Valuing Diversity In Education

In the article “Fremont high school”, Jonathan Kozol describes how the inability to provide the needed funding and address the necessities of minority children is preventing students from functioning properly at school. He talks to Meriya, a student who expresses her disgust on the unequal consideration given to urban and suburban schools. She and her classmates undergo physical and personal embarrassments. Kozol states that the average ninth grade student reads at fourth or fifth grade level while a third read at third grade level or below. Although academic problems are the main factor for low grades, students deal with other factors every day. For example, School bathrooms are unsanitary, air condition does not work, classrooms have limited

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

It has become common today to dismiss the lack of education coming from our impoverished public schools. Jonathan Kozol an award winning social injustice writer, trying to bring to light how our school system talks to their students. In his essay “Still Separate, Still Unequal," Kozol visits many public high schools as well as public elementary schools across the country, realizing the outrageous truth about segregating in our public education system. Kozol, cross-examining children describing their feelings as being put away where no one desires your presence. Children feeling diminished for being a minority; attending a school that does not take into consideration at the least the child’s well being. Showing clear signs of segregation in the education system.

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

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?

“Unintended Educational and Social Consequences of the No Child Left Behind Act” Journal of Gender, Race and Justice, no. 2, Winter 2009, pp. 311. EBSCOhost. In this peer-reviewed academic journal article, Liz Hollingworth, an associate professor in the College of Education at the University of Iowa, explores the history of school reform in the United States, and the unintended consequences of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Hollingworth states that the great promise of NCLB is that schools will focus on the education of low-achieving students, reducing the gap in student academic achievement between White students and African-American, Hispanic, and Native American student populations. Hollingworth states that an unintended consequence of NCLB was that teachers and school administrators had to shift curriculum focus in an effort to raise test scores, but in some cases, they had to also abandoned thoughtful, research-based classroom practices in exchange for test preparation. NCLB also affected teachers, highly qualified teachers left high-poverty schools, with low performance rates especially those schools where teacher salaries are tied to student academic performance. Hollingworth concludes her article by stating “we need to be wary of policy innovations that amount to simply rearranging the deck chairs on the

As I read about the achievement gap (Taylor), I felt a sense of despair. Families of color are positioned between a rock and a hard place. When children enter kindergarten, the racial gap is half of its ultimate size because many children of color do not participate in high-quality programs. How can people of color "catch up" to their counterparts when they are behind at the age of 5? There are also institutional factors that continue this achievement gap and perpetuate racism by consequence. After Brown v Board of Education (1954), white families enrolled their children in private and suburban schools. Since school busing has been discontinued, school assignments based on residential neighborhoods have created racially segregated schools.

Students have their own best way in effectively learning the lesson. With the diversity of students, the problem is each student has a preferred learning style. It becomes undeniably one of the reasons that make it difficult to achieve the best expected outcome out of teachers’ effort. However, teachers try to incorporate various teaching techniques to make every learning opportunity become productive, meaningful, and relevant for the learners.

All across the United States there are schools that are struggling financially and culturally due to different socio-economic challenges. Some of these challenges can not be avoided although many of them could be avoided. One of these problems that could be avoided is the act of institutionalized separation of rich and poor. If integration was more focused the school systems in certain parts of a city would not be understaffed and underfunded. In the documentary Waiting for Superman there were many different points made by the filmmaker that in the modern Education system people are believing that teachers are the only ones responsible for the success of their students. In the film states that people should not “wait for superman to come to the rescue; look in the mirror. We need to understand that it is not just the schools and teachers that are accountable for students performance”. This idea can be seen not only in the film but in Sheryll Cashin’s The Failures of Integration. A piece of literature that touches on modern education systems and the people in those organizations. Waiting for Superman argues that the public schools system in the United States is failing due to poor performing teachers in schools. When The Failures of Integration argues that race and socioeconomic impact is more important than the teachers in the failing schools.

The authors say that students felt they were ignored and disregarded by schools that added pressure over time for their lack caused them to drop out (Stevenson and Ellsworth). In this article, I find two different views. First, the school missed its points, purpose to reach the students by not provide support when students were struggling with their personal and school problems. Second, the students didn’t have any motivation about their education. The different between the inner-city minority adolescents and the white suburban drop-out was that white suburban took the responsibly and the blame to themselves fully for their failure. While the inner-city minority take took a partial blame for their failure. After reading the article written

African American girls continue to be dismissed academically at a systemic level in the K-12 public school system. Despite the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001, some students remain below the learning curve, in particularly, African American females. Until the educational stakeholders take responsibility for the inferior and inequitable resources, the persistent lack of funding, the racism and the class distinction that are institutionalized in the system—the achievement gap between White and Black females, will remain firmly in place (Ladson-Billings, 2006).

Part One of “The Problem We All Live With”, reported by Nikole Hannah-Jones of the New York Times, begins by explaining the correlation between the racial() makeup of ‘bad schools’ versus ‘good schools’. Specifically, Hannah-Jones states that ‘bad schools’ are made up mostly of black children and ‘good schools’ are made up mostly of white children. She discusses the massive education gap between these schools, about the programs that No Child Left Behind unsuccessfully

This ignorance, in fact, causes a great deal of anger in black and minority communities. And the effects of this anger are exemplified in the multiple riots, violent protests, social media outrage, and overall frustration that they feel. Although the segregation laws that once separated white and black society are long gone, the concept still exists to some extent. Statistics show that minority children are more likely to be brought up in troubled neighborhoods just based on demographics and the areas in which these races are forced to congregate based on sheer availability. As a result, non-white races in comparison to whites will always have the lower income jobs, lesser education, and unequal facilities. In fact, the U.S. Department of Education released a report that stated, “only 50% of high schools offer calculus, and only 63% offer physics, while 10% to 15% don’t offer other vital courses like algebra, geometry, biology, and chemistry. These numbers are especially relevant in schools with the highest percentages of African American and Latino students” (Mitchell, 2015). Within education itself, many of the African American students feel left out and are stereotyped throughout various schools in the nation. With a raise in the rate of African American households beginning to homeschool their children (Mazama, 2015), it is obvious that these children do not feel safe at school and their parents do not feel they are safe at school, because of race. The “cycle-of-poverty” should it remain unrectified, is both a dire and long-term consequence of racial discrimination that not only affects the present generation, but will inadvertently affect their children as well. But the present day consequences of the neverending cycle are just as severe. African Americans feel the highest level of frustration as they have been in this country for over three centuries, yet the

From the rudimentary assessments of the early 1900’s to the multitude of standardized tests used today, black and hispanic students have consistently scored lower than their caucasian and asian counterparts. Although numerous programs have been instituted throughout the years in efforts to counter this truth, many have remained largely unsuccessful. In fact in New York, “black and Latino students score below whites and asians on standardized tests so consistently that although hey are almost 70% of the overall student body, they are only 11% of students enrolled at elite public schools” (Rooks, 2012). Several educational and civil rights groups have filed complaints with the U.S. Department of Education arguing that this obvious discontinuity violates the 1964 Civil Rights Act. If schools rely on tests that are more beneficial for one racial group over another, it would seem that they have missed the true purpose of