Growing Income Inequality In American Education

Throughout the semester we have talked about the concept of community. Communities are more than just neighborhoods and cities. Communities are the social environment people grow up in interact throughout their everyday life. Communities have norms and procedures that transcend normal thinking. In the USA alone, there are multiple communities in multiple States and regions. In INT, we have talked about socio economic communities, racial communities, and even gender base communities. However, the problem in America, is that these communities are divided so heavily. So as we move forward with our education, a question arises. What do we do now? Do we allow communities to say so segregated, or do we try to change them? For society to survive and flourish, it needs a healthy community and happy citizens. Equality is key. Segregation and inequality directly go against this notion. I propose, for a stronger community and better living conditions, we as a society need to unite. Race, socio economics, and gender should not define a person's place in society. If America wants a true community that is prosperous for all, equality should be our main focus.

Education is a privilege that many American students take for granted. When students start the school year, what they are going to learn and how they are going to learn is already decided. This has been the method used for years and though, for the most part, it is a reliable system, it does not always prove to be the best method in low income schools (Spring). Public school education quality affects where it is located and its environment. The students that go to public school in impoverished areas are poor and their main focus is on them surviving day to day for the most part. They are not worried about obtaining good grades or learning but are more worried about having their basic needs met. So not only are they set up to fail because lack of education, but they do not have the money to improve their education or to go somewhere better. The environment these students are in does not make them successful, because the public school they are zoned for does not have the money to invest into the students, which in return results in the students having nothing to invest back into the environment, community, and others. Sadly, the school does not have the resources to improve the below average situation.

Duncan and Murnane argue that economic and educational inequality greatly affects children’s educational and developmental outcomes in Restoring Opportunity: The crisis of inequality and the challenge for American education. Duncan and Murnane point out that since the 1970s, there has been a shift in technology and globalization. This makes receiving a K-12 education more important for life skills than it has been in the past. Since the 1970’s, globalization and computerization have decreased blue-collar jobs and enhanced the job market. Despite this, there is still an issue of students attending and paying for college, and this problem is continuing to grow. Because of the increasing demand and cost for a college degree, receiving a good K-12 education is becoming more essential, especially for low-income students. The gaps between academic performance of students from a low-income families and students from high-income families are larger today than they have been in the past and are continuing to grow. Access to higher education and resources for learning have greatly widened between income

Did you know that one of the major factors that plays a role in Americas education system is the economic status of students and their districts? For many low poverty rated neighborhoods, governmental funding is hardly enough to sufficiently support an entire schools academic needs. Because majority of schools in the US are funded through the property tax of its neighborhood or district, schools in poor neighborhoods receive poor funding. Since funding is distributed depending on the surrounding areas property tax, schools in rich neighborhoods receive the greatest deal of economic support. The economic gap within the system can affect a students’ learning experience and create a bad image of education. Also, poor students encounter more problems on a daily bases than wealthy students which makes focusing on school that much harder. When growing up, my economic status wasn’t anywhere near the best. I had to worry about things like: how was I going to get my clothes washed, how were we going to pay the light bill or how was I going to eat if I didn’t make it to school. School was

The American Dream: a dream promising of opportunities for a better life. A dream that the impoverished and immigrants are motivated by in hopes of climbing up the social ladder. Unfortunately, this is usually not the case for most people in America. Similar to how the American Dream is often a “dream” rather than reality, the American education system’s goal of equal opportunity is another fantasy. An individual is more likely to increase social mobility with education, or the “movement of individuals between different class positions [is] a result of occupation, wealth, or income,” which would ideally minimize the widening class inequality, where the top 1% becomes wealthier and the poor even poorer (Giddens et al. 2014:175). With social policies like George Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act or standardized testing, the system desires to have education be accessible to everyone; however, these policies are underfunded and cannot produce effective results or become unexpectedly detrimental to society. Over and over, the education system consistently favors the wealthy since they can afford the resources given to them whereas the poor cannot; however, the education inequality has the potential to be reduced through effective social programs that prioritize opportunities for lower-income students and racial integration within communities and schools, allowing for more social mobility.

The socioeconomic status of a child greatly affects their school performance. Therefore, the ever-growing poverty among children of all races in our country is an important contemporary issue to

Inequality is fast-becoming a major issue not just in the United States but globally. The idea that the top one percent of the population wield both economic and political power over the rest of the society is far from the democratic system the United States has tried to establish. This democratic system, which when tied to the American dream, allows for every US citizen to have equal opportunities at success provided it is accomplished through hard work and dedication. Unfortunately, this American dream of equal opportunities forever remains an ideal as sectors in the US economy, including but not limited to the educational sector, grieves from wide disparities between social classes.

