unequal educational opportunities essay

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Effects of Social Stratification on Education: Striving for Equal Educational Opportunities

Table of contents, unequal access to educational opportunities, quality of education, curriculum and expectations, dropout rates and future opportunities, reinforcement of social inequalities, addressing educational inequalities.

• Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J. C. (1977). Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. Sage Publications.
• Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465-491.
• Reardon, S. F. (2011). The widening academic achievement gap between the rich and the poor: New evidence and possible explanations. In Whither Opportunity? Russell Sage Foundation.
• Rothstein, R., & Jacobsen, R. (2006). The widening academic achievement gap between the rich and the poor: New evidence and possible explanations. In Whither Opportunity? Russell Sage Foundation.
• Sirin, S. R. (2005). Socioeconomic status and academic achievement: A meta-analytic review of research. Review of Educational Research, 75(3), 417-453.

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Smedley BD, Stith AY, Colburn L, et al.; Institute of Medicine (US). The Right Thing to Do, The Smart Thing to Do: Enhancing Diversity in the Health Professions: Summary of the Symposium on Diversity in Health Professions in Honor of Herbert W.Nickens, M.D.. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 2001.

The Right Thing to Do, The Smart Thing to Do: Enhancing Diversity in the Health Professions: Summary of the Symposium on Diversity in Health Professions in Honor of Herbert W.Nickens, M.D..

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Inequality in Teaching and Schooling: How Opportunity Is Rationed to Students of Color in America

Linda Darling-Hammond

Stanford University School of Education

Despite the rhetoric of American equality, the school experiences of African-American and other “minority” students in the United States continue to be substantially separate and unequal. Few Americans realize that the U.S. educational system is one of the most unequal in the industrialized world, and that students routinely receive dramatically different learning opportunities based on their social status. In contrast to European and Asian nations that fund schools centrally and equally, the wealthiest 10% of school districts in the United States spend nearly 10 times more than the poorest 10%, and spending ratios of 3 to 1 are common within states. Poor and minority students are concentrated in the least well-funded schools, most of which are located in central cities or rural areas and funded at levels substantially below those of neighboring suburban districts. Recent analyses of data prepared for school finance cases in Alabama, New Jersey, New York, Louisiana, and Texas have found that on every tangible measure—from qualified teachers to curriculum offerings—schools serving greater numbers of students of color had significantly fewer resources than schools serving mostly white students.

Not only do funding systems allocate fewer resources to poor urban districts than to their suburban neighbors, but studies consistently show that, within these districts, schools with high concentrations of low-income and “minority” students receive fewer instructional resources than others in the same district. And tracking systems exacerbate these inequalities by segregating many low-income and minority students within schools (Kozol, 1991; Taylor & Piche, 1991). In combination, policies associated with school funding, resource allocations, and tracking leave minority students with fewer and lower-quality books, curriculum materials, laboratories, and computers; significantly larger class sizes; less qualified and experienced teachers; and less access to high-quality curriculum.

The end results of these educational inequalities are increasingly tragic. More than ever before in our nation's history, education is not only the ticket to economic success, but also to basic survival. Whereas a high school dropout had two chances out of three of getting a job 20 years ago, today he or she has less than one chance out of three, and the job he or she can get pays less than half of what would have been earned 20 years earlier (WT Grant Foundation, 1988). The effects of dropping out are much worse for young people of color than for whites. In 1993, a recent school dropout who was black had only a one in four chance of being employed, whereas the odds for his or her white counterpart were about 50% (NCES, 1995, p. 88). Even recent graduates from high school struggle to find jobs. Among African-American high school graduates not enrolled in college, only 42% were employed in 1993, as compared with 72% of white graduates. Those who do not succeed in school are becoming part of a growing underclass, cut off from productive engagement in society. In addition, working class young people and adults who were prepared for the disappearing jobs of the past teeter on the brink of downward social mobility.

Because the economy can no longer absorb many unskilled workers at decent wages, lack of education is increasingly linked to crime and welfare dependency. Women who have not finished high school are much more likely than others to be on welfare, while men are much more likely to be in prison. National investments in the last decade have tipped heavily toward incarceration rather than education. Nationwide, during the 1980s, federal, state, and local expenditures for corrections grew by over 900%, and for prosecution and legal services by more than 1000% (Miller, 1997), while prison populations more than doubled (U.S. Department of Commerce, 1996, p. 219). During the same decade, per pupil expenditures for schools grew by only about 26% in real dollar terms, and much less in cities (NCES, 1994). The situation is worse in some parts of the country. While schools in California have experienced continuous cutbacks over the last decade, the prison population there has increased by more than 300%.

