New Age Segregation: Division of Educational Equality
In today’s world, the idea that someone can be put at a disadvantage due to the color of their skin or the origins of their ancestors is unacceptable. Although school system officials are attempting to fix the problem, I feel that the racial achievement gap is not being given enough attention. In fact, the racial achievement gap is such an important issue that to give it such little attention is almost criminal, as it is affecting not only the children from the time they start school, but it also causes whole communities and groups of people to underachieve.
The achievement gap between different races starts early in a child’s life. Kozol (2005) says that, “It starts during the infant years and toddler years when hundreds of thousands of children in low-income neighborhoods are locked out of the opportunity for preschool education…” While Kozol says the problem is the low income of the student’s family, she also goes on to talk about how it tends to be minorities who make up the bulk of these low income families struggling to put their children into these increasingly expensive pre-school programs. With many minority students failing to gain access to pre-schooling, right off the bat, they are put at a disadvantage compared to their more privileged, white counter parts. In addition to the struggle to give minority kids access to pre-schools, there also exists a minority gap within the higher level schools. The within the school gap, as opposed to the between the school gap, is actually a bigger problem than most realize. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, in 2011, “the portion of the Black-White achievement gap attributed to within-school differences in achievement was larger than the portion attributed to between-school difference.”
After addressing the achievement gap problem within the schools, to further understand the problem, we must look at the achievement gap between different schools in different communities. One school system that struggles with achievement is the Chicago School System.
According to Terrence Jeffery (2012), 79% of eighth graders attending the city’s schools are “not proficient in reading”. This is in a school system, according to CPS.edu (2015), which is 45.6% Hispanic and 39.3% African American. Now, let’s compare this to a middle school in my community, Hillcrest Middle, which is comprised of 63% white students. Predominately white Hillcrest Middle has a proficiency rate of 74%, which is unsettling when compared to the 79% of children in the Chicago school system that are NOT proficient in reading. It is hard to pinpoint the best way to fix this, but it is not hard to discern reasons that at-risk communities struggle to shorten the achievement gap. Below is a picture from a Chicago projects building, Cabrini Green, where fencing was installed on the balcony to stop people from throwing others off of the edge.
This is just an example of the difference between what these kids have to worry about outside of school, compared to the drastically different and often trivial worries experienced by white, suburban children. These differences in lifestyles ultimately affect their classroom performances, furthering the distance in the racial achievement gap.
The racial achievement gap is a very real and dangerous problem facing our country. Not only does it harm the minorities it directly effects, it also harms everyone, as whole generations of people are being raised without adequate educations. Without a good education, it is next to impossible to make sound contributions to society. Dr. Wilder (2016) summed up the problems with the racial achievement gap perfectly by saying, “The inequalities we see in the classroom reflect the inequalities we see in society.” And in 2016, there is no room for discriminations in either.
Works Cited
Achievement Gap Between White and Black Students Still Gaping. (n.d.). Retrieved May 21, 2016, from http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2016/01/13/achievement-gap-between-white-and-black-students-still-gaping
Bohrnstedt, G., Kitmitto, S., Ogut, B., Sherman, D., and Chan, D. (2015). School Composition and the Black–White Achievement Gap (NCES 2015–018). U.S. Department of Education, Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics. Retrieved [date] from http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch
CPS Stats and Facts . (n.d.). Retrieved May 21, 2016, from http://cps.edu/About_CPS/At-a-glance/Pages/Stats_and_facts.aspx
Hillcrest Middle in Simpsonville, South Carolina. (n.d.). Retrieved May 21, 2016, from http://public-schools.startclass.com/l/79938/Hillcrest-Middle
Kozol, J. (2005). The shame of the nation: The restoration of apartheid schooling in America. New York: Crown.
U.S. Department of Education: 79% of Chicago 8th Graders Not Proficient in Reading. (2012). Retrieved May 21, 2016, from http://cnsnews.com/news/article/us-department-education-79-chicago-8th-graders-not-proficient-reading
Wilder, P. (2016, May 16). Racial Achievement Gap. Lecture presented in Online Class.
