Socioeconomic Inequality In The Classroom

Fiscal policy is the public policy domain that I am most interested in. But education policy is a strong secondary interest of mine, and recently, with the school closings in Detroit and Philadelphia and persistent problems in public education, I find urban policy to be extremely important. Additionally, as a conservative, seeing the increasing income inequality, in terms of solutions, I would like to analyze the deep root of the problem in lieu of a solution that I believe only scratches the surface such as increasing taxes on top earners. I do not think this will solve this issue because there is a disparity between the top 1% of earners and the top 1% of wealth owners and there is no real wealth tax. Wealth is what creates inequality in opportunity. Strengthening equal opportunity through K-12 education is where I would start looking answers.

Of particular interest during this week’s reading was the section on “Equity and Social Justice.” While education has developed drastically over the years, educational inequality has widened as well. Rury notes “ . . . school segregation has increased, and the problems of poor and minority children have grown more acute in communities across the country” (Rury 231). Often times, it can be deceptive when we are told that something is developing because people often link development with greatness, which isn’t the truth at all. It’s often suggested that these developments are consistent with neo-liberal policies, however they are also linked to changes in the larger economy. Students who suffer the most are often from relatively poor urban schools,

Diversity is recognizing a person’s differences as far as religion, ethnic group, sexual orientation, etc. Diversity can be seen in a workplace, schools, restaurants, or any public area. “Often diversity courses aim to explain that racism not only entails attitudes but also affects the opportunity structure in U.S. society; thus, the content of such courses should decrease the extent to which students view inequality as the result of individual short-comings (Cole, E. R., Case, K. A., Rios, D., & Curtin, N.).” Yes, psychology is the study of the mind however; learning the many different diversities is also learned and taught in psychology.

A High-School teacher who had repeated sexual relations with a student, has cried in the dock after being sentenced to sixty year imprisonment.

In most of the largest cities in the United States, people of color have children that attend schools where the majority of the students are considered “poor or low-income.” The National Equity Atlas classifies students as low-income if they are “from families with incomes up to the 130 percent of the poverty line.” The majority of the non-white impoverished population includes, but is not limited to, blacks and Hispanics. The National Center for Educational Statistics says that “nationwide there are about three-fourths of both African American and Hispanic young people that attend schools where most of their classmates qualify as low income. This is directed to the people of America to inform them of poverty and who it affects, including people

Stories about how our nation’s educational system has declined have been commonplace for over a generation. Recently, the International Mathematics and Science Study and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study reported our fourth and eighth grade students trail their contemporaries in Asia and many European nations in math and science.

I currently intern at Peregrine South, a private school in Davis that teaches preschool through elementary age children. I work as a kitchen intern with a chef, helping her prepare nutritious meals for the kids and serving them during lunch time. There are several children from different cultural backgrounds including Asian, Hispanic, and African American minorities, but the majority of the children are Caucasian. Some children have disabilities such as autism spectrum disorder. I observed boys and girls who were 4 to 5 years old interacting with their peers and teachers as well as their general behaviors during lunchtime. The kids eat lunch outdoors where each class sits at a table with their teachers and classmates. During my observation,

When taking all of the statistical demographic information into consideration, the classroom environment I have been observing and participating in starts to make more sense. For instance, while the students are typically kind hearted and eager to learn, they are more squirrely than students I have observed in slightly higher income areas. When looking at the free and reduced lunch numbers (83%) and the economically disadvantaged numbers (77.2%), this makes sense. While the cause of “squirrely behavior” is not directly associated with the school provisions for these disadvantages, it is associated with the disadvantages themselves. Because students parents are busy trying to economically get buy in low income households, buying healthy food

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

Without a doubt, our society has mercilessly segregate the ‘elite’ from the ‘inferior.’ There are two groups of people that contribute to the economy, the wildly rich and elite one percent and the other group is everyone else or the inferior majority. There is no longer a gap between these two group, but rather an ever-growing abyss. This injustice is known as the income inequality and many factors in our plagued society contribute to the growth of this issue. At birth, each human being is born with access to different resources and because of this, most Americans need to work much harder to simply make ends meet. Income inequality is the result of the discrepancies and differences between people’s education, wealth, personal ability, monopoly, and discrimination.

Feedback was provided throughout all parts of the assessment. If the students did something correctly, they had words of encouragement by their work. This helps to show the students their strengths in the assessment. Some of the problems they did well on had an extension with their feedback such as how would their inequality look on a number line.

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

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

With the development of economic society in contemporary China, there is an increasingly high demand for high-quality talents and people begin to pay more and more attention to the educational development. The inequality of educational development aggravates the cut-throat competition in the allocation of high-quality educational resources and even evolves into the inequitable “inside story”, which intensifies the issue of educational equality and leads to a radical social response. This paper mainly studies the issue of educational inequality in China’s contemporary society and briefly analyzes three phenomena and relevant reasons of the educational inequality. Meanwhile, this paper also discusses the relationship between education and economic development in a brief way.

Educational inequality and inequity have been and continue to be at the very epicenter of the academic failure of thousands of Latino students every year. Although well documented, this issue has yet to have a solution that has been well implemented. Latinos are the fasted growing ethnic population in the United States, and yet they are falling behind in today’s education system. The academic achievement, or lack thereof, of Latino students is both a contemporary and historical phenomenon. The term “academic achievement” is a loaded term that has historically, and more so recently used to legitimize punitive measures taken against schools with high populations of poor students of color. Under current policy, academic achievement is measured using norm-referenced high stakes standardized assessments. These assessments are designed, mostly by corporations, which are farthest removed from the classroom. In Patricia Gándara’s Overcoming Triple Segregation, she comes to a conclusion that poverty is the culprit and Latino children are more than twice as likely to live in poverty than white children, therefore affecting the quality of education they receive in the classroom due to the de facto segregation and disenfranchisement of Latino students. It is clearly evident that Latino students are not faring well in American schools. Poor quality of instruction coupled with sub-standard facilities, books, and supplies only serve to magnify the problem.