Racial Demographics

I live at 383 East, 143rd street and my zip code is 10454. It is an area in which Latinos are the main population. This area is called Mott Haven in which there are many public housing projects. I live in one of the housing project in which my neighbors I can see they are mainly Hispanics and Blacks. Around my specific zip code area, there are different neighborhoods. In addition, even though these neighbourhood are very close to each other, there are still a lot of differences between them. I will focus on the varieties of people’s races that inhabit certain areas of the zip code 10454 and how certain areas have more schools while other areas have more businesses.

America’s school system and student population remains segregated, by race and class. The inequalities that exist in schools today result from more than just poorly managed schools; they reflect the racial and socioeconomic inequities of society as a whole. Most of the problems of schools boil down to either racism in and outside the school or financial disparity between wealthy and poor school districts. Because schools receive funding through local property taxes, low-income communities start at an economic disadvantage. Less funding means fewer resources, lower quality instruction and curricula, and little to no community involvement. Even when low-income schools manage to find adequate funding, the money doesn’t solve all the school’s

“When we can predict how well students will do in school by looking at their zip code, we know we have a serious systemic problem” (Gloria Ladson-Billings 20). When we are able to forecast how a child will perform by where the child resides, then how can we say that every child is receiving quality education. The unsuccessful educational system infused into the United States is affecting the majority of minorities. In the United States students due to their race and social class, suffer from underfunded public schools, inexperienced teachers, and housing segregation, which in turn inhibit their opportunity to succeed through education. These difficulties plaque students from the very beginning of their public school experience and follow them throughout their academic life. There are a few solutions to these issues but they have to be implemented and enforced with a slow integration.

Richer homeowners also get tax relief for paying their mortgages. Meanwhile, poor black areas are dumping grounds for toxic waste and garbage, which benefit the wealthier citizens, but they tend to be the only places poor non-whites can afford to live. Low properrty values result in badly funded, dangerous schools. Wealthier whites avoid these public schools and move to suburbs where their property taxes go toward building elegant public schools. Trier school is an example. It attracts a highly trained staff, and boasts an Olympic swimming pool as well as other luxuries. An article about this suburban school brags that most of the students in it are white.

California’s housing situation is severe compared to the rest of the United States. California is included in the top three states with the most “housing cost burdened individuals” (Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, 2015). In a list of 20 cities where rents were highest compared to income, 10 of the 20 cities were in California with Los Angeles, CA topping the list (Dewan, 2014). Opponents might say that households in poverty could never afford housing due to their impoverished state but poverty measures of California show that the abnormally high cost of housing in California makes matters more severe and causes the amount of households that are severely cost afflicted to increase. Furthermore, when poverty measures take into account California’s uniquely expensive and insufficient housing supply, the results show that housing costs contribute significantly to poverty. For example, when housing costs were included in the California Poverty Measure as well as federal Supplemental Poverty Measure, the poverty rates rose substantially (Wimer, Mattingly, & Levin, 2013) (Short, 2015). And when high housing costs were artificially substituted with low housing costs, poverty rates significantly dropped (Bohn, Danielson, & Levin, 2013). And it’s not just the poor who are affected! Even those who are moderate income earners are becoming financially burdened by high housing costs. Those who are moderately well off compared to low income earners are financially burdened by rent costs in expensive cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, CA (Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University,

The educational gap between low-income children and the average American presents a serious problem that has only been perpetuated through government-funded public housing projects. Indeed, this divide eventually translates to a disparity of college acceptance rates and job placement rates. Thus, the academic success of children from low-income families directly threatens their upward mobility. A continued shift toward increased tenant-based housing would give families the opportunity to move out of their economically segregated neighborhoods and choose the neighborhood that best meets their children’s needs. Indeed, despite the Housing Choice voucher program’s current flaws, in each of the case studies, the housing choice vouchers have resulted

Today—nearly fifty years after the Brown decision—explicit endorsements of school segregation have been erased from all state and federal laws, yet the faces of American schools remain eerily similar to those of the 1950s. Current funding inequalities between poor and wealthy districts perpetuate the same inequalities between the races that state-sponsored segregation once did.

