Abstract

Paige Ross ’21

Project Title: Educational Inequality: How We Systematically Fail Our Children
Mentor: John Durst

Poor urban youth of color are left behind every step of the way- beginning with education. We are failing these children by not providing them with the necessary tools to be successful today in America. Our social classes and neighborhoods are racially segregated, causing disparities in school funding, due to government legislature that further advances these forgotten children deeper into disparity.

Whites are 1.8-2.3 times more likely to graduate from college, and this push for higher education begins in pre-K programs unavailable to historically non-White impoverished neighborhoods. The issue of educational inequality always comes back to that of systematically oppressive governmental policies. School funding is based off of property tax, reproducing the uneducated and well educated areas of the United States. Economically, the separation between races achievements is due to their educational resources available as children in the public system. Men with similar levels of prior educational achievement, the gap in annual earnings is at least two-fifths smaller than black-white gaps for men as a whole. This economic factor becomes a cultural factor, as one’s socioeconomic factor dictates your life chances and opportunities in this world. Due to low economic standing, these oppressed people often turn to crime to support themselves and their families. This high level of crime affects the children’s schooling by diminishing the property value, thus lowering the governmental funding, and making the area more dangerous- opening up gang violence to children, and pushing good teachers away from working in a more crime-heavy district. Therefore the impoverished and dangerous areas reproduced by the government’s racist economic policies of school funding is hurting these children both mentally, possibly physically, and definitely hinders their future social mobility. We must change the government policy on how our schools are funded, at least attempting to level the playing field for these forgotten children.