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Drafting from "Educational inequality in the United States"

K-12

Education at the K-12 level is important in setting students up for future success. However, in the United States there are persisting inequalities in elementary, junior high, and high school that lead to many detrimental effects for low-income students of color.

One indicator of inequality is that Black children are more likely to be placed in special education. Teachers are disproportionately identifying African American students for developmental disorders: Black students "are about 16% of the school-age population yet are 26% and 34% of children receiving services under the SED [serious emotional disturbances] and MMR [mild mental retardation] developmental delay categories."^[1] On the other hand, ADHD in Black children is more likely to go undiagnosed, and as a result, these students are often punished more severely than white students who have been recognized as having ADHD.^[2] One study shows that Black students with undiagnosed ADHD are seen as disruptive and taken out of class, reducing their learning opportunities and increasing the chances they will end up in prison.^[2]

More evidence of inequality is that allocation of resources and quality of instruction are much worse for African American, Native American, and Latino students when compared to their white counterparts.^[3] An analysis by the Stanford University School of Education found that there is a high concentration of minority students in schools that are given fewer resources like books, laboratories, and computers. In addition, these schools often have larger student to teacher ratios and instructors with less qualifications and experience. Teachers who are unqualified and inexperienced are less likely to adapt to different learning methods and fail to implement higher-order learning strategies that constitute quality education.^[3] Students who are placed in gifted education often receive better instruction; it was discovered that Black children were 54% less likely to be placed in one of these programs and "were three times more likely to be referred for the programs if their teacher was black rather than white."^[4]

According to multiple studies, African American students are disadvantaged from the very beginning of elementary school.^[5] One survey reported that they have very high aspirations (much higher when compared to the white students) but usually face negative schooling experiences that discourage them.^[6] These disparities carry over into higher education and explain much of why many choose not to pursue a degree.^[6]

Higher education

Higher education encompasses undergraduate and postgraduate schooling and usually results in obtaining a higher-paying job.^[7] Not only do Black and Hispanic people have less access to universities, they face many inequities while they attend and while applying to postgraduate programs. For most of history, Black Americans were not admitted into these institutions and were generally dissuaded from pursuing higher education.^[8] Even though certain laws have been enacted to make access to higher education more equal, the numbers today still illustrate that racial inequalities prevent completely equal access.^[8]

One study says that the social environment of universities makes African Americans feel more isolated and less connected to the school. They observed that "African American students at White institutions have higher attrition rates, lower grade point averages, lower satisfactory relationships with faculty, lower enrollment into postgraduate programs, and greater dissatisfaction."^[5] Additionally, many researchers have studied stereotype threat which is the idea that negative perceptions of race can lead to underperformance.^[9] One of these experiments done at Stanford tested a group of African Americans and a group of white students with the same measured ability; African Americans did worse when the test was presented as a measure of their intellect and matched performance of their white peers when they were told the test did not reflect intellectual ability.^[10]

Other studies have been conducted to analyze the different majors that students choose and how these majors hold up in the job market. After analyzing data from 2005-2009, they saw that African Americans were less likely to major in a STEM-related field, which has a higher return on investment than the liberal arts.^[7] A 2018 study yielded similar results: white students are twice as likely to major in engineering than Black students, with Hispanic students also being underrepresented.^[11]

In regards to postgraduate study, Black students are less likely to be accepted into such programs after college.^[5] One possible reason is because they aren't being recruited for doctoral programs and are looked less favorably upon if they received a degree from an HBCU (historically black colleges and universities).^[5]

Race

Race is often a big contributor to inequalities in education, and it can explain the widening achievement and discipline gaps between white students and students of color. Implicit bias and stereotyping perpetuate systemic injustices and lead to unequal opportunities.^[12]

Race influences teachers' expectations and in turn, influences achievement results. A 2016 study showed that non-Black teachers had much lower expectations of Black students than Black teachers who evaluated the same student. White teachers were 12% less likely to think the student would graduate from high school and 30% less likely to think they would graduate from college.^[13] Previous studies have proved the importance of teachers' expectations: students whose teachers believe they are capable of high achievement tend to do better (Pygmalion effect).^[14] In another study, they saw that white teachers were more likely to give constructive feedback on essays if they believed the student who wrote it was white. The essays perceived to be written by Black or Latino students were given more praise and less pointers on how to improve their writing.^[15] One reason for this lack of quality feedback could be that teachers don't want to appear racist so they grade Black students more easily; this is actually detrimental and can lead to lower achievement over time.^[16]

