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Education Inequality in America
Education Inequality in America
Education Inequality in America
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Recommended: Education Inequality in America
Reflecting back on my educational journey thus far, the most meaningful material I have studied was regarding the overall lack of access and barriers to education. Specifically, Dr. Kathy Nakagawa’s Justice Studies course, JUS 365 – Inequality/Diversity in Education, provided a compelling glimpse of the intersectionality of race, class, and gender as contributing factors for both successful and unsatisfactory educational outcomes, at various levels of schooling. To be sure, my personal aspirations to become a community college professor deeply inspire me to explore the process of learning from multiple perspectives. Additionally, as I progressed through this course, I found myself identifying with several of the concepts due to the personal challenges I have faced in my primary and secondary education experiences. Indeed, my parents were teenagers when I was born; I was raised by a single mother and I did not know my biological …show more content…
Thus, my family structure was officially part of the low-socioeconomic status throughout my childhood and adolescence. Subsequently, many of the obstacles I personally endured were explained by the theories we covered in this course. Remarkably, I have been able to overcome these challenges and I am about to graduate with two undergraduate degrees and summa cum laude honors. Albeit, I am an older student and it took me twenty years to achieve this opportunity to fully dedicate myself to academics. I am extremely proud of my accomplishments thus far, especially my acceptance to ASU Law, my membership in Phi Kappa Phi, and my perfect GPA. Indeed, my journey has been long, with several starts/stops in between. And yet, the kindness of my scholarship donors, coupled with my perseverance and dedication to academics, has brought me to the last leg of this phenomenal quest for
As Pollock states, “Equity efforts treat all young people as equally and infinitely valuable” (202). This book has made me realize that first and foremost: We must get to know each of our students on a personal level. Every student has been shaped by their own personal life experiences. We must take this into consideration for all situations. In life, I have learned that there is a reason why people act the way that they do. When people seem to have a “chip on their shoulder”, they have usually faced many hardships in life. “The goal of all such questions is deeper learning about real, respected lives: to encourage educators to learn more about (and build on) young people’s experiences in various communities, to consider their own such experiences, to avoid any premature assumptions about a young person’s “cultural practices,” and to consider their own reactions to young people as extremely consequential.” (3995) was also another excerpt from the book that was extremely powerful for me. Everyone wants to be heard and understood. I feel that I owe it to each of my students to know their stories and help them navigate through the hard times. On the other hand, even though a student seems like he/she has it all together, I shouldn’t just assume that they do. I must be sure that these students are receiving the attention and tools needed to succeed,
In the essay “Achievement of Desire”, author Richard Rodriguez, describes the story of our common experience such as growing up, leaving home, receiving an education, and joining the world. As a child, Rodriguez lived the life of an average teenager raised in the stereotypical student coming from a working class family. With the exception, Rodriguez was always top of his class, and he always spent time reading books or studying rather than spending time with his family or friends. This approach makes Rodriguez stand out as an exceptional student, but with time he becomes an outsider at home and in school. Rodriguez describes himself as a “scholarship boy” meaning that because of the scholarships and grants that he was receiving to attend school; there was much more of an expectation for him to acquire the best grades and the highest scores. Rodriguez suggests that the common college student struggles the way he did because when a student begins college, they forget “the life [they] enjoyed
Success. Society tends to correlate “success” with the obtainment of a higher education. But what leads to a higher education? What many are reluctant to admit is that the American dream has fallen. Class division has become nearly impossible to repair. From educations such as Stanford, Harvard, and UCLA to vocational, adult programs, and community, pertaining to one education solely relies on one’s social class. Social class surreptitiously defines your “success”, the hidden curriculum of what your socioeconomic education teaches you to stay with in that social class.
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.
When I was born, my family had just migrated to California from Mexico. In a new country, my father worked in landscaping earning less than $4 dollars an hour, while my mother relied on public transportation to take her newborn child to and from doctor visits. In the land of opportunity, my family struggled to put a roof over our heads. But never discouraged, my parents sought to achieve their goals and worked tirelessly to raise my younger brother and I. From a young age, I was taught the importance of education; this became a major catalyst in my life. My desire to excel academically was not for self-gain, but my way of contributing to my family’s goals and aspirations.
