Education Is The Root Of Inequality In America

Throughout the semester we have talked about the concept of community. Communities are more than just neighborhoods and cities. Communities are the social environment people grow up in interact throughout their everyday life. Communities have norms and procedures that transcend normal thinking. In the USA alone, there are multiple communities in multiple States and regions. In INT, we have talked about socio economic communities, racial communities, and even gender base communities. However, the problem in America, is that these communities are divided so heavily. So as we move forward with our education, a question arises. What do we do now? Do we allow communities to say so segregated, or do we try to change them? For society to survive and flourish, it needs a healthy community and happy citizens. Equality is key. Segregation and inequality directly go against this notion. I propose, for a stronger community and better living conditions, we as a society need to unite. Race, socio economics, and gender should not define a person's place in society. If America wants a true community that is prosperous for all, equality should be our main focus.

     Will Durant, a businessman and the founder of General Motors, once said, “Education is the transmission of civilization.” Unfortunately, education is still one of the most deliberated and controversial issues in the United States. Thus far, the privilege or right to receive education has not attained the level of equality throughout the nation; poor districts obtain less educational funding while rich districts obtain more, creating an immense gap between the quality of schools in poor and rich areas.

When one thinks of the word “inequality”, some things that come to mind are racial inequality, gender inequality, economic inequality, marriage inequality, or social inequality. These inequalities have evolved into movements and revolutions, making strides for future generations to live in a nation that supports them. However, when it comes to making strides for our future generations to be successful, the same statement cannot be made. This is due to the fact that our nation and government aren’t concerned with the welfare and success of our present generation. One inequality that hasn’t delivered a sense of urgency to be tackled by our nation, and specifically our city of New York, is Education Inequality. Horace Mann, “The Father of American

What grade would America receive for our education system? America would probably get a D because we cannot provide everyone with the same quality education as other public schools, private, and charter schools. Education is important in all countries especially in America, but there is so much educational inequality that everyone does not get an equal opportunity at a good education. This can be due to the location and income of families that can determine how successful they are going to be in school. The government has attempted to increase graduation rates by implementing new laws and standards that have actually in time proven to be unsuccessful. This essay is going to highlight the educational inequality in America,

In recent years, the term intersectionality has taken the foregrounds in understanding how differences such as age, gender, race, sexuality, disability, and religion, etc., interweave and intersect upon individual lives in modern society (Beck 1992). Intersectionality has become a demonstration as to understand, employ, and analyze with difference in which difference itself becomes a feature of otherness. Intersectionality is important to understand and realize because it is a dynamic that changes through different spaces and for different people; which works on a micro and macro level. In this paper, the goal is to explore the different views of inequality for individual’s education in the United States and show how intersectionality plays a vital role in understanding those differences that perpetuate education inequality, stratification, and social reproduction.

Fiscal policy is the public policy domain that I am most interested in. But education policy is a strong secondary interest of mine, and recently, with the school closings in Detroit and Philadelphia and persistent problems in public education, I find urban policy to be extremely important. Additionally, as a conservative, seeing the increasing income inequality, in terms of solutions, I would like to analyze the deep root of the problem in lieu of a solution that I believe only scratches the surface such as increasing taxes on top earners. I do not think this will solve this issue because there is a disparity between the top 1% of earners and the top 1% of wealth owners and there is no real wealth tax. Wealth is what creates inequality in opportunity. Strengthening equal opportunity through K-12 education is where I would start looking answers.

Education is the foreground to success in modern society. The quality of education and the amount of education one receives is a large determinant in the financial wellbeing of individuals. Studying the inequalities found in the American educational system is essential because it uncovers how social stratifications, inequalities, and social constructions of race, class, gender, and sexuality are created as well as reinforced. Although many of the notions about races, classes, genders, and sexualities have been created outside of the school, it is in the educational system that children are presented with the social constructions of race, class, and gender that dominate our society.

Furthermore, my research in education inequality will encompass not only supreme court rulings such as "Separate but Equal" it will also include other supreme court rulings such as the 1954's court ruling "Brown vs Topeka," declaring segregation unconstitutional, Jim Crow laws and even two-year college purpose or impact on segregation will also be studied. Concepts whit a hidden meaning will be under my research. For example, "differentiation" or "tracking" those concepts used in the public education jargon only perpetuate segregation; those concepts mean nothing but segregation. Furthermore, I will include educational reforms such as 2001, "No Child Left Behind," and I will make research on theories which are not educational theories but it could be helpful to understand and advocate for education inequality such as "Neoclassic Human Capital theory," and "Social Capital."

