We Live in a World where Equality

Introduction

We live in a world where equality is far from being reached and where segregation is still present. In many circumstances equality is brushed past as if it does not matter anymore, at least that’s how the government makes it seem. The government clearly separates race and ethnicity with governmental laws, districts, schools, residential neighborhoods and there may be a chance that it is overlooked because the people simply just don’t know what is being done. For the ones who are knowledgeable (those a part of the Edbuild nonprofit organization), they know that those simple distinctions are still forms of segregation.

They also know how unjust and unfair it is to deprive those who are not white, of an equal opportunity to learn. While reading the article “White Students Get More K-12 Funding than Students of Color”, I found that exact thought and opinion is proven to be correct for the most part. There are facts showing where the government is separating race and living areas to determine who gets more school funding. As shown in the report, race and social class are combined when comparing the poverty level of racially fixed systems. I also read that wealthier school districts earn more local funding than poor school districts. It is said that school district budgets are tied to property taxes, which that is another reason how social norms deter the amount of funding that is given between the two racial backgrounds. Within both reports I read where there are three main sections that contribute to the difference in the money provided for each community and those sections are school demographics, the average enrollment, and finally the average revenue provided per student.

Executive Summary

The Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka was a critical point in history. In 1954 the Supreme Court case where the justices ruled collectively that segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional. Brown vs. Board of Education was one of the major turning points during the civil rights movement, and it helped establish the model, “separate-but-equal” education and other services were not, in fact, equal at all. However, still today truth is that the United States continues to provide a substantial amount of revenue to educate the children in the white communities. Even with attempts to distribute funding equally between the communities the United States is still in the same predicament it was nearly more than a half-century ago. Majority of the countries school students are still attending racial school systems. Studies show that 27% of students are enrolled in predominantly nonwhite districts and 26% of students are enrolled in predominantly white districts. They have linked race and class when they compared the poverty level of racial concentrated systems. It is shown that the white kids are better off than that of the nonwhite peers. Statistics show that 20% of the students in the United States are enrolled in districts that are both poor and nonwhite, whereas a little over 5% of the students live in white districts that are equally financially challenged.

Both articles show comparisons where there is a major difference in money value given to schools that are either predominantly white or nonwhite. That sum that was given was $23 billion. In the report the Edbuild nonprofit organization researches and dissects the issue. They provide facts after researching the topic further. One primary cause would be the “local control.” Local control is considered to be the government filling the gaps created by a concentration of wealth within invisible borders. The control of taxes is only beneficial for the privileged kids, the small white districts that are made up by irrational lines that can raise free money for their schools within their districts. Those districts could also be considered “district borders.” The borders are designed to exclude outside students and protect internal advantage. In other words the borders are created to keep the nonwhite families away from their areas so that the white families can benefit more. Another cause is the local taxes.

Narrative of the Report

The “White Students Get More K-12 Funding than Students of Color: Report” articles is about how predominately white school districts receive more funding than minority districts. Growing up in a county that had more whites than blacks, I understood the article better. Separate will always be unequal. But just how unequal is the education we offer our students of color today? This paper answers this question using one small but important measure per-pupil state and local spending. This fraction of spending is certainly not the only useful measure of educational opportunity. How we spend our money is perhaps more important. But newly released data give us the opportunity to shed new light, specifically on inequity in spending from state and local sources. For the first time ever, the U.S. Department of Education in 2009 collected school-level expenditure data that includes real teacher salaries. Amazingly, this had never been done before. I use these data to examine per-pupil spending in public schools, finding that: Students of color are being shortchanged across the country when compared to their white peers. Variation within a district is largely due to district budgeting policies that ignore how much money teachers actually earn. When veteran teachers elect to move to low-need schools in richer, whiter neighborhoods, they bring higher salaries to those schools. New teachers who tend to start out in high-need schools, serving many students of color and poor students, earn comparatively low salaries. This leads to significantly lower per-pupil spending in the schools with the highest concentrations of nonwhite students. To date, the size of the problem has been difficult to measure due to a lack of data. Other researchers have made important contributions to these conversations by documenting a pattern of underinvestment in minority students, but they have been hampered by a frustrating lack of information. In 2009 the Obama administration showed that it recognized the importance of this issue by including a requirement in the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009 that districts report actual state and local spending on school-level personnel and no personnel resources in school year 2008–09.

Conclusion

Although it is often blamed for the racial achievement gap, unequal school funding is largely a myth. Per-pupil spending in the U.S. is broadly similar across racial and ethnic groups. If any one group enjoys an advantage in funding, it is black students, especially in the Northeastern states. Group differences in school achievement cannot be the result of an unequal commitment of resources to minority students, and simple increases in public school funding are not likely to close the gaps."

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