Having a family of low socioeconomic status inevitably leaves me to reside in a low-income neighborhood which makes it more likely for me to witness the tragedies, adversities and hardships that people go through [not excluding myself]. Being conscious of this kind of environment, and these kinds of events, creates a pressure on me for having the aim to achieve social mobility in order to escape the aforementioned environment so that my own children could witness one less abominable aspect of life. Moreover, my family’s low socioeconomic status does not authorize me the privilege of being raised with the concerted cultivation method that kids of high socioeconomic status are more prone to being raised in. My family did not have the financial resources that granted us access to extra classes or lessons of instrumental classes, swimming practices, karate practices, or any other extracurricular activities that people of high socioeconomic status would be able to afford. This invisible fence that prevents me from these extracurricular activities enables me to having more appreciation towards the hobbies and talents that other people have. Plus, the fact that my family’s low socioeconomic status acts as a barrier from enjoying expensive luxuries in life creates a yearning [in me] to enjoy them later on in my life, in addition to acting as the fuel to my wish of achieving social mobility in anticipation of providing my own children with the luxurious vacations, gadgets, beachhouse, new cars that I could not
Higher education is not easy to achieve. Many obstacles barricade the path to a college degree. These obstacles are referred to as barriers. Barriers can be cultural, academic, systemic, or personal obstructions that impede success. In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks' provides a personal account of the institutional barriers faced while pursuing higher education, just as Rendón did in From the Barrio to the Academy. Douglas Massey et al. discussed how the theories of capital deficiency, stereotype threat, and critical theory serve as barriers in The Source of the River. Derald Wing Sue's barrier of micro-aggressions is discussed in
In America, the idea of equality between people is important, it is in fact, written into the Constitution. However, for years the American educational system has operated in a completely inequitable manner due, in part, to the way that schools are funded, mostly through local or property taxes. The differences between schools in wealthy neighborhoods and those in poor neighborhoods are, many times, reminiscent of the differences between white schools and black schools before the end of segregation. While there is a desperate need to fix this broken system, there has been little progress. The issue is so divisive and the problem so big and entrenched in American laws, many politicians refuse to even attempt to come up with a solution. The answer lies with the federal government. To make American public schools equitable the federal government needs to step up its role in funding and administering the schools.
The education reform movement is made up of voices that disproportionately are not of comprised of the very races, ethnicities, and cultures it attempts to serve. Recently, I read an article directly addressing this issue and acknowledging the calls to diversify by African American education leaders including Kaya Henderson, chancellor of the DC public schools and Howard Fuller, Marquette professor. Fuller stated, “The people who are being liberated must be a critical part of their own liberation.” This statement made me reflect on my own experiences as a researcher and advocate within education reform.
Develop an argument on or some ideas of understanding about curriculum as multicultural text by relating the works of Darling-Hammond, French, & Garcia-Lopez, Delpit, Duarte & Smith, Greene, Nieto and Sletter to your experience of curriculum, teaching, and learning as affirming diversity. You could think specifically about the following questions: Is there a need for diversity in curriculum studies and designs? Why? What measures do you think will be effective in incorporating such a need into curriculum studies and designs? What is the relevance of diversity to your career goal, to education in your family, community, and school, to education in Georgia, and to education in general? In which way can you develop a curriculum which helps cultivate empathy, compassion, passion, and hope for citizens of the world, and which fosters social justice?
Education plays a key role in determining how one navigates adulthood. It is more likely for young students who perform well in the classroom to further their education as they grow older and to potentially live more fulfilling lives because of it. As a teacher it will be my responsibility to give all students what they need to be successful in school. Equity does not mean all students are treated exactly the same; it means every student has the same opportunity to achieve at the highest level he or she can reach. I do not believe equity in the classroom can be achieved by following a set of definitive rules. Instead, it takes a multifactorial approach including aspects of learning, teaching, and classroom interactions. As a teacher, my goal
To me, equality of opportunity in public education is where every single person deserves and is entitled to an equal chance to obtain a good education, grow and make positive progress throughout their time in school, and be successful in reaching their full potential later in life. These people should be treated identically, not differently due to their gender, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status.
I am the product of divorced parents, poverty stricken environments, and a blended family, but I refuse to let that dictate the outcome of my life. At the age of ten, I had to assume the role of a fatherly figure to my three siblings, so I missed out on the typical childhood most would have had. I grew up in neighborhoods where gangs and criminal acts of violence were a pervasive occurrence, but I resiliently did not allow the peer pressures of others to force me to conform to their way of life. By the age of 15, I received my worker 's permit, and that allowed me the ability to help my mother financially in the absence of my father’s income. I worked the maximum amount of hours I could while balancing my academics and extracurricular school activities. I was a scholar athlete and triathlete in high school, and although I continuously faced much adversity, I still managed to be accepted to the University of California State, Bakersfield after I graduated from high school in 2005. Sadly, after
Through out this course we have learned how the lives that we live and the person we are is impacted by a number of dimensions. These dimensions include the economy, discrimination, lack of resources and the availability to good education. These dimensions hold a lot of weight in our lives and most of them we have no control over. For some people unfortunately, they innately inherit certain disadvantages ranging from where their family comes to the color of their skin or even the neighborhood they were born into. Those factors are uncontrollable and yet still deeply effect the quality of their life. Not only do these factors have an impact on us as children they have a presence over us all the way into adulthood.
This class showed me how inequality is the base of education, if it’s not about gender it’s about class or race, making it hard for a person that falls under this description to have an equal chance, yet our society train us to believe that education can change