School SegregationEssay Preview: School SegregationReport this essayIn today’s society, we now know integration in almost every aspect of schooling has a positive effect on students. This is what prompted the Supreme Court’s decision to desegregate schools back in 1954. This concept is meant to be more than just seating black, whites, and Latinos next to each other in classrooms, it is not solely about race. Often schools are also segregated by where these students live based on parents salaries. Minorities attending racially isolated schools leads to inadequate educational opportunities and are held to a lower curriculum level. Due to this, they tend to have lower rates of academic achievement compared to students in middle-class schools. Many studies have shown a significant increase in both education and occupational achievements, quality of secondary education, salary earned later and reduce likely hood of incarceration among African American students. Integration actually is beneficial to middle-income and white students providing situations that improve critical thinking skills and better prepare students to move into our multicultural world they will face as they become adults. Segregation of schools only leads to a huge achievement gap in students.
It is seen that in schools with the biggest disadvantages of African American children are segregated due to school zoning based on high-poverty neighborhoods. Nationally, in more aspects then just education, African American and Hispanic students are 3 times (35% and 34.5%, respectively) as likely as White students (12.5%) to be born into poverty, have less adequate access to health care, and tend to attend schools with inadequate physical facilities, and less highly qualified and trained teachers. (Carter 2016) The outcome from this is negative for these minority students because they are not only segregated from white students but also not given the chance to be exposed to students in the middle-class, believed to alter academic success.
[Updated] – From The Atlantic:
“The report by the Commission is not a complete accounting. It also takes pains to point out that it contains the impression that, because of its political correctness, the Department of Education has consistently failed to address or correct the very serious problem of black school segregation.”
[Updated] – From The Nation:
“There are two categories of schools affected: racially segregated and unprivileged.”
[Updated] – From The Times: “…If I was a teacher at a suburban high school, I would never say there are too many children from disadvantaged backgrounds. And you are never going to find a child from a class with a black male friend, not even from a race that’s just as rare as your own… This can be a situation that I find hard to understand.”
[Updated] – From The Nation:
“I did know that my children didn’t need to be in a place where they would have a lot more opportunities to grow up than to go to a black school, but I didn’t know why some of my children felt there was no chance for success.”
[Updated] – From The Nation:
“Sixty percent of the black children that come onto a high-school curriculum today fall into this category. As an institution, we’re not giving them opportunities to go out to bars, strip club or anything else. We’re basically making them afraid of black culture and black culture, because that’s something that we’ve been fighting against throughout our history. And they’re afraid that some days white culture is going to take over, and those days are coming back with a vengeance. And the fact that they’re still so afraid of being taken advantage of by this culture, they have no way to think about it … it’s not that they don’t like it, it’s that they didn’t think of it, or maybe they wouldn’t have thought of it. And they need to accept that what they do is wrong and if they do this, those who put themselves in that position are simply not getting any better and they have no hope of being successful.”
[Updated] – From The Nation:
“The first thing anyone should do is recognize that the people we are focusing on when we talk about school segregation is not racism and this is not the way it should have been. In many ways it has just been the wrong kind of problem to fix and to get people out of schools. And yet at the same time, even teachers that work on issues of prejudice and discrimination say to me, ‘What have you got to lose; where have you got to go from here’? And if I’m a black teacher, that’s a very different story than to say things like ‘Look, I want you to know that I love you, so tell me you’re proud of it’. I think that we need to look at what makes that school more attractive for some of us who are