In 1993, there were more African-American citizens on probation, in jail, in prison, or on parole (1,985,000) than there were in college (1,412,000) (U.S. Department of Commerce, table numbers 281 and 354, pp. 181 and 221). Increased incarceration, and its disproportionate effects upon the African-American community, are a function of new criminal justice policies and ongoing police discrimination (Miller, 1997) as well as lack of access to education. More than half the adult prison population has literacy skills below those required by the labor market (Barton & Coley, 1996), and nearly 40% of adjudicated juvenile delinquents have treatable learning disabilities that went undiagnosed in the schools (Gemignani, 1994).

Meanwhile, schools have changed slowly. Most are still organized to prepare only about 20% of their students for “thinking work” —those students who are tracked very early into gifted and talented, “advanced,” or honors courses. These opportunities are least available to African-American, Latino, and Native American students. As a consequence of structural inequalities in access to knowledge and resources, students from racial and ethnic “minority” groups in the United States face persistent and profound barriers to educational opportunity. As I describe below, schools that serve large numbers of students of color are least likely to offer the kind of curriculum and teaching needed to meet the new standards being enacted across the states and to help students attain the skills needed in a knowledge work economy. In most states, schools serving minority and low-income students lack the courses, materials, equipment, and qualified teachers that would give students access to the education they will need to participate in today's and tomorrow's world.

• CLOSING THE GAP: CHANGES IN EDUCATIONAL ACHIEVEMENT

While the demands for knowledge and skill are growing, the gap in educational opportunity between majority and minority students has been widening. Although overall educational attainment for black Americans increased steadily between 1960 and 1990, this trend is reversing in some states that have imposed graduation exams without improving opportunities to learn. By 1995, 74% of black Americans had completed four or more years of high school—up from only 20% in 1960. However, dropout rates have been increasing for black male students since 1994. Recent evidence from individual states like Texas, Florida, and Georgia where exit exams have been instituted indicates that dropout and pushout rates have increased substantially for African-American and Hispanic students during the 1990s (Haney, 1999).

On national assessments in reading, writing, mathematics, and science, minority students' performance lags behind that of white students, and the gap has widened in most areas during the 1990s. The situation in many urban school systems deteriorated throughout the 1980s and 1990s as drops in per pupil expenditures have accompanied tax cuts while immigration and enrollments have grown. Urban schools serve increased numbers of students who do not speak English as their native language and growing proportions requiring special educational services. These students are increasingly served by growing numbers of unqualified teachers who have been hired since the late 1980s.

In addition, many urban systems have focused their curricula more on rote learning of “basic” skills than on problem solving, thoughtful examination of serious texts and ideas, or assignments requiring frequent and extended writing (Cooper & Sherk, 1989; Darling-Hammond, 1997). As new tests in many states (and the National Assessment of Educational Progress, 1994) focus more on higher-order skills, problem solving, analytic and writing ability, they diverge from the lower-level skills taught in many texts and tested by widely used multiple choice examinations. Students whose education is guided mostly by workbooks compatible with basic skills tests find themselves at a growing disadvantage when they confront the more challenging expectations of new standards and the assessments that accompany them.

• INEQUALITY AND ACHIEVEMENT

The concentration of minority students in high-minority schools facilitates inequality. Nearly two-thirds of “minority” students attend predominantly minority schools, and one-third of black students attend intensely segregated schools (90% or more minority enrollment), most of which are in central cities (Schofield, 1991, p. 336). By 1993, 55% of all students in central city schools were black or Hispanic (National Center for Educational Statistics, NCES, 1995, p. 121). As Taylor and Piche (1991) noted:

Inequitable systems of school finance inflict disproportionate harm on minority and economically disadvantaged students. On an inter -state basis, such students are concentrated in states, primarily in the South, that have the lowest capacities to finance public education. On an intra -state basis, many of the states with the widest disparities in educational expenditures are large industrial states. In these states, many minorities and economically disadvantaged students are located in property-poor urban districts which fare the worst in educational expenditures. In addition, in several states economically disadvantaged students, white and black, are concentrated in rural districts which suffer from fiscal inequity (pp. xi–xii).

Not only do funding systems and tax policies leave most urban districts with fewer resources than their suburban neighbors, but schools with high concentrations of “minority” students receive fewer resources than other schools within these districts. And tracking systems exacerbate these inequalities by segregating many “minority” students within schools, allocating still fewer educational opportunities to them at the classroom level. In their review of resource allocation studies, MacPhail-Wilcox and King (1986) summarized the resulting situation as follows:

School expenditure levels correlate positively with student socioeconomic status and negatively with educational need when school size and grade level are controlled statistically…Teachers with higher salaries are concentrated in high-income and low-minority schools. Furthermore, pupil-teacher ratios are higher in schools with larger minority and low-income student populations… Educational units with higher proportions of low-income and minority students are allocated fewer fiscal and educational resources than are more affluent educational units, despite the probability that these students have substantially greater need for both (p. 425).

