PA 597-V05 Final Report: Establishing an education system that addresses race and income inequality

PA 597-V05 Final Report: Establishing an education system that addresses race and income inequality
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Establishing an education system that addresses race and income inequality
Introduction
Inequity, inequality, prejudice, discrimination, disparities, and bias are some critical concepts that permeate most public and scholarly discussions. The education system has not been spared from the ills of inequality and iniquity, occasioned by various variables such as race, ethnicity, place of origin, education, socio-economic class, and income inequalities, among many other factors. The education sectors have been under intense impact caused by race disparities, or ethnicity and income inequality. There is a systemic war on efforts geared towards efforts that nurture education equality, evidenced by attacks and criticism in affirmative policy actions that create more equal communities regarding education opportunities. Some sections of the privileged class feel that affirmative actions that salvage the minority communities are an unfair phenomenon, yet the victims of brutal discrimination feel that step would protect them and enhance the probabilities of enjoying education opportunities like the rest of the dominant groups.
Controversies and contestations appear to emerge when the issue of equal access to opportunities through specific action arises. The concept of success among Asian communities in educations and other aspects of life, including business, has brought more questions than answers to the debate concerning inequalities in education systems. Why do Asian communities, as a minority group, excel in education and business? Is success in education and income earnings result from hard work, genes, or lack of effort? These are issues that need further interrogation if the issue of implementing affirmative action needs consideration. However, the contemporary theories attempt to answer these questions by illustrating the racism and ensuing inequality should not be looked at from personalized or individualized viewpoints. Instead, it should be interpreted as systemic issues that even the visitor often do not have control over.
Much of the discussion surrounding unequal access is centered on the reality that education outcomes among minority children represent systemic unequal access to education resources, including instructors, teachers, and quality of educational content and delivery, often defined and influenced by race. There is a general perception that the dominant race often received better education due to increased access to diverse resources. Theories such as critical race theory (CRT) and critical social analysis of concepts can help understand inequalities complexities and act as a blueprint in developing key strategies.
Income inequality is perceived as the other fundamental driving force behind the education access inequalities. More often, economic class impacts accessibility to education resources. Those who are doing well economically would often find it easier to access more education opportunities, and even the level and type of knowledge and skills they get is much better than the poor economic class. However, in our contemporary societies, economic inequality is widening such that the gaps between the poor and rich are alarming. The situation is far worse than anticipated when we considered that few individuals own wealth to feed and educate millions of people who cannot do so. The evident manifestations of our current societies of expanding economic inequality are reflected in widening education performance, and achievement gaps between the children at the higher economic echelons and the children belong to the low economics class or the poor.
Purpose of this Project
The project's goal is to provide an in-depth understanding of how economic and racial disparities influence education access. This project will explore options of addressing education inequalities occasion by race and income upon this comprehensiveness overview of inequality's underlying dynamics. The study intends to purses various solutions as guided by various theoretical frameworks. Rising income inequality and persistent racism constitute fundamental challenges that U.S citizens in all communities grapple with within their life. Over the last decades, there have been widening income disparities between the wealthy and the poor. Income inequality is becoming a primary concern for many as more people cannot afford quality education, access quality healthcare services, and even adequately feed themselves.
The education system that is often perceived as a potent equalizer is already losing its sense of equality. More wealthy people enjoy better education propensity and profile than their poor counterparts. The U.S education is marred with various intricate and interconnecting challenges that derail the principle of equality and equity, manifested by vast differences among poor, minority races, and that wealthier and dominant white community. To fully understand the relationship between education inequality and race and income inequality, the U.S Department of Education provides the various facts to support this postulation. First, performance variations are nurtured during the early years of a student's education progress and ultimately tend to narrow in the subsequent years. This observation means that students often fail to recover from the burden of inequalities occasioned by race, ethnicity, or poverty. Countrywide, white students' graduation rate is about to 86% compared to approximately 69 % among black students and 73 % among Hispanic learners, and 97% of students in low-income families depend on their learning institutions for internet access, yet most of the schools do not have high-speed Internet (Governing.com). Upon this blatant discrimination, this study explores ways of navigating and adapting to the currents education inequalities occasioned by racism and income disparities. The efforts of the presidential administration or state cannot provide equal education to all students. As a result, this proposal favors a combination of grass-roots approaches, federal policies, and state regulations as fundamental strategies in addressing racial and income equality in education.
The Concept of Race and Economic influence on Education Disparities
Race is one of the fundamental predictors of educational inequalities. Evidence suggests that the ‐ school patterns functions to maintain and perpetuate racial inequality in education. This phenomenon happens when teachers and administrators tend to hold lower academic expectations for learners of color and participate in racially biased patterns, deploy alienating curricula, and fail to manage racially related issues in meaningful ways when they arise (Alvaré, 2018). Critical race theory (CRT) postulates that racism is deeply embedded in society, and racism within schools is not an anomaly, but it appears that educational schools surreptitiously maintain and reconfigure White supremacy in various approaches. Racial and ethnic stereotyping is deep-rooted in history, where among other things, the dangerous Black male stereotype is relevant to school discipline today. Although integration in the light of Brown v. Board of Education was aimed at taming stereotype and prejudice, re-segregation has culminated into minimal true integration. Thus, the old phenomenon of racially-inspired inequality constitutes reinforced ongoing processes comprising implicit bias, micro-aggression, and colorblindness (Carter et al., 2017).