One research study done to look at how implicit bias affects students of color found that white teachers who gave lessons to Black students had greater anxiety and delivered less clear lectures. They played recordings of these lectures to non-Blacks students who performed just as badly, proving that it wasn't a result of the students' ability but rather implicit bias in the teachers.^[17]

Minority students often don't have equal access to high-quality teachers which can be an indication for how well a student will perform.^[18] However, there has been conflicting research on how large the effect truly is; some claim having a high-quality teacher is the biggest predictor of academic success^[19] while another study says that inequalities are largely caused by other factors.^[18]

Neighborhood effects

One study done in Chicago placed African Americans students in public housing in the suburbs as opposed to in the city. The schools in the suburbs generally received more funding and had mostly white students attending. Students who attended these schools “were substantially more likely to have the opportunity to take challenging courses, receive additional academic help, graduate on time, attend college, and secure good jobs.”^[3]

Parental involvement and engagement

Parental involvement is when schools give advice to parents on what they can do to help their children while parental engagement is when schools listen to parents on how better they can teach their students; parental involvement has been shown to work well but engagement works even better.^[20] Researchers have found that high-achieving African American students are more likely to have parents who tutor them at home, provide additional practice problems, and keep in touch with school personnel.^[21]

There is evidence that African American parents do value education for their child, but may not be as involved in schools because they face hostility from teachers when they give their input.^[22] Lack of involvement can also be due to social class and socioeconomic status: working-class African American parents tend to have less access to "human, financial, social, and cultural resources."^[23] They also tend to be more confrontational toward school personnel compared to the middle-class African American parents who usually have the ability to choose what school and what class their child is enrolled in.^[24]

Surveys conducted on parental involvement in low-income families showed that more than 97% of the parents said they wanted to help their children at home and wanted to work with the teachers. However, they were more likely to agree with the statements "I have little to do with my children's success in school," "Working parents do not have time to be involved in school activities," and "I do not have enough training to help make school decisions."^[25] A case study of Clark Elementary in the Pacific Northwest showed that teachers involved parents more after understanding the challenges that the parents faced, such as being a non-native English speaker or being unemployed.^[26]

School funding

Research in 2018 has concluded from a longitudinal study that "a 21.7% increase in per-pupil spending throughout all 12 school-age years was enough to eliminate the education attainment gap between children from low-income and non-poor families and to raise graduation rates for low-income children by 20 percentage points."^[27]

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Need for Revision of "Educational inequality in the United States"