These inequalities are increasingly the subject of legal action. The State of New York provides a recent example. Studies have found that by virtually any resource measure—state and local dollars per pupil, student-teacher ratios and student-staff ratios, class sizes, teacher experience, and teacher qualifications— districts with greater proportions of poor and minority students receive fewer resources than others (Berne, 1995). In January 2001, the New York State Supreme Court declared the funding system unconstitutional because it denies students in high-need, low-spending districts like New York City the opportunities to learn needed to meet the state's standards, including well-qualified teachers and curriculum supports ( Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. State of New York ). A similar suit is now pending in the Superior Court of California ( Williams v. State of California ).

A critical problem is that shortages of funds make it difficult for urban and poor rural schools to compete in the marketplace for qualified teachers. When districts do not find qualified teachers, they assign the least able individuals to the students with the least political clout. In 1990, for example, the Los Angeles City School District was sued by students in predominantly minority schools because their schools were not only overcrowded and less well funded than other schools, they were also disproportionately staffed by inexperienced and unprepared teachers hired on emergency credentials ( Rodriguez et al. v. Los Angeles Unified School District, Superior Court of the County of Los Angeles #C611358. Consent decree filed August 12, 1992). In 1999, students in California's predominantly minority schools were 10 times more likely to have uncertified teachers than those in predominantly white schools (Shields et al., 1999).

A growing body of research suggests that inequitable distributions of qualified teachers are a major cause of the achievement gap. Recent studies have found that differential teacher effectiveness is an extremely strong determinant of differences in student learning, far outweighing the effects of differences in class size and heterogenity. Students who are assigned to several ineffective teachers in a row have significantly lower achievement gains—creating differences of as much as 50 percentile points over three years—than those who are assigned to several highly effective teachers in a row (Sanders & Rivers, 1996). These studies also find evidence of bias in assignment of students to teachers of different effectiveness levels, including indications that African American students are nearly twice as likely to be assigned to the most ineffective teachers and about half as likely to be assigned to the most effective teachers.

Analyzing a data set covering 900 Texas school districts, Ronald Ferguson (1991) found that the single most important measurable cause of increased student learning was teacher expertise, measured by teacher performance on a state certification exam, along with teacher experience and master's degrees. Together these variables accounted for about 40% of the measured variance in student test scores. Holding socioeconomic status (SES) constant, the wide variation in teachers' qualifications in Texas accounted for almost all of the variation in black and white students' test scores. That is, after controlling for SES, black students' achievement would have nearly equaled that of whites if they had been assigned equally qualified teachers.

Ferguson also found that class size, at the critical point of a teacher/student ratio of 1:18, was a statistically significant determinant of student outcomes (Ferguson, 1991), as was small school size. Other data also indicate that black students are more likely to attend large schools than white students (Paterson Institute, 1996), with much larger than average class sizes (NCES, 1997a, p. A-119), and confirm that smaller schools and classes make a difference for student achievement (for a review, see Darling-Hammond, 1997).

Ferguson repeated this analysis in Alabama, and still found sizable influences of teacher expertise and smaller class sizes on student achievement gains in reading and mathematics (Ferguson & Ladd, 1996). They found that 31% of the predicted difference in mathematics achievement between districts in the top and bottom quartiles was explained by teacher qualifications and class sizes, while 29.5% was explained by poverty, race, and parent education.

These findings are confirmed elsewhere. For example, in North Carolina, Strauss and Sawyer (1986) found a strong influence on average school district test performance of teachers' average scores on the National Teacher Examinations (NTE) measuring subject matter and teaching knowledge. After taking account of community wealth and other resources, teachers' test scores had a strikingly large effect on students' success on the state competency examinations: a 1% increase in teacher quality (as measured by NTE scores) was associated with a 3% to 5% decline in the percentage of students failing the exam. The authors' conclusion is similar to Ferguson's:

Cumulative effects of teacher effectiveness. Student test scores (5th grade math) by effectiveness level of teachers over a three-year period, for two metropolitan school systems. SOURCE: W.L.Sanders and J.C.Rivers. Cumulative and Residual Effects of (more...)

Of the inputs which are potentially policy-controllable (teacher quality, teacher numbers via the pupil-teacher ratio and capital stock) our analysis indicates quite clearly that improving the quality of teachers in the classroom will do more for students who are most educationally at risk, those prone to fail, than reducing the class size or improving the capital stock by any reasonable margin which would be available to policy makers (p. 47).

These findings are reinforced by a recent review of 60 production function studies, which found that teacher education, ability, and experience—along with small schools and lower teacher-pupil ratios—are associated with significant increases in student achievement (Greenwald, Hedges, & Laine, 1996). In this study's estimate of the achievement gains associated with expenditure increments, spending on teacher education swamped other variables as the most productive investment for schools.

Effects of educational investments: size of increase in student achievement for every $500 spent on: Achievement gains were calculated as standard deviation units on a range of achievement tests in the 60 studies reviewed.

• WHAT MATTERS IN TEACHING?

Unfortunately, policymakers have nearly always been willing to fill teaching vacancies by lowering standards so that people who have had little or no preparation for teaching can be hired, especially if their clients are minority and low-income students. Although this practice is often excused by the presumption that virtually anyone can figure out how to teach, research consistently shows that fully prepared and certified teachers—those with both subject matter knowledge and knowledge of teaching and learning—are more highly rated and more successful with students than teachers without full preparation (Druva & Anderson, 1983; Greenberg, 1983; Evertson, Hawley, & Zlotnik, 1985; Ashton & Crocker, 1986, 1987; Darling-Hammond, 1992). As Evertson and colleagues (1985) concluded:

(T)he available research suggests that among students who become teachers, those enrolled in formal preservice preparation programs are more likely to be effective than those who do not have such training. Moreover, almost all well planned and executed efforts within teacher preparation programs to teach students specific knowledge or skills seem to succeed, at least in the short run (p. 8).

A number of studies have found that teachers who enter the teaching profession without full preparation are less able to plan and redirect instruction to meet students' needs (and less aware of the need to do so), less skilled in implementing instruction, less able to anticipate students' knowledge and potential difficulties, and less likely to see it as their job to do so, often blaming students if their teaching is not successful (Bledsoe, Cox, & Burnham, 1967; Copley, 1974; Gomez & Grobe, 1990; Grossman, 1989; 1990; Bents & Bents, 1990; Rottenberg & Berliner, 1990;). Most important, their students learn at lower levels (See figure 3 ).

Effects on student achievement of teacher certification in mathematics. ANOVA results: *p < .01 **p < .001 SOURCE: P.Hawk, C.Coble, and M.Swanson. Certification: It Does Matter. Journal of Teacher Education, 36 (3) May–June 1985; (more...)

Teacher expertise and curriculum quality are interrelated, because expert teachers are a prerequisite for the successful implementation of challenging curriculum. Teachers who are well-prepared are better able to use teaching strategies that respond to students' needs and learning styles and that encourage higher-order learning (Peikes, 1967–1968; Skipper & Quantz, 1987; Hansen, 1988). Since the novel tasks required for problem solving are more difficult to manage than the routine tasks associated with rote learning, lack of knowledge about how to manage an active, inquiry-oriented classroom can lead teachers to turn to passive tactics that “dumb down” the curriculum, busying students with workbooks rather than complex tasks that require more skill to orchestrate (Carter & Doyle, 1987; Doyle, 1986; Cooper & Sherk, 1989). Teacher education is also related to the use of teaching strategies that encourage higher-order learning and the use of strategies responsive to students' needs and learning styles. Thus, policies that resolve shortages in poor districts by hiring unprepared teachers serve only to exacerbate the inequalities low-income and minority children experience.

Access to Good Teaching

In “Closing the Divide,” Robert Dreeben (1987) described the results of his study of reading instruction and outcomes for 300 black and white first graders across seven schools in the Chicago area. He found that differences in reading outcomes among students were almost entirely explained not by socioeconomic status or race, but by the quality of instruction the students received:

Our evidence shows that the level of learning responds strongly to the quality of instruction: having and using enough time, covering a substantial amount of rich curricular material, and matching instruction appropriately to the ability levels of groups…When black and white children of comparable ability experience the same instruction, they do about equally well, and this is true when the instruction is excellent in quality and when it is inadequate (p. 34).

However, the study also found that the quality of instruction received by African-American students was, on average, much lower than that received by white students, thus creating a racial gap in aggregate achievement at the end of first grade. In fact, the highest ability group in Dreeben's sample was in a school in a low-income, African-American neighborhood. These students, though, learned less during first grade than their lower-aptitude white counterparts because their teacher was unable to provide the quality instruction this talented group deserved.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has documented that the qualifications and training of students' teachers are among the correlates of reading achievement. Students of teachers who are fully certified, who have master's degrees, and who have had professional coursework in literature-based instruction do better on reading assessments. Furthermore, teachers who have had more professional coursework are more likely to use an approach that integrates literature and writing, which is associated with stronger achievement. For example, teachers with more staff development hours in reading are much more likely to use a wide variety of books, newspapers, and materials from other subject areas and to engage students in regular writing, all of which are associated with higher reading achievement. They are also less likely to use reading kits, basal readers, and workbooks which are associated with lower levels of reading achievement (NAEP, 1994).

Curricular differences like these are widespread, and they explain much of the disparity between the achievement of white and minority students and between those of higher- and lower-income levels (Oakes, 1985; Lee & Bryk, 1988). When students of similar backgrounds and initial achievement levels are exposed to more and less challenging curriculum material, those given the richer curriculum opportunities outperform those placed in less challenging classes (Alexander & McDill, 1976; Oakes, 1985; Gamoran & Behrends, 1987).

Most studies have estimated effects statistically based on natural occurrences of different tracking policies. However, one study that randomly assigned 7th grade “at-risk” students to remedial, average, and honors mathematics classes found that at the end of the year, the at-risk students who took the honors class offering a pre-algebra curriculum outperformed all other students of similar backgrounds (Peterson, 1989).

Another study of African-American high school youth randomly placed in public housing in the Chicago suburbs rather than in the city, found similar results. Compared to their comparable city-placed peers who were of equivalent income and initial academic attainment, the students who were enabled to attend largely white and better-funded suburban schools had better educational outcomes across many dimensions. They 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 (Kaufman & Rosenbaum, 1992).

These examples are drawn from carefully controlled studies that confirm what many other studies have suggested. Much of the difference in school achievement found between African-American students and others is due to the effects of substantially different school opportunities, and in particular, greatly disparate access to high-quality teachers and teaching (Barr & Dreeben, 1983; College Board, 1985; Dreeben & Gamoran, 1986; Dreeben & Barr, 1987; Oakes, 1990; Darling-Hammond & Snyder, 1992).

The Unequal Distribution Of Teachers

Minority and low-income students in urban settings are most likely to find themselves in classrooms staffed by inadequately prepared, inexperienced, and ill-qualified teachers because funding inequities, distributions of local power, labor market conditions, and dysfunctional hiring practices conspire to produce teacher shortages of which they bear the brunt. By every measure of qualifications, unqualified and underprepared teachers continue to be found disproportionately in schools serving greater numbers of low-income or minority students (NCES, 1997a). In 1994, just over 20% of newly hired public school teachers were hired without having met regular certification requirements (NCTAF, 1997). The vast majority of these teachers were assigned to the most disadvantaged schools in central city and poor rural school districts.

Districts with the greatest concentrations of poor children, minority children, and children of immigrants are also those where incoming teachers are least likely to have learned about up-to-date teaching methods or about how children grow, learn, and develop—and what to do if they are having difficulties. In addition, when faced with shortages, districts often hire substitutes, assign teachers outside their fields of qualification, expand class sizes, or cancel course offerings. These strategies are used most frequently in schools serving large numbers of minority students (NCES, 1997a; NCTAF, 1997). No matter what strategies are adopted, the quality of instruction suffers.

This situation is partly a function of real shortages, but it is also due to urban district hiring practices that are often cumbersome, poorly managed, insensitive to teacher qualifications, and delayed by seniority transfer rules and a variety of other self-inflicted procedures (National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, 1996). Furthermore, since many of the more expert, experienced teachers transfer to more desirable schools and districts when they are able, new teachers and those without training are typically given assignments in the most disadvantaged schools that offer the fewest supports (Wise, Darling-Hammond, & Berry, 1987; Murnane et al., 1991). Because they confront challenging assignments without mentoring or other help, attrition rates for new teachers, especially in cities, average 30% or more over the first five years of teaching (Grissmer & Kirby, 1987; Wise, Darling-Hammond, & Berry, 1987; NCES, 1997b).

This adds additional problems of staff instability to the already difficult circumstances in which central city youth attend school. Where these practices persist, many children in central city schools are taught by a parade of short-term substitute teachers, inexperienced teachers without support, and underqualified teachers who are not really familiar with either their subject matter or effective methods. The California Commission on the Teaching Profession (1985) concluded that disproportionate numbers of minority and poor students are taught throughout their entire school careers by the least qualified teachers. This sets up the school failure that society predicts for them.

Oakes' (1990) nationwide study of the distribution of mathematics and science opportunities confirmed these pervasive patterns. Based on teacher experience, certification status, preparation in the discipline, degrees, self-confidence, and teacher and principal perceptions of competence, it is clear that low-income and minority students have less contact with the best-qualified science and mathematics teachers. Students in high-minority schools have only a 50% chance of being taught by a math or science teacher who is certified at all, and an even lower chance of being taught by teachers who are fully qualified for their teaching assignment by virtue of the subject area(s) they are prepared to teach. Oakes concluded:

Our evidence lends considerable support to the argument that low-income, minority, and inner-city students have fewer opportunities…They have considerably less access to science and mathematics knowledge at school, fewer material resources, less-engaging learning activities in their classrooms, and less-qualified teachers… (p. x–xi).