O' Day and Smith (2016) argued that disparities and inequalities within the educational system are due to the institutional structures and cultures that disenfranchise learners and suppress overall learning quality.  Education is a product of quality teachers, appropriate class sizes, and the availability of educational resources. However, the inequalities in education have a more profound negative impact on poorer schools due to deeply rooted racial inequality and unequal access to education. The racial inequities reflect unequal opportunities around education achievements. The embedded racial inequalities are manifested and implemented via systematic policies, practices, and stereotyping of the minority communities' children. The genesis of these education disparities must be understood to chart a projector for addressing such inequalities. The concept of race does not impact education systems in isolation, but it also influences how resources such as incomes ad infrastructural developments are distributed, which affects education in various ways.
The concept of education inequality is embedded in the labyrinth of race, affiliations, and other socio-economic factors. It is such an extensive topic that includes segregation in terms of housing and schooling. Educational opportunities have relationships with housing where segregations pitting against neighborhoods lead to segregated schools, which, in turn, produce unequal education Orfield, (2013). Segregation in public and private divestment with a critical focus on high-poverty neighborhoods, especially the aspect of people of color, is not residential choice's product, but it is an embodiment of decades representing discriminatory practices and policies (Orfield, 2013).
The race is one of the core forces underpinning education inequalities in the U.S. According to Marchand et al. (2019), there are positive outcomes when there are parents who get to engage in school activities, but more often, black parents are unwelcomed or feel unwelcome in school precincts. Thus, black parents may appear uncaring towards their children's educational progress. The observations of poor engagements of black parents regarding their children programs in schools as aggravated by perceived sidelined and racial differences lead to education inequalities possible marked by poor cadmic performances.
Despite the arguments that education is a substantial equalizer, these beliefs have not been actualized in the U.S school system, as evidenced by remarkable disparities and discriminative practices. The existing realities show that education has failed to achieve the goal of being a great equalize that bridges the gap between the poor and the rich, the privilege and the less privileged, the whites and people of color, well served underserved, among other binary or dichotomous groupings. However, this paper is not suggesting that education achievement are unessential towards future success, but it is trying to illustrate that the current evidence shows that despite various education reforms that attempt to rectify inequalities, it appears that educational achievement is anchored on and reflects parents education status, access to pre-schooling, childhood nutrition, and health, poverty, and segregation (O'Day, & Smith (2016).
O' Day and Smith painted an interesting conversation where they argue that equality among children existent at the time of birth. After that, it disappears as soon as societal institutions and structures set in. When children are born, they tend to express limitless possibilities, with equality genetic predispositions to learning, social enterprise, language, and hold the futuristic times of the society. However, more often, the ensuing failure occurs among these children when they grow due to social challenges, breakdowns, and denial of opportunities and resources based on socio-economic class, gender, place of origin, locality, ethnicity, and race. Thus, the potential to grow and exploit the full potential of an individual, a learner, or a child is often limited and constrained by endemic beliefs, policies, and social structure (O' Day, & Smith, 2016). Even the most well‐intentioned schools and teachers are influenced by historical and contemporary racist ideas and beliefs about Black students and their families (Milner, 2011), and educators' deficient views can keep schools from being "the great equalizer". Particular categories of children appear to get exposed to more adverse environments than others, being marked by underserved learners who grow in abject poverty and racially disseminated minorities. Over 16 million children in the U.S. are living in poverty with about 20 % of all children and 25 % under the age of five, and 40 % of poor children live in "extreme poverty"; these statistics are largely confounded by race, as children of color are twofold to be poorer than white children (O'Day, & Smith, 2016). It can be safely concluded that the external condition under which children live has far-reaching implications for their education. Residential and racial segregation, poverty levels, parental education levels, and inadequate social support tend to influence the children's schooling progress and achievement, thereby becoming critical predictors of adult earnings and civic participation. In this equation, education is a key intervening variable.
One of the resounding factors in education inequalities s revolves around the concept of access to education resources. Unequal resource access constitutes the primary underlying factor being growth education disparities. There resource-related gaps in education emanate from intricate and intertwining interactions between various factors, including race, place of origin, political and religious affiliations, ethnicity, poverty, neighborhoods, and economic imbalances. The minority races, people of color and underserved populations are exposed to instruction unit, which is deficient in various aspects. An instructional unit comprises teachers, content, and student interactions (O'Day, & Smith, 2016). When examining the resourcefulness of the education system, the fundamental elements that are looked at include teachers or instructors, learners, and content. More often, learners, especially poor children, experience their learning processes and activities in crowded classrooms. Such overcrowding reflects residential and segregationists policing regarding the student placements. In 2011&nda...