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Education inequality theory
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An essay on education and inequality
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Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own Proves Students Need Schools of Their Own According to the Children’s Defense Fund, in 1989 an average of 1,375 children dropped out of school every day. As a future educator, my reaction to this figure is one of horror and disbelief. Once I get past the shock of such a figure and the obligatory rhetorical questions: How could we let this happen?, I become an investigator. I begin to look for patterns in the profiles of students who have failed. I consider the curriculum these students ingest and how it is fed to them. I try to understand what circumstances result in the forsaking of 1,375 students per day. As a nation, we have established institutions of learning that cater to the needs of some. Our schools allow a select handful of students to succeed. Certain segments of our population appear to be at greater risk than others. The future does not bode well for young black and Latino men and women who do not make it through high school. According to Duane Campbell, author of Choosing Democracy, the unemployment rate for Latino men and women is substantially higher than the national average and an African American child is as likely to go to prison as to college (15). According to the Economic Policy Institute, in 1991 43% of African American children and 35% of Latino children were living in poverty. It is not surprising that a vast number of the 501,875 annual school drop-outs come from impoverished black and Latino families. Of course it is not only blacks and Latinos who are lost in the educational shuffle. There are hordes of students who simply do not fit into the traditional public school paradigm. Whether this poor fit is the result of an unorthodox learning style, an emotional disability or a need for a higher level of teacher involvement, these students are often failed. Such students may stay in school, but they receive a sub-standard education. Virginia Woolf, in her essay "A Room of One’s Own" makes a strong case for schools which cater to the needs of students who are failed by our existing system. I did not see the connection between "A Room of One’s Own" and education upon my first reading of the essay, as a matter of fact the idea came to me as I read Woolf’s essay "The Common Reader.
Furthermore, Chapter 15 begins to explain educational inequality. In the United States, education is available but not to every child in the same way. Different social-classes means different schools, instructions, criteria, rates, and times. In addition to class differences, races and ethnics unfortunately play a role in educational achievement. For example, in general, African Americans, Latino/a’s, and Native Americans usually do worse in school than white or Asian American students
The essay “Still Separate, Still Unequal”, by Jonathan Kozol, discusses the reality of inner-city public school systems, and the isolation and segregation of inequality that students are subjected to; as a result, to receive an education. Throughout the essay, Kozol proves evidence of the inequality that African American and Hispanic children face in the current school systems.
“More than 3,000 youngsters will drop out will drop out today and every day for the rest of the school year, until about 600,000 are lost by June. One in four will pass through the correctional system, and at least two or three of those will be dropouts.” (Barber pg. 209) In Benjamin Barber’s essay, “Americans Skip School,” the American Educational Systems underlying problems are revealed and expose society’s ignorance to the importance of receiving an education. Statistics display the quantity of students in America that drop out of school and become criminals, nonetheless Americans continue to sidestep the issue. How can we expect students to listen to their teachers when they lack guidance and encouragement from their parents? Skewed moral
1. According to Pizarro, “Chicanas and Chicanos face the highest dropout rates of any major ethnic group in the United States- as many as half of a given cohort of Chicana and Chicano students does not complete high school- and their relative educational outcomes have been stable or have worsened over time.” (Pizarro, 1).
In chapter two of A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf introduces the reader to the uncomfortable conditions existing between men and women during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Woolf’s character, Mary Beton, surveys books about women at the British Museum and discovers that nearly all of them are written by men. What’s more, the books that she does find express negative sentiments about women, leading Beton to believe that men are expressing “anger that had gone underground and mixed itself with all kinds of other emotions” (32). She links this repressed anger to man’s need to feel superior over women, and, wondering how and why men have cause to be angry with the female sex, she has every right to be angry with men.
Achieving the best education is a rewarding accomplishment for many students, especially for minority groups. It allows the individuals to pursue careers they love and be financially secure. But not everyone has been able to receive the best education possible . Throughout history Chicanos had to face inequality in the education system. They have been segregated, tracked, and denied culturally relevant programs. These problems have driven Mexican American student to fight for education rights with protests and lawsuits. Even though Chicanos have continued to struggle for many years, no progress has been made in the American education system. To this day, Chicanos continue to struggle with inequality in the education system such as the concerns with the increase dropout rates of no English speakers.
