Ancillary 7: The Educational Achievement Gap

The Seattle area prides itself on being a liberal, and accepting city. When I learned that its schools had one of the widest white-black achievement gaps in the country I was taken aback to say the least. I grew up north of Seattle, north enough to consider Seattle my home city and home base, but also north enough to not experience what living within the city truly entailed. Marysville School District, the district I grew up in, clearly saw a disparity in its achievement between students of color, and the appearance of the neighborhoods that would attend each high school. I do know that the most successful high schools in the district have the largest majority of white students, it is also clear that the neighborhoods that feed into Marysville Getchell are much nicer than those of Marysville Pilchuck. Marysville Pilchuck notably ranks less successfully, and earned a particularly bad reputation by many after a horrible shooting occurred. That effectively drew the community closer together, while simultaneously segregating it, and informing harmful stereotypes. The worst performing school of Heritage has a majority of Native American students, and a minority of white students, and includes a very low achievement rate. While researching the issue most information came from Marysville holding an announcement congratulating certain schools on their job well done in my opinion for doing the bare minimum to help these disparities. A real lack of addression, but I did discover that over the past 10 years the Tulalip Tribes and Marysville have been meeting and working to increase students of color achievement, and to increase inclusion and diversity. But I am curious to know what has truly been done, the Seattle School District discussed more massively implementing funds and resources into the more low income neighborhoods to even the playing field for students of color. But clearly this was not without pushback from white parents. Should Marysville implement this tactic? I do not see much support for furthering the careers of students in Marysville, and the students that reach higher education usually do so through the privilege of having outside support from family, friends, and extra resources achieved through connections. Overall I think that resources should be better allocated, and currently not enough emphasis is being put on the education and futures of kids in Marysville school district, and specifically for students of color. Along with an implementation of better education of the diversity of the community, and how schools can foster a better and more inclusive environment for students of color.