The Color of Education in America
Uploaded by mvallido on Mar 03, 2013
The Color of Education in America
In his essay “Still Separate, Still Unequal,” Jonathan Kozol gives us a very detailed presentation of the emergent trend of racial segregation within America’s urban and inner-city schools. Kozol provides substantiation to his claim based on his research and observations of different school environments, its teachers and students, and personal interviews with them. It is very clear that color of education in America is not green like the dollar bill; it is white if you’re rich and brown if you’re poor. What’s more atrocious is how the government of the people gives more educational benefits to the rich and less to the poor.
I cringed when I look at the statistics Kozol provided; this claim of segregation becomes an eye-opener to tax payers and the people who elected our government officials. Based on the data he provided, the vast “majority of enrollment in most of the public schools in our major cities is black or Hispanic: 79% in Chicago, 94% in Washington, D.C., 82% in Saint Louis, 96% in Detroit, 84% in Los Angeles, up to 95% in New York”, to name a few(Colombo 220). One would think that maybe this is happening in Alabama or Mississippi but not in New York, Illinois, Michigan and Los Angeles. It is more discouraging to hear from black teachers that if you happen to be in a major city and would like to see the segregation in action, just look for a school named after Martin Luther King Jr. or Rosa Parks. And on top of that according to Kozol’s research, Caucasian children living in the public school districts that enroll blacks and Hispanics as majority will often opt-out of attending that particular school and instead enroll in a predominately white school.
Kozol also argued that students of the minority basically are limited in what they can achieve from a very young age because of financial status. He states that wealthy individuals are able to educate their toddlers in very extensive programs before they even enter kindergarten. By the time the students are expected to take “high-stakes tests” in 3rd grade, these wealthy students have had far more education than minority students who are expected to take the same standard exams. He is right on target when he mentioned that money makes the difference of whether or not a parent can afford to send their child...