Racial Inequality In Education

For my historical conversations project, I want to focus upon the racial bias that is present within and negatively impacts our modern education system. I want to illustrate that racial bias is still present today, despite any major counter arguments, through two major factors including: faculty support towards colored students vs. non-colored and the distribution of school funds upon being dependent upon the ethnic make-up of the student population. I want to make this point to show how the U.S. education system has yet to achieve equal education opportunities for everyone, greatly affecting the success rates throughout a wide array of institutions from lower grade public schools to higher education at the university level. Even though I am

In this paper, I will explore the aspects regarding racial inequality pertaining to education in the United States of America. It has come to my attention, based on my observations, that race is a definitive factor that plays a role in establishing socioeconomic status. In relation to socioeconomic status, variables correlating with race that I will be focusing on, is the educational and wealth aspects. An individual’s level of education is pivotal to establishing stable, consistent wealth and vice-versa; the access for quality education is inconsistent primarily among minority races/ethnicities. According to historical records ranging from the year 1980 to 2000, between Whites, Hispanics, African-Americans, and Native Americans, the educational attainment gap is widening (Kelly 2005). Education is seen to be a source of respect and key to gaining a higher income, which transfers over to greater wealth. Acknowledging the slow expansion of the educational attainment disparities, I argue that the society’s perceptions and actions addressing race perpetuates and produces social inequalities by limiting opportunities despite “equal” resources, privileges, and rights through social policies that have contributed towards the quality of America’s education system.

Racial formation is a vast sum of signifying actions and social structures that clash in the creation of complex relationships and identities that is a labeled race. Throughout the history of the United States, a large array of strategies was engaged in regarding education that took advantage of nonwhites. Since policies by those who supposedly “protect our rights” attempted to eradicate social, economic and cultural aspirations, dominated groups were more often than not suspicious of the school 's interests. According to John Ogby, “children from dominated cultures often failed school because they considered the school to be representative of the dominant white culture” (Spring, 101). This portrays racial formation having an effect on equality. “Acting white” meant to attempt to do well in school because

Racial disparities exist in every aspect of our society. It exists in religion, socioeconomic status, life-chances, media, etc. It affects everyone even if they realize or not. Education is one of the things that are also affected by the racial stratification occurring in the United States. In this paper I will look in to whether Tennessee is better or worse for educational advancement by comparing four races and their high school graduation rates on the national and state levels. The four races used will be; Asian, Black, Hispanic/Latino, and White. I will then tie specific theories to why these disparities may exist. This will hopefully give insight in to this touchy topic and provide a starting point for correcting the gap.

Racial inequality persists in the current U.S. education system, despite nationwide efforts to promote the acceptance of students of all racial and ethnic backgrounds. Minority students, most notably African American and Latino, receive lower qualities of education compared to the Caucasian majority and are, as a result, at an indisputable disadvantage after primary and secondary education. According to a 2014 study conducted by the U.S. Department of Education, “students of color in public schools are punished more and receive less access than white students to experienced teachers” (Abdul-Jabbar 31). Higher suspension rates and an increased frequency of corporal punishment use, allowed in 19 states as of 2014 according to Business Insider (Adwar), for minority students are two disciplinary examples of underlying racial discrimination with the current U.S. education system. Economic repercussions of racial inequality in education have been proven to include wealth gaps, higher unemployment rates, and financial instability for minorities in later life. Due to the prominence of racial segregation within schools, it remains a controversial point of debate in modern-day society, resulting in attempts such as affirmative action to establish racial equality in education. In Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), the United States Supreme Court declared affirmative action to be a justified policy in the

Who we are and how we are treated as children is directly correlated to who we will become as adults. Spoken by Lyndon B. Johnson, “Until Justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men’s skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.” These words are echoed throughout the educational system that is put in place today. Jonathan Kozol, an award-winning writer and public lecturer who focuses on social injustice in the United States, reverberates these words in his article, “From Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid”. Kozol proves his mastery in persuasion by the facts he provides and the personal anecdotes from teachers and students.

