School Context And Lack Of Direct Strategies

One fifteen-year-old girl explains that “It’s more like being hidden” (Kozol 3). A young girl wrote to Kozol saying, “You have all the thing and we do not have all the thing. Can you help us?” (Kozol 3). A principal at an overly crowed school pointed at a trash bag covering part of the collapsing ceiling, telling Kozol, “This would not happen to white children” (Kozol 4). Many political leaders claim that the economy is to blame for failing schools, but the reality is that these schools are awful even during economic growth and success. In truth, parents of minority parents are thought of as people who can be discounted and their children are not considered valuable. Teachers at these schools are paid grossly less than teachers at other

Within the United States everyday many people from different races experience discrimination within every aspect of there lives. One aspect is within the school systems that they are having to attend. The funding between the school systems in the United States and in different areas within those states has a large gap. This gap was so large that within the, “The Atlantic” a credible news article wrote about how race within the schools influences how much that school is going to receive funding. In the article called, “ The Data Dre Damaging: How race Influences School Funding” it states, “That means that no matter how rich or poor the district in question, funding gaps existed solely based on the racial composition of the school. Just the increased presence of minority students actually deflated a district’s funding level” (White). If this is true what is to say that every school in America is still doing this kind of discrimination. This kind of discrimination on needs to end immediately. Just because these young children are growing up in the poorer sections of town doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t have the same rights as other kids. Every child in America should have the same access to a quality education.

Schools systematically subjugate minority and black students when a school’s enrollment contains a huge racial majority. If students have no exposure to persons of different ethnicities, cultures, races, and religions, then these students will experience culture shock when they confront “other” people. Even in our class, we talk about black and minority students as another group, one that differs from “us.” We think about the inequalities in school systems as problems we need to fix, not as problems that have influenced our thinking and affect us as prospective teachers. For example, a white graduate student with

How should society handle the perceived differences between races when it comes to education? The goal of both researchers is to narrow the academic gap between white and black students. Both authors attribute the gap between the academic scores of black and white students from opposite sides of racial identity. As Dr. Beverly Daniels Tatum, President of Spelman College and clinical psychologist has written an article entitled “Why are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” Her approach is from the perspective of the student and how they perceive their role and upper limits while maintaining their place in their peer group's expectations of their race. Dr. Diane Ravitch, a research professor of education at New York University, has written an article entitled "The Facts about the Achievement Gap.” Her approach is from the perspective of how schools and society implicitly or explicitly cast students into achievement tracks based on their race. Both approach the same idea about racial identity, but they have different solutions, such as peer groups, the school board, and who is right about the solution.

A school setting provides opportunities where issues of social justice, oppression, and discrimination can be addressed. According to Bemak and Chung (2009), students of color and economically disadvantaged students are likely to have low academic achievement, in comparison to their White middle class counterparts. These disparities in academic

In 1965, Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act as part of his “war on poverty” in hopes of closing the achievement gap between low income schools, which typically house larger percentages of student of color, and their more affluent counterparts. The act has been redefined and reauthorized every five years since its original enactment. However, despite the last 50 years of education reform, the disparity amongst high and low poverty schools is as large as it ever was. In turn, the disparity between students of color and white students has only grown. Clearly, the one size fits all approach to education America has been using does not work. The U.S public education system is broken and, as a country, very

The American education system is failing the generations of the future. Society neglects the children born into impoverished areas, while mainly white upper class children participate in superior educational activities. Low-income neighborhoods often produce schools with low scoring students. Therefore the government transitions these schools into impersonal factories. The phrase diversity masquerades the reality of re-segregation of schools. Many schools across the country are utilizing the phrase diversity, yet the statistics reveal that over ninety percent of the students are black or Hispanic. Creating successful environments is extremely difficult and subsequently results in serious consequences for the American education system.

