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An essay on discrimination in education
An essay on discrimination in education
An essay on discrimination in education
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The article “Unequal Opportunity: Race and Education” was written by Professor Linda Darling-Hammond who holds an Ed. D., in urban education. Throughout the reading of the article, it is clear that the main point is on inequality within educational systems. Darling-Hammond opens the article with a reference to W.E.B. DuBois that quickly shapes into her main focus of how race and education interact. Darling-Hammond mainly states her points through historical evidence and looking at the root of the problem of education inequality.
Inequalities have always existed in society. These inequalities are often perpetuated through education. While the United States Supreme Court supported desegregation of schools and struck down the idea of “separate, but equal” in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education cases, there still exists many inequalities within the United States educational system today for minority races and people of the lower economic classes. Ann Ferguson in her article “Bad Boys” discusses punishment practices in schools and the detriment these practices provide as they resemble incarceration. Conley in his article “Education” discusses education acting as a sorting machine and the tracking of students.
whereby, placing these White students in a place of racial dominance (Lopez, 1996) Therefore, White students often do not recognize the existence of White privilege because it is not something that can be seen. Critical Whiteness Theory Mistrust. One of the things that these White female novice teachers kept discussing throughout the entire interviews was the fact that the Black students exhibited great mistrust and suspicion towards them.
For countless years, there has been deliberate bigotry against people of color all around the world. However, today in America the social prejudice against the African American race has become almost entirely a thing of the past. Researchers argue that the discrimination people of color face has lessened over time and the barriers between whites and blacks have weakened. Education in America has changed significantly to benefit all races since the 1920’s. Education is an essential part in any person’s life no matter their race and every person should be able to receive the same opportunities.
Racial minorities and immigrants are not reaching the same outcomes of their White and non-recent immigrant counterparts. The dropout rates of visible-minority students still exceeds those of students belonging to the majority (Kirova, 2008, 103). For examples, Hispanic and Latino students have a dropout rate two times that of their White peers, and Black students have a dropout rate almost four times that of their White peers (Kahn, 2008, 527). School performance of African American and Hispanic students tends to be lower than the level achieved by their white peers (The Equity and Excellence Commission, 2013, 13). Groups that belong to races other than White are still represented proportionately higher than their White counterparts in the legal system (Kirova, 2008, 103).
Resmovits utilizes surveys, including data from every U.S. school district, released by the U.S. Education Department to assert that public school students of color get an additional amount of punishment and less access to experienced, knowledgeable teachers than their white peers. Resmovits highlights the long-established inequalities that leave minority students at a disadvantage. As an example of one of the disadvantages, she mentions the “school-to-prison pipeline”, which leads troubles students into the justice system. Through data that shows disparities in students as early as preschool, Resmovits invalidates the widely believed misconception that varying discipline outcomes happen as a result of specific races acting out more than others.
With research, interviews, and intersectionality the article demonstrates an informative overview of racism in school education and how the contexts affects principals means of understanding racism and solving them. Seen as how it gives an insight on different ways to interpret racism, it gives more reason to the purpose of conveying racism as a problem in school education. The source gave me a new way to look at racism not just from the biological aspect, but also the cultural and institutional aspects. Several points of the text argue racism being a problem in education.
Wait you're saying there are still is racial inequality in schools! ( according to the article Worsening unchecked segregation in k-12 schools)Yes it's true there still is and it's not just happening in 1 school but many. And it's not fair they don't get the same amount of materials and resources as the white kids do.
Racism Discrimination and Expectations of Student’s Achievement Summary In this Chapter Sonia Nieto discusses the role racism and discrimination in the United States plays in terms of student achievement. There is no denying that racism and other prejudices exist in different systems of education, but just how much do they affect students? Children may not be able to clearly identify these issues, but they do suffer because of them.
Constantly, US schools in black and latino neighborhoods have been severely understaffed and underfunded. “A quarter of high schools with the highest percentage of black and Latino students do not offer Algebra II; a third of these schools do not offer chemistry” (Heffling). Schools not offering these basic courses to their students simply due to a lac of funding significantly impacts the performance of black and latino students in the post-secondary world. In fact, nearly 51% of all public school students come from a household that is near or below the federal poverty line (Layton). Education is supposed to be one of the biggest equalizers in regards to achievement yet there already exists an inequality amongst the education received.
Despite an increase of education scores in the past decade, the United States still trenches behind many countries. Scores found in the Programme for International Student Assessment, the most popular cross sectional test, finds that the United State ranks thirty-eight out of seventy-one countries in test performances of english, math and science literary. But within the country itself contains a deeper issue. The term “achievement gap” is used to describe the polarity between the academic performances of minorities, such as Black and Hispanics, to those of Asians and White students; which are found to be much lower than the latter. Besides test scores, this achievement gap is most apparent in grades and drop-out rates as well.
An outrage among society today; high school students are not being admitted to their dream colleges based on ethnic background. Adolescents should not be burdened by the thought that they won’t get into the college they deserve to attend just based on their skin color. Affirmative Action is the cause of this appalling injustice in the college admissions process among big universities. There have been several cases where people have fought for their right to be admitted solely based on their qualifications. Universities’ use of Affirmative Action, and racial quotas in their admissions process should be exposed and terminated.
I tend to explore poverty as an outside-of-school factor and its influence on the inside-of-school experiences and outcome of students. I plan to consider the unified space of learning, instructional practices, and poverty. I decided to use race as an analytic site not to suggest that people are in poverty because of their race but to demonstrate how race can be a noticeable factor in how people experience and inhabit the world and consequently education. My point is that we (those of us in education and who care about it) should work to eradicate poverty for all students, not just students of color. However, we need to understand and question why a disproportionate number of students of color live in poverty and are from lower socioeconomic
In Unequal Opportunity: Race and Education “Race could make or break a student's education, because teachers are less likely to understand a student's learning style, teachers are to blame the students if teachings are not working.” (Linda Darling-Hammond). “Robert Dreeben at University of Chicago did a research on, 300 Chicago first graders African-American and white students who achieved comparable levels on reading skills.” (Linda Darling-Hammond) The results of the test is comparable but the African American students wasn’t given the same level, the white students test was on level and the black student's test was below level.
Most importantly, the education and health of minority races are greatly discriminated against as “high-achieving African American students may be exposed to less rigorous curriculums, attend schools with fewer resources, and have teachers who expect less of them academically than they expect of similarly situated Caucasian students (Azzam, 2008)” (American Psychological Association). Furthermore, Fiscella, Franks, Gold, & Clancy states that Socioeconomic status and race/ethnicity have been associated with avoidable procedures, avoidable
