Universal Equality Of Educational Opportunity

In his article, “Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid”, Jonathan Kozol points out, whether we are aware or not, how American public schools are segregated. Schools that were segregated twenty-five to thirty years ago are still segregated, and schools that had been integrated are now re-segregating. The achievement gap between black and white students, after narrowing for a few decades, started to widen once again in the early 1990s when federal courts got rid of the mandates of the Brown decision and schools were no longer required to integrate.

Most inner city schools are not challenging their students and not allowing them to be creative. Yet, challenging students is their normal practice in the better school. On the other hand, all inner city schools should give their students with the same amount of education as private schools in order to better their education. There are different methods of teaching between these schools, especially when it comes to economics and geography. “Scholars in political economy and the sociology of knowledge have recently argued that public schools in complex industrial societies like our own make available different types of educational experience and curriculum knowledge to students in different social classes” (Anyon, 1980). Even though years after Brown versus Board of Education, where the Supreme Court declared segregation to be unconstitutional, Caucasian, African and Hispanic Americans continue to learn in different worlds. As long as each race has low incomes, there will always be unequal education.

The book, Inequality in the Promised Land: Race, Resources, and Suburban Schooling, tells us about the problems that inner-city students face in schools across America. There is an apparent problem with discrimination towards black and poorer families within some suburban districts. The effect of this is a vicious cycle of limited/ scare resources of educational opportunities for students. Author, Lewis-McCoy examines a suburban area in which a “promised land” of educational opportunities and beneficial resources has failed to live up to it’s name. America’s suburbs are seeing an increase in diverse families, yet there is still a challenge of giving equal and high quality educational opportunities to them.

With landmark Supreme Court decisions in regards to education such as Brown v Board of Education, which made segregation within schools illegal, one would be inclined to believe that modern schools are void of any inequality. However, at a deeper glance, it is apparent that there is a glaring inequality within public school systems at the national, statewide, and even district-wide level. Such an inequality has drastic results as the education one receives has a high correlation to the college they will attend, and the job they will work. It is in society's best interest that public school systems be improved to equally supplement students with the tools necessary to succeed. While the public school system aims to reduce the inequality within it, they have proven ineffective in guaranteeing children of all races and economic classes an equal education.

Ultimately the lack of reliable resources and preparation from underfunded schools leads African American students into being unprepared for college and jobs, once again reinforcing a vicious cycle of poverty within the community. Gillian B. White, a senior associate editor at The Atlantic, wrote a chilling article regarding the systematic racism that is deeply embedded in the American school system. In the article The Data: Race Influences School Funding, White states “At a given poverty level, districts that have a higher proportion of white students get substantially higher funding than districts that have more minority students” (White). In this quote White explains the clear correlation of race and inadequate funding in the American school

Education and economic justice were two forms of systemic inequalities that make inequality difficult to talk about. Education is a requirement if someone wishes to have a better life, but not everyone has access to quality education. In the U.S there has always been a battle, people of color have fought to be able to access quality education, (Philips, 2016: 130) they are constantly attending inferior and ineffective school where there are many distractions for students to be fully successful in the classrooms. Often these schools where children of color attend lack quality facilities, educational resources, and qualified teachers. Someone can’t help to notice that in general such unqualified schools are mostly in color people’s neighborhoods.

Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools is an intense expose of unjust conditions in educating America’s children. Today’s society of living conditions, poverty, income, desegregation and political issues have forced inadequate education to many children across the country. Kozol discusses major reasons for discrepancies in schools: disparities of property taxes, racism and the conflict between state and local control. Kozol traveled to public schools researching conditions and the level of education in each school. He spoke with teachers, students, principals, superintendents and government officials to portray a clear picture of the

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

In Jonathan Kozol “Still Separate Still Unequal” the author discusses how education for inner city school kids greatly differs from white school kids. “Schools that were already deeply segregated twenty-five or thirty years ago are no less segregated now” (Kozol 143). Although in 1954 the popular court case Brown vs Board of Education should have ended segregation in schools. The author shows how “the achievement gap between black and white children continues to widen or remain unchanged,” (Kozol 164) due to society’s grouping of privileges. Kozol relies heavily on logos to show how socio-economic privileges affects the education that inner city schools kids receive, those being blacks and Hispanics, compared to white schools kids.

The essay “Still Separate, Still Unequal”, by Jonathan Kozol, discusses the harsh truth of public school systems, and how they have become an isolation and segregation of inequality that students are subjected to; as a result, to receive an education. Throughout the essay, Kozol proves evidence of the inequality that African American and Hispanic children face in the current school systems across the country. Kozol supports his testimony by providing the reader with factual statistics and percentages, of how segregated the public school systems have become within many major cities. He exposes the details and statistic of how wealthier schools received better funding and opportunity than the low-income and poverty struck school systems throughout the major cities across the country.

Jonathan Kozol’s book, Savage Inequalities, is a passionate testament to the shortcomings of the public education system in the United states. Kozol visits some of the most impoverished school districts in East St. Louis, Chicago, New York, Camden, and San Antonio. He identifies characteristic among all of these schools to include a high percentage of dropouts, a population of almost entirely non-white students, an infrastructure in disrepair, a startling lack of basic supplies, a shortage of teachers, and an excess of students. Kozol also visits schools in the vicinity that are in stark contrast to the poorest schools. They have an abundance of supplies, space, funds, AP curriculum, extra-curricular activities, and teachers. These schools were also predominantly white. Kozol explores reasons for these differences between neighboring schools and finds that those who are in a position to initiate change are largely apathetic to the inequalities.

Ever since the establishment of equal education in the United States, there has been a disparity in academic success between children of different races. The education of African American children has become a prime example of this. As discussed in the historical text, A Letter to My Nephew, which was written during the time of the civil rights movement in the 1950’s and 1960’s, African Americans were not given equal opportunities to succeed educationally and could do little to change their futures for the better. They had to work much harder than whites to receive even a portion of the recognition and success that whites achieved (Baldwin 1). Although many today believe America has overcome this problem, it still remains a pressing issue in many aspects of society, arguably the most important being education. The racial achievement gap, an important term to familiarize with when discussing this topic, refers to the disparity in educational performance between students of different races (National Education Association 1). As of now, although the education achievement gap has been narrowing, there still remains a large disparity between African Americans and their racial counterparts. According to a study by Roland G. Freyer and Steven D. Levitt, professors at Harvard University and W.E.B Du Bois Institute, respectively, African American students enter kindergarten already significantly behind children of other races, and their test scores continue to drop

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?

Two articles, The Facts about the Achievement Gap by Diane Ravitch and From Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid by Jonathan Kozol, provide facts about the crumbling education system in the inner cities of America. Schools there have shown to be segregated, poorly staffed, and underfunded. While the theme of both articles may be educational shortcomings, the content is surrounded by discussions of segregation. There are more underlying factors the authors are missing. Readers need to be rallied together in a unilateral cause to identify the issues affecting the nation’s education system, segregation is not one of them.

education – race (par. 1). She states that the racial makeup of America drives four major factors