After reviewing the Government laws and policies that have been in placed and replaced in history and more currently to contribute and correct the issue. The most important question of all remains. Why does the Achievement Gap still exist? According to former Secretary of Education John King (2016) “Black and Hispanic students continue to lag behind their White peers in achievement and graduation rates.”After so many attempts made by the Government to close the Gap and create equality, clearly there is something that is not being addressed across American Public Schools. Frederica Wilson (2013) former state senate member stated in the Brown vs Board Documentary There is such a difference in going to one school in one community and going to another in another community. Why don't we tackle that problem instead of testing the students predicting they will fail, watching them fail and denying them a good life?”The question now that remains how exactly are the schools different in different communities?

Teaching in racially diverse classrooms often leaves educators feeling uncertain about how to proceed and how to respond to historically marginalized students. There is pressure to acknowledge and accept students of color with different perspectives, to diversify the syllabi, be more aware of classroom dynamics, and pay attention to how students of color experience the learning process.

In the article “Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Education Apartheid” author Jonathan Kozol informs us about inequality and segregation in today’s school systems. Kozol talks about schools were minority’s makes up the student body. For example, Kozol refers to John F. Kennedy High School where the majority of the student body is made up by African Americans and Hispanic students, only a third of the students are white. Kozol states that schools like these are typically underprivileged schools that normally have structural issues and also lack behind in technology and resources for students. Kozol also brings up the predominately white schools where on average there is more money spent on students and funding is not a problem, these

Furthermore the questions that guide this study are: “(1) how and why teachers participate in practices and policies that may undermine minority students’ academic achievement, (2) how elementary students respond to these practices and policies, and (3) the implications of

It has been proven by psychologists that education and learning first begins at home through the family. The author’s of this text, Hawley and Nieto, touched ground on this fact while they discussed the racial differences on education for families. They went on to express that like any other family for instance, culturally diverse families value education as well. All families share a similar positive outlook for their children, especially to break the poverty cycle. This idea brought about appeals for value that everyone is equal and deserves fair education so that professional educators may notice that all students want to prosper. However, most ethnic families feel ultimately unwelcome and out of place when it comes to their child’s education, which led to less involvement in the classroom. It is seen here that the school is supposed to be a place

The author, Amanda Lewis, conducted a study in the 1990s to examine how race and racial inequality are reproduced on a day-to-day basis in schools. She argues that the curriculums, educators, and the children themselves create and reinforce racial lessons. She picked three elementary schools in Southern California: Foresthills, West City, and Metro2. The schools were selected based on their location and cultural composition. At each school she was paired with a teacher who would be the best help for the study. She observed the behaviors and interactions of students in fourth/fifth grade classes. Interviews were conducted with the students, teachers, members of the school community, and parents as well.

All in all, we must recognize that the marginalization of students of color in education is a reality (Leonardo, 2013) and for this reason we can come to see the use of CRT as an alternative to a more equitable direction. One the one hand, CRT in education allows us to realize dilemmas in school litigation, school funding, and harmful teacher practices (deficit thinking and colorblindness), while on the other hand, challenges us to search for the voices of others and counterstories. In 2005, CRT scholars, Dixson and Rousseau, describe how a quick research of the literature of “critical race theory in education” through the ERIC database revealed only 44 hits, while only 125 in Lexis-Nexis. Today, in the summer of 2015, I conducted a similar review of the literature, using “critical race theory in education,” in the ERIC database. I found 2,083 hits in the ERIC database, and since 2011 (the last five years) there were 24,084 hits; in addition to 996 hits using the Lexis-Nexis database. As is indicative of the proliferation of CRT into education, it is my hope—as well as my own research—that this greater awareness cultivates transformational change for students of color and

An interview was done to a professional educator from a high school in the Washington, D.C. area. The educator shared her insights on the actual state of support in minority education in D.C. Most of the feedback received reveals the achievement gap is due to a lack of communication from the schools in informing parents and students about available educational opportunities. In addition, the educator mentioned