Freedom Writers Inequalities

Authors Glenn E. Singleton and Curtis Linton in Chapter Five of Courageous Conversations About Race broach the topic of race, by asking the reader to evaluate his or her own consciousness of race. According to the authors, in order to address the achievement gaps between African American students and White students, educators should shift their energy towards focusing on the factors that they have direct control of inside the classroom rather than on the factors that influence this achievement disparity between races outside the classroom.

“Freedom Writers” is a powerful film that is based on a true story about a teacher named Erin Gruwell, who struggles to connect with her students to make them believe that they can succeed in life, and to show them that their lives, experiences, and knowledge is valuable, all while attempting to unify them and to overcome racial segregation and gang violence that is part of their daily lives. Gruwell focuses on introducing the concepts of discipline and obedience in her classroom. She gradually begins to earn their trust and buys them composition books to record their diaries, in which they talk about their experiences of being abused, seeing their friends die, and being evicted; Gruwell refers to the composition books as “The Freedom Writers Diary.”

Who we are and how we are treated as children is directly correlated to who we will become as adults. Spoken by Lyndon B. Johnson, “Until Justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men’s skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.” These words are echoed throughout the educational system that is put in place today. Jonathan Kozol, an award-winning writer and public lecturer who focuses on social injustice in the United States, reverberates these words in his article, “From Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid”. Kozol proves his mastery in persuasion by the facts he provides and the personal anecdotes from teachers and students.

In the book, “Warriors Don’t Cry” by Melba Pattillo Beals, An African American teenager and her eight friends leave their old school for a new school called Central High. In the 1950’s where the incident takes place, segregation was in full operation. Racial Groups were separated from each other because the color of their skin. African Americans had different schools to attend, different drinking fountains that were often dirty and even weren’t able to get certain services because of their skin. For Example, in the book “Warriors Don’t Cry”, Melba explains how she was sick with an infection as a newborn but because of the racial tension and the color of her skin the nurses didn’t want to help her. “A doctor operated to save my life, twenty-four hours later I wasn’t getting better. Neither nurses nor

The Warren Court described the practice of having separate schools for black and white children as inherently unequal in the revolutionary court case Brown v. Board of Education (1954) in the following ways. It allows for a significant difference to occur in educational and professional opportunities for black and white students, it leads minority children and teenagers to internalize the perception that they are inherently lesser than their Caucasian counterparts based on their race. Consequently, it also leads minority children and adolescents to have a lack of motivation in the school setting since they have internalized the thought pattern of inferiority so deeply that it affects how they think of themselves and their ability to learn.

High Schools across the United States have students with different ethnicities and cultures. However, in the 1950’s the world was different and the thought of integration was perceived by many as an instrumental goal. There were white and black schools, parks, water fountains, restaurants, and communities. Melba Pattillo Beals was among one of the first African-American to change the landscape of integration in schools. In 1957, Beals and eight other African American students would change the color divider for generations to come, although with change comes sacrifice. The help of her family and the protection of the soldiers in the school from the animosity of her white classmates and the white community helped Beals endure the trials and tribulations

“Black students were expelled at three times the rate of white students.” (Steven Hsieh, 2014) Until now, we are still finding unequal treatment from school in American Society from different aspects, such as school discipline, early learning, college readiness and teacher equity. However, education is more than learning from books. Education enables individuals potential to utilize human mind and open doors of opportunities to obtain knowledge. But the US educational system doesn’t serve the majority of children properly and gaps remain between white and black students. What’s more, nowadays, a lot of schools only treat education as a curriculum and test scores; ignoring the stimulus of curiosity. Therefore, “Between the World and Me” is a book written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, who weaves his own personal, historical, and intellectual development into his ruminations on how to live in a black body in America. In this book, Coates writes about education and pleasures of his own educational experience in Howard University. Although bad education hides the truth and restricts students’ ideas, education also contains pleasures, which broaden people’s mind, help people build their own thoughts, and prevent people from prison. As a result, there are more pleasures in American education that positively impact on black body than dangers.

Not only more work (at Exeter five hours of homework was the norm), not only harder play (all were required to play a sport every season), but more responsibility- to themselves, to their school, to their family and country.” (180) The students at Exeter are well aware of what they have to accomplish. The 40 colored students of Edmunds class might have felt pressure to succeed more than their white peers. On a daily basis Edmund had to prove that he could do what the white students were capable of. This caused him to feel inadequate because he had to try harder and put in more effort than they did. Whatever Edmund did he would never be considered as equal when compared to his white peers.