Access to High-Quality Curriculum

In addition to being taught by teachers less qualified than those of their white and suburban counterparts, urban and minority students face dramatic differences in courses, curriculum materials, and equipment. Unequal access to high-level courses and challenging curriculum explains much of the difference in achievement between minority students and white students. For example, analyses of data from the High School and Beyond surveys demonstrate dramatic differences among students of various racial and ethnic groups in course taking in such areas as mathematics, science, and foreign languages (Pelavin & Kane, 1990). These data also demonstrate that for students of all racial and ethnic groups, course taking is strongly related to achievement. For students with similar course taking records, achievement test score differences by race or ethnicity narrow substantially (Jones, 1984; College Board, 1985, p. 38; Moore & Smith, 1985; Jones et al., 1986).

One source of inequality is the fact that high-minority schools are much less likely to offer advanced and college preparatory courses in mathematics and science than are schools that serve affluent and largely white populations of students (Matthews, 1984; Oakes, 1990). Schools serving predominantly minority and poor populations offer fewer advanced courses and more remedial courses in academic subjects, and they have smaller academic tracks and larger vocational programs (NCES, 1985; Rock et al., 1985). The size and rigor of college preparatory programs within schools vary with the race and socioeconomic status of school populations (California State Department of Education, 1984). As plaintiffs noted in the New Jersey school finance case, wealthy and predominantly white Montclair offers foreign languages at the preschool level, while poor and predominantly black Paterson does not offer any until high school— and then, relatively few. And while 20% of 11 th and 12 th graders in wealthy Moorestown participate in Advanced Placement courses, none are even offered in any school in poor and predominantly black Camden and East Orange (ETS, 1991, p. 9).

When high-minority, low-income schools offer any advanced or college preparatory courses, they offer them to only a very tiny fraction of students. Thus, at the high school level, African American, Hispanics, and Native Americans have traditionally been underrepresented in academic programs and overrepresented in general education or vocational education programs, where they receive fewer courses in areas such as English, mathematics, and science (College Board, 1985). Even among the college-bound, non-Asian minority students take fewer and less demanding mathematics, science, and foreign language courses (Pelavin & Kane, 1990).

The unavailability of teachers who could teach these upper-level courses, or who can successfully teach heterogeneous groups of students, reinforces these inequalities in access to high-quality curricula. Tracking persists in the face of growing evidence that it does not substantially benefit high achievers and tends to put low achievers at a serious disadvantage (Kulik & Kulik, 1982; Oakes, 1985; 1986; Slavin, 1990; Hoffer, 1992), in part because good teaching is a scarce resource, and thus must be allocated. Scarce resources tend to get allocated to the students whose parents, advocates, or representatives have the most political clout. This results, not entirely but disproportionately, in the most highly qualified teachers teaching the most enriched curricula to the most advantaged students. Evidence suggests that teachers themselves are tracked, with those judged to be the most competent, experienced, or with the highest status assigned to the top tracks (Rosenbaum, 1976; Finley, 1984; Davis, 1986; Oakes, 1986; Talbert, 1990; NCTAF, 1996).

Tracking in U.S. schools is much more extensive at much earlier grade levels than in most other countries. Starting in elementary schools with the designation of instructional groups and programs based on test scores and recommendations, it becomes highly formalized by junior high school. The result of this practice is that challenging curricula are rationed to a very small proportion of students, and far fewer of our students ever encounter the types of curricula that students in other countries typically experience (McKnight et al., 1987; Usiskin, 1987; Useem, 1990; Wheelock, 1992).

Although test scores and prior educational opportunities partially explain these differential placements, race and socioeconomic status play a distinct role. Even after test scores are controlled, race and socioeconomic status determine assignments to high school honors courses (Gamoran, 1992), as well as vocational and academic programs and more or less challenging courses within them (Useem, 1990; Oakes, 1992). This is true in part because of prior placements of students in upper tracks in earlier grades, in part due to counselors' views that they should advise students in ways that are “realistic” about their futures, and in part because of the greater effectiveness of parent interventions in tracking decisions for higher-SES students (Moore & Davenport, 1988).