I met Elias G, a black student who lives in my neighborhood and is learning about Anesthesia, at the Foothill College Cafeteria. In this personal interview, he emphasized that none of his close African American friends in his high school have entered universities. As for why, he argues that inequality still remains in college admissions and scholarship systems. Today, higher education seems to be considered the only way in which one can move his social status up in the nation. As a result, many politicians and leaders in the country have emphasized the importance of education. A number of policies regarding education have been published, executed, and planned by those already highly educated in the nation. These policies have been truly successful

While the educational gap among high-income neighborhoods and low-income neighborhoods is large, there is also a large gap between white and minority students in the United States. Educational opportunities for students have continued to be separate but equal; In the article “Unequal Opportunity: Race and Education” by Linda Darling-Hammond, she draws attention to “the striking differences between public schools serving students of color in urban settings and their suburban counterparts, which typically spend twice as much per student for populations with many fewer special needs” (Darling-Hammond). Students in states with low educational funding budgets and students who go to schools where the majority of students are minorities, often do

Lyndon B. Johnson, the 36th president of the United States and the president who signed the Civil Rights Act into law, once said, “Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men’s skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.” Many are unaware of how well a person can receive their education when their race differs from the dominant white majority of the U.S. Whether it’s ignorance or the deliberate choice of not giving other races the same opportunity to succeed, we don’t know, but that is what we have set out to find. Throughout all of our literature, we can see examples of people not getting the same choices or opportunities as other citizens

First by theoretically and methodologically grounding the study in qualitative applications which allows one to understand educational inequities and issues of race in American schools by using 3 of the theory’s foundational tenets. The Critical Race Theory tenets that are best suited as qualitative application tools are all centered around the voice and experiences of people of color, they include: (1). understanding the centrality of race or race as a customary and ordinary occurrence in American life, which is woven into the fabric of American social structure; (2). the interest convergence theory and the fact that educational law and policy do not benefit minorities, with for the exception of when these policies and laws converge with the interests of whites and white superiority; and finally, (3). the centrality of experiential knowledge and the lived experiences of students of color, their families and their communities through storytelling and counter-storytelling challenges racism and white superiority in America (Delgado & Stelfancic, 200l; Malagon, Lindsay & Velez,

American society likes to believe that race relations in our country are no longer strained. We do not want to hear about the need for affirmative action or about the growing numbers of white supremacist groups. In order to appease our collective conscious, we put aside the disturbing fact that racism is alive and well in the great U.S.A. It hides in the workplace, it subtly shows its ugly face in the media, and it affects the education of minority students nationwide. In the following excerpts from an interview with a middle class African American male, the reader will find strong evidence that race plays a major role in determining the type and quality of education a student receives.

With the creation of affirmative action policy, the election of the United States’ first African American President, and debate concerning reparations for slavery, twenty-first century America appears to have largely disowned its iniquitous history seated in centuries-long mistreatment and intolerance of non-white, minority peoples. Though the overt designs of slavery and Jim Crow no longer mare the American cultural landscape, the covert racist and classist machinations of bygone individual agents and national policies persist—though in lesser forms—within the nation’s paramount cultural institution: its education system. African American and Hispanic students consistently score lower on standardized exams—which determine grade advancement, college admission, and professional success--than white students (Ford).

Equal access to educational opportunities for all students was a primary goal of education reforms during the time of the Civil Rights Movement and it still remains a problem today. Today, we are focused on a broader range of ethnic groups and in a higher goal than simply “letting people in,” we ask questions about how to create educational institutions that serve all students equally well ("50 Years After Brown v. Board of Education: The Promise and Challenge of Multicultural Education"). In 1954 we did not ask whether schools’ would welcome and nurture students of color or whether the schools would adjust to a curriculum that made equal sense to all groups. Today, we ask such questions. Research shows that multicultural education and curriculum

In education, white people have always been at an advantage compared to other races. African-American have had quite a setback in prior years. There was a time when African-American weren’t even allowed to learn how to write or read in our country just because of the color of their skin. There has been quite the improvement from those times in terms of African-Americans obtaining an education. According to Essentials of Sociology, only about 20 percent of African-Americans had a high school diploma in the year of 1960. The number has increased significantly to roughly 82 percent in 2013. That percentage represents a significant change that shows how our nation has progressed throughout the years. However, you are still at a set back if you aren’t white. “Black students were expelled at three times the rate of white students” (Hsieh, 2014).

Building wealth becomes increasingly unmanageable without steady employment, but the unemployment rate for people of color has been consistently twice that white people, regardless of the fluctuations in the economy. An education is a way to help you achieve that goal. However, the rate for unemployment for blacks with college degrees is twice as high to be unemployed than all other graduates, according to The American Non-Dilemma: Racial Inequality Without Racism, a book published by Nancy DiTomaso, a professor of sociology, at Rutgers University who lectures inequality and organizational diversity. This is because applications with white-sounding names have a fifty percent chance higher than black sounding names to get callbacks, even when the resume does not change. Previous to the business opportunities, a person must obtain an education.