The term “achievement gap” refers to the difference in academic performance and education attainment among students. More specifically, it describes how “white students and students from wealthy, well-educated families have consistently

A quality education, has always been viewed as a way to achieve greatness in life. Education allows youth to have social mobility; a way to break out of their current status. In history, the educational opportunities of the United States of America, has been viewed as a crucial part of the American Dream. Public education started during the Industrial Revolution as a way to allow children to achieve greater jobs than gruesome factory work. For the first time in history, all children were learning outside of the close family bubble that traditional education relied on. Public schools have continued to evolve to this day, in hopes of preparing America’s youth for college and beyond. However, as many parents have found, the reality of such education is far from the expectations. Particularly in urban public schools, in poverty stricken cities like Detroit and Chicago, teachers fail to be able to teach their pupils. It is easy to blame these issues on the teacher or on building principals for not being ‘qualified enough’, but that is not necessarily true. Others will quickly blame individual parents, who fail to take a large enough role in their child’s education. Regardless of the reason, parents and many teachers have looked to new and innovative ways to teach our youth. This was originally present in the growth of private schools in the United States. But unlike public schools, private schools often require expensive tuition payments, and have been reserved for the social

The American instinct when it comes to education is that it is the path to escape poverty for the middle class. As reasonable as that sounds, it is not the reality that students in poor school districts are receiving. These schools are persistently failing in helping students succeed and this puts them at greater risk of failing or dropping out. Attention and basic necessities are what is needed to start improving these schools and their students. Poor schools and people whose children attend these schools, need to be taken into consideration in knowing what is needed to make them succeed.

With the fast-growing global economy, education has become an integral part of the today’s society. Education has in fact been argued to be a necessity, as conformity to society’s set standards, goals and means is gradually near impossible without education. However, ‘proper’ education is becoming increasingly expensive and rare across all levels of education. As a result, even with the vast availability of several institutions that claim to offer ‘proper’ education, the question on most people’s minds is how education, a concept that is considered ‘somewhat’ a human right in America, is still not fully accessible to all citizens. A brief introduction to the concept of inequality in the educational system, especially in the public-school system, proves to answer to some lengths, the insufficiency of the educational system in the United States. The U.S. has been rumored to have two types of public school systems: first are those that are located in the suburbs and cater mostly to the middle class in the society and second are those that are located in the poorer urban and rural areas and serve to educate the lower class in the society. Usually, public education in these rural and poor urban settings serve mostly as a ‘way to get kids involved and out of the house’ so as to prevent these kids from a life of crime. However, most of these children end up in juvenile detention even before completing high school education. And, of the few that do succeed in completing their

conditions. This problem was "solved" with the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of

Duncan and Murnane argue that economic and educational inequality greatly affects children’s educational and developmental outcomes in Restoring Opportunity: The crisis of inequality and the challenge for American education. Duncan and Murnane point out that since the 1970s, there has been a shift in technology and globalization. This makes receiving a K-12 education more important for life skills than it has been in the past. Since the 1970’s, globalization and computerization have decreased blue-collar jobs and enhanced the job market. Despite this, there is still an issue of students attending and paying for college, and this problem is

The Latino community has made strides forward when it comes to education. Adriana Kohler and Melissa Lazarin, analysists for education reform for the National Council of La Raza, reports that “The growth of the Latino student population has significantly surpassed that of other ethnic/racial groups (2). Even with these strides, the Latino community still faces obstacles in higher education. Kohler and Lazarin further report that “although Latino enrollment in institutions of higher education has increased, Latinos are still less likely than non-Latinos to be enrolled in or graduate from college (10).” It is important in understanding the obstacles that the Latino community face in accessing higher education and through advocacy and legislation, help to support educational achievement and resources to that effect.

There is no doubt that elementary school plays a big role in a child’s education. But how does that differ from students of different socioeconomic status? “Middle-class children gain advantages, including potential benefits in the world of work, from the experience of concerted cultivation” (Lareau 1). the lower class starts their academic career unequally compared to middle and upper class. Teachers need to realize that the student plays a role in their education as they do, students are not just passive recipients of knowledge. Whether its help-seeking or after school programs that don’t work, lower-class students in elementary school start their education off with unequal footing. School programs try to fix some of these inequalities