In the 21st Century everything is digitized, from emails to the education system. This trend is especially prevalent in Marin County, where the median income is $90,535, nearly double that of the national median income. The elementary schools in the county teach their students to use websites like StudyIsland™ and TypingPal™ to help students learn, study, and excel in the ever evolving technological world. This trend follows in the middle and high school curriculum. With a culture so embedded in technology as a result of the assumption of wealth and access, the district, faculties, and students have grown accustomed to amenities only a minority of people have access to. Certainly, this isn’t the case as there are students who are economically

conditions. This problem was "solved" with the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of

Building wealth becomes increasingly unmanageable without steady employment, but the unemployment rate for people of color has been consistently twice that white people, regardless of the fluctuations in the economy. An education is a way to help you achieve that goal. However, the rate for unemployment for blacks with college degrees is twice as high to be unemployed than all other graduates, according to The American Non-Dilemma: Racial Inequality Without Racism, a book published by Nancy DiTomaso, a professor of sociology, at Rutgers University who lectures inequality and organizational diversity. This is because applications with white-sounding names have a fifty percent chance higher than black sounding names to get callbacks, even when the resume does not change. Previous to the business opportunities, a person must obtain an education.

When talking about the relationship between education and social inequality, particularly economic inequality, we can find that education or educational inequality is one of the reason why economic inequality occurs, however, economic inequality causes new educational unfairness in reverse. As mentioned above, gaokao is likened to a dumuqiao or “single-log bridge” (Kipnis, 2001, p.483) as it has the monopoly power to determine whether students from different social origins can get opportunities for higher education. Most importantly, it trigged the rise of merit-based selection, and made the university you graduated from become one of the merits to value (Liu, 2016). In order to cultivate graduates “who can respond to the needs of the economy” (Cockain, 2016, p.314) and revitalize the nation, China has realized “211 Project”, “985 Project”, and even developed world-class research institutions in the 21st century. However, name of these projects and universities become graduates’ labels and enterprises’ filter criteria when recruiting employees, and graduates from prestigious institutions will get much higher starting salary than the ones from common colleges. In the context of China’s reform and ensuring rapid growth in economy, more education means “greater computational skills, more extensive knowledge of geography, more accurate identification of historical events and figures, wider acquaintance with authors and works of literature” (Rong & Shi,

Duncan and Murnane argue that economic and educational inequality greatly affects children’s educational and developmental outcomes in Restoring Opportunity: The crisis of inequality and the challenge for American education. Duncan and Murnane point out that since the 1970s, there has been a shift in technology and globalization. This makes receiving a K-12 education more important for life skills than it has been in the past. Since the 1970’s, globalization and computerization have decreased blue-collar jobs and enhanced the job market. Despite this, there is still an issue of students attending and paying for college, and this problem is continuing to grow. Because of the increasing demand and cost for a college degree, receiving a good K-12 education is becoming more essential, especially for low-income students. The gaps between academic performance of students from a low-income families and students from high-income families are larger today than they have been in the past and are continuing to grow. Access to higher education and resources for learning have greatly widened between income

The discussion of race, literacy, and power is one that dates back centuries ago from slavery to the present. Within the conservation, education has been a vital topic because of the countless injustices weaved into the American education system overtime by those who have the power to manipulate it. Generations ago, individuals of color were given little to no education at all because the white the prevalent supremacy which openly controlled our government and ultimately the country at the time deemed it fit. Even today, the conversation inequality in our education system takes place in classrooms, where students discuss the roots of the educational barriers placed on students of color; city government, were school districts are creating programs dedicated to seeing students of color succeed; to our national congress, who is constantly pressed with propositions to advance the education system to better suit the nation’s diversity and technological growth. Two scholars, Thomas Holt and Sherman Alexie, have forwarded this discussion in their their papers describing the oppression forced on individuals of color who wanted access to education. In his paper “Knowledge Is Power: The Black Struggle for Literacy,” Holt uses his knowledge of economy, politics, and society after slavery to produced an academic work illuminating the Black American plight to equal education against the white dominated country of America in the 1800’s. On the other hand, Alexie uses his experiences of

There are a lot of problems already mentioned in tertiary education of developing and transition countries but inequalities in many forms are very persistent and evident in developing and transition countries. We feel these inequalities being included in the developing countries. Some of those inequalities are the following: