Jonathan Kozol

Jonathan Kozol documents this in his article Hitting Them Hardest When They’re Small after working with students in New York City public schools. Kozol found that while a substantial amount of white students still attended NYC public schools, that over 400 doctors were employed to serve their students. Years, and a substantial decline in white enrollment later resulted in a cut that left only 23 doctors to serve the increasingly minority and poor NYC public school students. “Political leaders in New York tended to point to shifting economic factors... rather than to the changing racial demographics of the student population, as the explanation for these steep declines in services.” (Kozol, 263) Trends like this can be found for a host of services

This is as such because they both determine exactly what institutions one will have access to and the quality of the services provided by those institutions. This would not be as bad if race and class didn’t effect mostly every institution in the country but unfortunately it does. In Racial Formation, Omni and Winant define race as “a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and intersects by referring to different types of human bodies.” (Omni, 212) Most Americans hold beliefs about others based solely on their race, and by extension, their class. Being of a specific race or class has different implications. People with black bodies are not treated the same way as their fairer skinned counterparts. The same is true for those with and without money A lack of services such as that of the doctors would not be allowed to happen if the student body in NYC public schools had been largely white or more affluent. Omni and Winant would posit that that is the case for various reasons. The assumed and lived dominance of whites in America is the root cause for this. “The centuries of racial dictatorship have had three very large consequences: first, they defined “American” identity as white, as the negation of racialized ‘otherness’...in both law and custom... public institutions and... cultural representations. It was the successor of the to the conquest as the “master”

In Charter Schools: A welcome Choice for Parents, author Jason Richwine talks about the benefits of charter schools. Charter schools function like independent schools in that they are operated with little governmental oversight yet they still receive public funds. The lax in oversight allows charter schools to experiment with new pedagogical approaches and disciplinary practice which is something most public schools are not able to do. Many of these schools boast smaller class sizes and safer environments for their students. Given their increased popularity, many charters are in fact forced to hold lotteries in order to see who can gain admittance. In the short article, Richwine suggests that parental satisfaction is the