From “gifted and talented” programs at the elementary level through advanced courses in secondary schools, teachers who are generally the most skilled offer rich, challenging curricula to select groups of students, based on the theory that only a few students can benefit from such curricula. Yet the distinguishing feature of such programs, particularly at the elementary level, is not their difficulty, but their quality. Students in these programs are given opportunities to integrate ideas across fields of study. They have opportunities to think, write, create, and develop projects. They are challenged to explore. Though virtually all students would benefit from being similarly challenged, the opportunity for this sort of schooling remains acutely restricted.

Meanwhile, students placed in lower tracks are exposed to a limited, rote-oriented curriculum and ultimately achieve less than students of similar aptitude who are placed in academic programs or untracked classes (Gamoran & Mare, 1989; Oakes, 1985, 1990; Gamoran, 1990). Teacher interaction with students in lower track classes is less motivating, less supportive, and less demanding of higher-order reasoning and responses (Good & Brophy, 1987). These interactions are also less academically oriented, and more likely to focus on behavioral criticisms, especially for minority students (Oakes, 1985; Eckstrom & Villegas, 1991). Presentations are less clear and less focused on higher-order cognitive goals (Oakes, 1985).

In addition, many studies have found that students placed in the lowest tracks or in remedial programs—disproportionately low-income and minority students—are most apt to experience instruction geared only to multiple-choice tests, working at a low cognitive level on test-oriented tasks that are profoundly disconnected from the skills they need to learn. Rarely are they given the opportunity to talk about what they know, to read real books, to write, or to construct and solve problems in mathematics, science, or other subjects (Oakes, 1985; Davis, 1986; Trimble & Sinclair, 1986; Cooper & Sherk, 1989).

• POLICY FOR EQUALITY: TOWARD EQUALIZATION OF EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITY

The common presumption about educational inequality is that it resides primarily in those students who come to school with inadequate capacities to benefit from what education the school has to offer. The fact that U.S. schools are structured such that students routinely receive dramatically unequal learning opportunities based on their race and social status is simply not widely recognized. If the academic outcomes for minority and low-income children are to change, reforms must alter the caliber and quantity of learning opportunities they encounter. These efforts must include equalization of financial resources, changes in curriculum and testing policies, and improvements in the supply of highly qualified teachers to all students.

Resource Equalization

Progress in equalizing resources to students will require attention to inequalities at all levels—between states, among districts, among schools within districts, and among students differentially placed in classrooms, courses, and tracks that offer substantially disparate opportunities to learn. As a consequence of systematic inequalities at each of these levels, minority and low-income students are frequently “at risk” not from their homes or family factors but from the major shortcomings of the schools they attend.

Special programs such as compensatory or bilingual education will never be effective at remedying underachievement as long as these services are layered on a system that so poorly educates minority and low-income children to begin with. The presumption that “the schools are fine, it's the children who need help” is flawed. The schools serving large concentrations of low-income and minority students are generally not fine, and many of their problems originate with district and state policies and practices that fund them inadequately, send them incompetent staff, require inordinate attention to arcane administrative requirements that fragment educational programs and drain resources from classrooms, and preclude the adoption of more promising curriculum and teaching strategies.

Current initiatives to create special labels and programs for “at-risk” children and youth—including mass summer school programs and mandatory Saturday classes for the hundreds of thousands of students who are threatened with grade retention under new promotion rules—are unlikely to succeed if they do not attend to the structural conditions of schools that place children at risk. In the pursuit of equity, our goal should be to develop strategies that improve the core practices of schooling rather than layering additional programs and regulations on foundations that are already faulty. The pressures to respond to special circumstances with special categorical programs are great, and the tradition of succumbing to those pressures in an add-on fashion is well established, in education as in other areas of national life. But special programs, with all their accoutrements of new rules and procedures, separate budgets, and fragmented, pull-out programs will be counterproductive as long as the status quo remains unchanged in more significant ways.

As the 1992 interim report of an independent commission on Chapter 1 observed: “Given the inequitable distribution of state and local resources, the current notion that Chapter 1 provides supplemental aid to disadvantaged children added to a level playing field is a fiction” (Commission on Chapter 1, 1992, p. 4). The Commission proposed that each state be held accountable for assuring comparability in “vital services” among all its districts as well as in all schools within each district. Among these vital services, perhaps the most important is highly qualified teachers, not just for specific Chapter 1 services but for all classrooms.