In one of the article of Baltimore Sun that entitled “Time for the feds to raise the cigarette tax”, it informs us about the government activity on the taxation of cigarettes and how it benefits Maryland by saving lives of smokers, as it’s stated that more than 70,000 lives has been saved due to the lower smoking rates. Maryland has collected revenue of nearly $400 million from tobacco and alcohol. Between the period of 1998 and 2009 there has been a decline in adult smoking rates by 32.6 percent. The congressional budget office have come into conclusion that hike in the tax of cigarettes from $1.01 to $1.51 per pack would help trim costs to Medicare, also there would be a decline in death rates and improve health, this would therefore make the citizens of the US live longer and paying taxes longer. It’s a possibility that tobacco companies are to make a riot, by making statements such as tax revenue is not the dependable source of revenue, and increasing tax will only inspire smuggling. If poor people are the ones who’ll quit the habit of smoking, so much better for them as they’ll benefit a better quality of life, but there will be a raise in the cost of Social security as there are healthier individuals who are likely to live longer, and hat would result in more retirees.
United States. ERIC Development Team. Latino High School Leaving: Some Practical Solutions. By Harriett D Romo. Charleston: ERIC, 1998. Print.
These groups need to work together to develop a statewide agenda. Hispanic students, according to some studies, lag behind other students in classroom performance; have the highest dropout rate of any ethnic group in the country; and, according to federal data, are less likely to pursue higher learning(Tucson ’66). We as a society, need to have a school system that prepares our students for higher education if that is their choice. Society needs to work together to change the educational process for Latino students. Consider these numbers, which we drew from As A Relook at Tucson ’66 states” Minority groups are being shortchanged by more than 20...
For decades, the United States educational system has provided opportunity for millions of Americans to attend school. However, the gap between the lower income and middle-class students continue to narrow in terms of who will drop out and who would succeed. The articles I chose speak both of issues regarding education and inequality and the growing gap of educational success between the haves and the have nots. In addition, how race and lower class play a large factor on those who succeed and those who do not.The articles also bring to life possible factors such as funding towards a child’s education, in particular the early years, parent involvement and race.
Michael Oher was from an all-black neighborhood located in the third poorest zip code in the country. By the time he was a sophomore, he’d been to 11 different schools, he couldn’t read or write, and he had a GPA of 0.6. In his first-grade year alone, he missed 41 days of school and ended up repeating both the first and the second grade; he didn’t even go to the third grade. Oher was one of the thousands of children that have been identified as having four or more of the at-risk factors mentioned by the National Center of Education and Statistics (NCES). According to the NCES, poverty and race are high on the list of things that negatively affect students’ ability to succeed at school. Other risk factors include changing schools multiple times and being held back from one or more grades. Oher’s biography, The Blind Side by Michael Lewis, proves how socioeconomic status impacts a child’s academic success because placed in perspective, education is not as important as the hardships of reality.
Low-income and minority students are the individuals and groups that are the most negatively affected by the United States educational failure. The number of Hispanic students in the United States is expected to grow 33 percent by 2020 and the number of multi-racial students are expected to grow 44 percent, however their educational future does not look bright. Historically, minorities are the most likely to be impoverished. Dozens of policies have been drafted and implemented in order to fix this problem, however the solutions have not worked, since at least 50 percent of elementary school students are now attending schools where the majority of students are low income and minority. The high poverty, educational environment the students are in leads to less high school graduation and college attendance, thus in turn will lead to a large population that will burden the United States economy later on in areas such as healthcare and welfare.
The use and abuse of animals in a circus has gone on far too long. When you know what they do with the animals
. . . African American, Latino/a, and Native American students score less well on standardized tests. [Achievement] gaps persist in additional levels of achievement, such as grades and class rank. . . . In addition, African American students are more likely to be placed in special education classes and, once placed, are less likely to be mainstreamed or returned to regular classes (Davis, 96).
...trated in the inner city where the worst, most impoverished schools are located. Therefore, even if they wish to attend school, they still receive have less access to good teachers and a good learning environment. And perhaps the most detrimental issue that minorities face is that they are often stigmatized as inferior. This causes them to be treated differently and it causes them to have low expectations for themselves, which leads to poor performance.