1. Restructuring: There are no subsections with further development of the main points in this article. In addition, the existing sections do not have a flow to them and seem very unconnected. We are going to restructure the page to better bridge the information and provide a more organized overview. Here is our new outline, and I have also added scholarly sources to the bolded sections I will be working on:
   1. History
   2. Inequalities in different educational stages
      1. K-12
         1. Gardner, Ralph, and Antoinette Halsell Miranda. "Improving Outcomes for Urban African American Students." The Journal of Negro Education 70, no. 4 (2001): 255-63. Accessed September 25, 2020. doi:10.2307/3211278.
         2. Moody, Myles. "From Under-Diagnoses to Over-Representation: Black Children, ADHD, and the School-To-Prison Pipeline." Journal of African American Studies 20, no. 2 (2016): 152-63. Accessed September 25, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44508173.
      2. Higher education
         1. Clewell, Beatriz Chu, and Bernice Taylor Anderson. "African Americans in Higher Education: An Issue of Access." Humboldt Journal of Social Relations 21, no. 2 (1995): 55-79. Accessed September 25, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23263010.
         2. Erastus Karanja, and Nathan Austin. "What Are African Americans Doing in College? A Review of the Undergraduate Degrees Awarded by U.S. Institutions to African Americans: 2005–2009." The Journal of Negro Education 83, no. 4 (2014): 530-48. Accessed September 25, 2020. doi:10.7709/jnegroeducation.83.4.0530.
         3. Hayes, DeMarquis, Michael Cunningham, and Jacques Courseault. "Race Related Barriers for African American Males Pursuing Higher Education: Implications for Psychology." Race, Gender & Class 13, no. 1/2 (2006): 124-32. Accessed September 25, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41675226.
         4. Smith, William A., Jeremy D. Franklin, and Man Hung. "The Impact of Racial Microaggressions Across Educational Attainment for African Americans." Journal of Minority Achievement, Creativity, and Leadership 1, no. 1 (2020): 70-93. Accessed September 25, 2020. doi:10.5325/minoachicrealead.1.1.0070.
   3. Factors contributing to inequalities
      1. Race
         1. Allison, Clinton B. "African-Americans and Education: Do Schools Reproduce Racial Bias in America?" Counterpoints 6 (1995): 133-59. Accessed September 25, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42974989.
         2. Lofton, R. “The Duplicity of Equality: An Analysis of Academic Placement in a Racially Diverse School and a Black Community.” Teachers College Record 121, no. 3 (2019): 48.
         3. Hanselman, Paul. “Access to Effective Teachers and Economic and Racial Disparities in Opportunities to Learn.” The Sociological Quarterly 60, no. 3 (2019): 498–534. https://doi.org/10.1080/00380253.2019.1625732.
            1. White supremacy in curriculum
      2. Socioeconomic status
         1. Rouse, Cecilia Elena. "Low-Income Students and College Attendance: An Exploration of Income Expectations." Social Science Quarterly 85, no. 5 (2004): 1299-317. Accessed September 25, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42955997.
         2. Thomson, S. Achievement at school and socioeconomic background—an educational perspective. npj Science Learn 3, 5 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-018-0022-0.
      3. Private vs. public education
      4. Language barriers
   4. Educational inequalities
      1. Achievement gap
      2. Summer learning gap
      3. Discipline gap
      4. Prison pipeline
   5. Potential Solutions
      1. Early intervention
      2. Parental involvement
         1. Archer-Banks, Diane A. M., and Linda S. Behar-Horenstein. "African American Parental Involvement in Their Children's Middle School Experiences." The Journal of Negro Education 77, no. 2 (2008): 143-56. Accessed September 25, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25608677.
         2. Bradley, Carla, Phillip Johnson, Glenda Rawls, and Arlana Dodson-Sims. "School Counselors Collaborating with African American Parents." Professional School Counseling 8, no. 5 (2005): 424-27. Accessed September 25, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42732484.
         3. Slaughter-Defoe, Diana T. "Parental Education Choice: Some African American Dilemmas." The Journal of Negro Education 60, no. 3 (1991): 354-60. Accessed September 25, 2020. doi:10.2307/2295488.
      3. School funding
         1. Mintrom, Michael. "Why Efforts to Equalize School Funding Have Failed: Towards a Positive Theory." Political Research Quarterly 46, no. 4 (1993): 847-62. Accessed September 25, 2020. doi:10.2307/448934.
         2. Payne, Kevin J., and Bruce J. Biddle. "Poor School Funding, Child Poverty, and Mathematics Achievement." Educational Researcher 28, no. 6 (1999): 4-13. Accessed September 25, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1177291.
         3. Waldron, John. "Education and Equality: The Battle for School Funding Reform." Human Rights 24, no. 3 (1997): 10-17. Accessed September 25, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27880049.
      4. Charter schools
      5. School discipline reform
2. Expansion: There is not enough information about how race influences unequal educational opportunities. Therefore, we hope to expand this article to include more topics that are race-specific, since it is one of the biggest factors of educational inequality in the United States. I am specifically focusing on including more information about the factors that cause these inequalities in the first place.
3. Notability: In general, representation on Wikipedia for African Americans and other POC is scarce. This specific topic lacks that same representation. To get the full picture of the United States education system, we cannot leave out how racism has affected millions and millions of children. We must confront all the factors for why this has been and continues to be a problem. We hope that in adding more information, we can expand knowledge and hopefully work to fix injustices in the system.