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Inequality In Public Schools

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All of these things considered, we have a major social problem on our hands: the inequalities among and within our public schools, and the major disadvantage this places on minority and low-income groups. In order to accurately suggest a policy to repair the cracks in our system, it is important to first understand the issues more in-depth.

As Storer et al. poignantly state in “Moving Beyond Dichotomies…”, “…class, race and place are intricately bound to one another and a singular focus on any of these factors is an insufficient explanation for educational outcomes” (18-19). In other words, race, class, and location affect each other, and combined, they all play a crucial part in education. As an initial example, Storer et al. point to the …show more content…
government, equal education is not a constitutional right. This was shown in the Board of Education of San Antonio vs. Rodriguez case, when a group of majority Mexican-American families took a case to the courts due to their frustration with their state’s unequal school funding system, which inevitably gave their children deteriorating school buildings and an inferior education (Connell, “Public Education”). Since this case in 1973, a plethora of similar cases have been heard, all of them receiving different results. However, they have all brought to light the issue of unequal educations in our country. As Connell writes, “The US Government Accounting Office issued a report on per-pupil expenditures between high-wealth and low-wealth school districts, in February 1997. The public school funding systems of 43 states drive more per-pupil money to affluent rather than low-income communities” (“Public Education”). Funding is not the only inequality within public school, however; significant differences within schooling itself serve as a great factor in the education-class divide. Connell discusses how lower class 3rd graders are filling out boring worksheets and completing meaningless problems, while middle class white 3rd graders type their own books on their family computers (“Public Education”). This significant difference in teaching mechanisms results in a severed education among peers, who should be receiving the same education across their grade levels. This all adds up and comes to a detrimental result in high school. “No matter how different urban education officials ‘cook the books,’ about one-third of their entering high school classes never graduate. And those who do graduate enter a competitive job market where high school degrees and even two years of community college doom them to low-skilled jobs with

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