh price in this situation, sending their children to an underfunded school with little to no resources, where sometimes teachers must supply the classroom from their own pocket. As Rogerson and Fernandez note, “a system that allows the accidents of geography and birth to determine the quality of education received by an individual is inimical to the idea of equal opportunity in the marketplace”

The United States had gone through so many changes over the years and with each change we could say that we have become a better nation. Along the way to becoming a better nation, we have gone through highs and lows; however there seems to be a constant low that is now taking a toll on our children. The low may also end up having an effect on our future and that low is inequality in education among minority races and low income students. Low income students should be concerned with inequality in education in the United States because this means that their chances of continuing their education to obtain a better paying job in the future is significantly harder to do then students in higher income brackets.

Another major problem of NCLB is the people who create the tests. State senators across the country make different tests and decide what should be in the learning curriculum. To become a state senator you do not need a degree, and the senators that do have degrees are typically degrees of business or law. Why did senators make the tests and not teachers? Many of the state senators writing the tests do not have the educational background needed to write tests. And because every state senate makes a different test for every state, students who move out of state are supposed to be able to pass a test that they have not learned about.

There is a high degree of social inequality within the United States. Of most modern industrial countries, the United Stated has some of the richest and some of the poorest people to be found. That fact is very disturbing, however, explains why much of the inequality exists in the US. In the following essay I will explain to you about the inequality in our country and why it occurs, based on the theoretical perspectives of a functionalist, conflict theorist, and social interationist.

NCLB has directly affected teachers and their stability of their jobs. In this act, teachers are evaluated based on student’s standardized test scores. There are many factors that affect students when they take standardized tests. Students could understand all of the material, but when they take the test have anxiety, and not do well. Student disabilities also need to be a factor to consider. All students are different, and teachers should not have to worry about losing their jobs based on one test that their students take. According to Levine, “Tests made it easier to identify substandard teachers and easier to justify firing them.” (Levine). Standardized tests should not be used as a way to justify; they should be used to test what a student has learned. The importance of these tests is causing teachers to only focus on the material to make sure the students do well on the tests. They solely focus on what will be on these tests, which affects the other factors students need to learn at school. This is called “teaching to the test”. For example, students should learn how to do an oral presentation and group projects, which could potentially be pushed to a corner to focus strictly on testing material. Focusing just on testing material could also make teachers not focus on their creativity in lesson plans. This deprives