How Illinois Pays For Public Schools By Becky Vevea

The Educational Dilemma The privilege that a student is born into can truly define the extent of their education. A privileged culture can provide much more educational opportunities than a pauperized one. Whether it's the privilege of gender, wealth, geography, and race. The consideration of education taken by students will ultimately stick with them forever and will in the end determine their futures, so it is very important they experience it in a positive manner or else it might have negative effects in the long run. Privilege is an aspect of culture that can greatly affect a students education experience and can negatively influence their educational success in the end. A privileged culture can provide much more educational opportunities

Children who grow up in high crime, poverty-stricken neighborhoods may face numerous challenges that can make it difficult to succeed in school. In “How Illinois Pays For Public Schools” by Becky Vevea she states “We don’t have full-time art and music at the elementary level, says superintendent Kevin Russell. Instead, what we do is, for half of the year the students get art, and the other half of the year the students get music. It’s just one example of what a school can or can’t do with roughly $9,794 per student”(Vevea, 1). This school demonstrates how the geography of where these students are impacts their education because their school just can’t afford to give them the luxuries that other schools can because they just don’t get the same funding based on where they are located. On the other side there are other schools like Rondout which Vevea says “the school is surrounded by business, including part of the offices for the international pharmaceutical company, Abbott. Those businesses pay property taxes, and a big chunk of the resulting revenue helps pay for Rondout School. That fact, along with the district’s low enrollment, helps explain why Rondout was able to spend $28,639 per student in 2013”(Vevea, 2). This goes to show how much privilege students have if they are lucky enough to be living in an area where their school's funding is being positively affected by the

Historically, certain racial groups have faced systemic discrimination in education, which has resulted in unequal access to resources and opportunities. For example, Black and Hispanic students are more likely to attend underfunded schools and they also face higher rates of disciplinary actions, such as suspensions and expulsions, which can negatively impact their academic progress and mental health. For example in “Pigeons” by Eileen Pollack she states “Pablo Rodriguez, whose parents were migrant farmers and who, in sixth grade could barely read or write or the Buck Brothers, Phil and Gregory, who seemed to get punished for no other reason than being a large and male and black”(Pollack 118). This statement shows how big of a role being born into a certain race impacts the educational opportunities a child can receive in life. As Well as the discrimination a student can face by just being a different race in the text the Buck brothers were seemingly just punished because they were and had different color skin for the rest of the students and this is seen today in school systems where students are mistreated just by how they look. Additionally, racial stereotypes and biases can impact the way teachers and administrators interact with students. I can recall that there was an incident at Eisenhower Junior High School where a student was forced to learn in the corner of the classroom