Back in the 1990’s white was the dominant race in Huntington Park, consisting of 52.87% white but slowly this changed and by 2010 Huntington Park was made up of 97.2% Hispanics whereas in 1990 there was 28% Hispanics. The changes in race have intersected with the changes class because before when the city was mostly white, the percentage of income for those who make less that $24,999 was about 35.52 and 7.86% made more than $100,000 yearly. Today, in Huntington Park 6.52% make more than $100,000 and 38.74% make less than $24,999. This reveals that as white people moved out and hispanic moved in, the income and class decreased. Considering families in my community are non english speaking immigrants, many of their children were tracked by being placed in ESL classes (English as Second Language).This was a disadvantage to them because they did not get the help that those speak the language attain. The high school in my city does not have many programs like AP or Honors courses available in comparison to other schools. The fact that we Latinos do not get the same benefits as others, affects us when applying and attending college because our education was “..hardly comparable to the education received by their white and Asian American counter parts in the state” (Hunter and Ramon). My community has gone though much change that has affected any of the residents living in

In the article, “The Segregated Classrooms of a Proudly Diverse School” really caught my attention while reading it. In the article, it mentions how advanced classes and introductory level courses are separated at the school. Majority of the students in the advanced courses are white students even though the majority of the students of the school are black. The same situation occurred to me at my high school. My high school was located in a low-income area, but a few miles down, there were middle class homes not too far away from the high school.At my high school, we had a major Latino population, which made up 60% of student population. Just like the high school in the article, we separate students based on their level on the certain subject. Overwhelmingly, there was more white students in each advance level courses than

In the United States of America, a child’s zip code often determines the quality of the child’s education. A myriad of social, economic, and political factors contributes to this tragic truth. This article, however, focuses on the staggering, discriminatory effect that Unequal School Funding has on our nation’s youth.

Unlike the Spanish Empire, America characterizes individuals commonly as black or white when that is not the case. An accurate description is required to distinguish the various ranges of racial mixtures. Since America only generalizes between the Europeans and the Africans, the blending of the minority are disregarded.

The average black house is found to have roughly 35,000 in income but reside in a neighborhood ranging about

In Miami-Dade County, most public schools reflect a school named American Senior High, where the composition is 28 percent Black, 65 percent Hispanic, and a small percentage of White non-Hispanics (McGrory). She adds that the public school population reflects the results of repeated waves of immigration. Based on these figures, one can understand the rationale behind demographers declaring South Florida schools a sign of the nation’s future.

I am teaching U.S. History at Merrillville High School. Though having one or two students who are on the college-bound trek, the classes are the general trek of courses. In my classes, African-Americans make up the largest portion of the population at 60% while Hispanics are second with 18% and whites are 13.8%. Correspondingly, according to city-data.com, the student body broadly reflects the demographics of Merrillville. This, in contrast, is markedly different from the demographics where I attended high school; La Porte High School. In the La Porte School system, whites are the majority at 79% followed by Hispanics at 12% then, African-Americans at 2.8%. Similarly, the demographics of the La Porte are also reflected in the

A review of school enrollment patterns allowed us answer our first research question - has State-level legislation and policy designed to address racial, ethnic and economic isolation of Connecticut public schools created a more diverse learning environment? In some instances, the creation of schools of choice and reliance on self-integration has improved the racial, ethnic and economic isolation experienced by the 49,254 public school students attending a school of choice during the 2012-13 school year. Of the 504,611 students attending traditional neighborhood schools in Connecticut during the 2012-13 school year, 95,127 attended a school that was hyper-segregated. We next turned our attention to the second research question: What local efforts to reduce racial, ethnic and socioeconomic isolation have