In the mid-to-late 1950s African Americans were not allowed to be in the same breathing space as a white person, let alone the same school. Now today, any individual of any race can freely enter into any building and still receive quality teaching. A special thanks are for the nine brave history changers; Minnijean Brown, Terrance Roberts, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Patillo, Gloria Ray, Jefferson Thomas and Carlotta Watts. If it wasn’t for these students who endured the discomfort, students today will not be able to enjoy the comfortableness of being a high school student.

Almost every person who has stepped foot in a college classroom has experienced ethnic diversity within the students in the room. This has not always been the case however. Up until 1954 blacks and whites attended different schools and weren’t allowed the same schooling opportunities. It took a young girl, Linda Brown, and her father, Oliver Brown, as well as many other courageous African American families to stand up to the old law of “separate but equal”, decided in the Plessy vs. Ferguson case in 1892, and fight for equal educational rights for whites and blacks. Even though the Supreme Court decided in favor of the Brown family in 1954, this did not mean that everyone was so eager to accept

Another source of inequality comes from student-teacher relations directly. Thandeka K. Chapman in “Is Integration a Dream Deferred?” argues that within suburban mixed-race (however, still majority white) schools, there is a significant difference between the behavior and treatment of minority students versus that of white students within the same school (314). To examine this more thoroughly, a research team interviewed students regarding their experience, and reported the results. Since teacher student relationships are extremely important in contributing to how connected students are with education, the interviewers asked students to report on their experiences they had with their teachers (317). Each individual response varied. One student reported his white math teacher talking to him like a young child, baffled as to why the student was asking a question during class, as if the student was incapable of understanding the material (Chapman, pg 317). Another student’s white English teacher witnessed 2 students falling asleep during class, a black and a white student. However, the teacher only woke up the white student, suggesting that she is setting the white student up for success, and the black student up for failure (Chapman, pg 217). The undercurrent beneath all of the students’ responses was the same: students felt that the teachers (typically white) in these schools have lower expectations for minority students, have different “tracks” in mind for different racial

Walter Fields, a parent in the district, said his African American daughter was denied the opportunity in an advanced class, even when having the eligible grades and test scores. ‘“Now we arrive at the point—in 2014—where you can literally walk down a hallway in Columbia High School and look in a classroom and know whether it’s an upper-level class or a lower-level class based on the racial composition of the classroom,” Fields said.”’ ("Modern-Day Segregation in Public Schools - The Atlantic." 2014. 15 Mar. 2016) In many cases, cultural and racial minorities are denied equal academic opportunity. “... high-achieving African American students may be exposed to less rigorous curriculums, attend schools with fewer resources, and have teachers who expect less of them academically than they expect of similarly situated Caucasian students” ("Ethnic and Racial Minorities & Socioeconomic Status." 2010. 15 Mar. 2016) Stereotypes of race and culture, prevents many young minorities from reaching their academic potential. This kind of behavior can influence what our nation sees as ideal people of the workforce, which can ultimately lead to biases affecting the unemployment and poverty rates of

The film Freedom Writers directed by Richard La Gravenese is an American film based on the story of a dedicated and idealistic teacher named Erin Gruwell, who inspires and teaches her class of belligerent students that there is hope for a life outside gang violence and death. Through unconventional teaching methods and devotion, Erin eventually teaches her pupils to appreciate and desire a proper education. The film itself inquiries into several concepts regarding significant and polemical matters, such as: acceptance, racial conflict, bravery, trust and respect. Perhaps one of the more concentrated concepts of the film, which is not listed above, is the importance and worth of education. This notion is

To begin, a white woman named Erin Gruwell decides to take up teaching at Woodrow Wilson High School two years following the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. She arrives on the first day to find out that her class is full of “at-risk” high school students— some of which are just out of juvenile hall and have very poor grades. These are kids who have segregated themselves into racial groups so badly that they can’t even sit near each other in the same classroom or walk by each other without getting into fights.

“Everybody thinks you should be happy just because you’re young. They don’t see the wars that we fight every single day”. Brandy Ross, one of the students in the movie Freedom Writers once said. This is the predicament that the students in Woodrow Wilson High School faced every day. There are dead bodies on the street, the students have to protect themselves from other gangs, and most of them didn’t finish high school. It might not be a big issue for us because we didn’t face it by ourselves, but after watching this movie you will know that it is a significant thing to look at. The differences among race caused all of these problems, to deal with this is not easy at all. Freedom Writers show us that we can live our life with distinction because it shows us how to understand and accept dissimilarity that we have and also to