Ferguson's (1991) recommendation that equalization focus on district capacity to hire high-quality teachers is an important one. In addition to the weight of evidence indicating the central importance of qualified teachers to student learning, there is real-world experience with the positive effects on teacher quality and distribution of such policies. When Connecticut raised and equalized beginning teacher salaries under its 1986 Education Enhancement Act, shortages of teachers (including those that had plagued urban areas) evaporated. By 1989, most teaching fields showed surpluses. The state raised standards for teacher education and licensing, initiated scholarships and forgivable loans to recruit high-need teachers into the profession (including teachers in shortage fields, those who would teach in high-need locations, and minority teachers), created a mentoring and assessment program for all beginning teachers, and invested money in high-quality professional development, with special aid to low-achieving districts. The state also developed a low-stakes, performance-oriented assessment program focused on higher-order thinking and performance skills, which is used to provide information to schools and districts, but not to punish children or teachers. By 1998, Connecticut had surpassed all other states in 4 th grade reading and mathematics achievement on the NAEP and scored at the top in 8 th grade mathematics, science, and writing. Although Connecticut still has an achievement gap it is working to close, black students in Connecticut score significantly higher than their counterparts elsewhere in the county (Baron, 1999; Wilson, Darling-Hammond, & Berry, 2000).

The new wave of school finance lawsuits that are challenging both within state and within district resource allocation disparities are also promising. These suits are increasingly able to demonstrate how access to concrete learning opportunities is impaired by differential access to money, and how these learning opportunities translate into academic achievement for students. As standards are used to articulate clearer conceptions of what students need to learn to function in today's society and what schools need to do to support these levels of learning, lawsuits like ones recently won in Alabama and New York may be linked to definitions of the quality of education that is “adequate” to meet the state's expectations for student achievement. Such cases are requiring remedies that link levels of funding to minimum standards of learning and teaching. As suits brought on the adequacy theory establish that learning experiences depend on resources and influence outcomes, they establish a principle of “opportunity to learn” that could allow states to define a curriculum entitlement that becomes the basis for both funding and review of school practices.

Opportunity to Learn Standards

The idea of opportunity to learn standards was first articulated by the National Council on Education Standards and Testing (NCEST), which argued for student performance standards but acknowledged they would result in greater inequality if not accompanied by policies ensuring access to resources, including appropriate instructional materials and well-prepared teachers (NCEST, 1992, E12–E13). The Commission's Assessment Task Force proposed that states collect evidence on the extent to which schools and districts provide opportunity to learn the curricula implied by standards as a prerequisite to using tests for school graduation or other decisions (NCEST, 1992, F17–F18).

Opportunity-to-learn standards would establish, for example, that if a state's curriculum frameworks and assessments outlined standards for science learning that require laboratory work and computers, specific coursework, and particular knowledge for teaching, resources must be allocated and policies must be fashioned to provide for these entitlements. Such a strategy would leverage both school improvement and school equity reform, providing a basis for state legislation or litigation where opportunities to learn were not adequately funded. Opportunity-to-learn standards would define a floor of core resources, coupled with incentives for schools to work toward professional standards of practice that support high-quality learning opportunities. Such standards would provide a basis for:

• state legislation and, if necessary, litigation that supports greater equity in funding and in the distribution of qualified teachers;
• information about the nature of the teaching and learning opportunities made available to students in different districts and schools across the state;
• incentives for states and school districts to create policies that ensure adequate and equitable resources, curriculum opportunities, and teaching to all schools;
• a school review process that helps schools and districts engage in self-assessments and external reviews of practice in light of standards; and
• identification of schools that need additional support or intervention to achieve adequate opportunities to learn for their students.

Curriculum and Assessment Reform

As noted above, the curriculum offered to many students—and to most African American students—in U.S. schools is geared primarily toward lower-order “rote” skills—memorizing pieces of information and conducting simple operations based on formulas or rules—that are not sufficient for the demands of modern life or for the new standards being proposed and enacted by states and national associations. These new standards will require students to be able to engage in independent analysis and problem solving, extensive research and writing, use of new technologies, and various strategies for accessing and using resources in new situations. Major changes in curriculum and resources will be needed to ensure that these kinds of activities are commonplace in the classrooms of minority students and others.

These efforts to create a “thinking curriculum” for all students are important to individual futures and our national welfare. They are unlikely to pay off, however, unless other critical changes are made in curriculum, in the ways students are tracked for instruction, and the ways teachers are prepared and supported. Although mounting evidence indicates that low-tracked students are disadvantaged by current practice and that high-ability students do not benefit more from homogeneous classrooms (Slavin, 1990), the long-established American tracking system will be difficult to reform until there is an adequate supply of well-trained teachers—teachers who are both prepared to teach the more advanced curriculum that U.S. schools now fail to offer most students and to assume the challenging task of teaching many kinds of students with diverse needs, interests, aptitudes, and learning styles in integrated classroom settings.

Other important changes concern the types and uses of achievement tests in U.S. schools. As a 1990 study of the implementation of California's new mathematics curriculum framework points out, when a curriculum reform aimed at problem solving and higher-order thinking skills encounters an already mandated rote-oriented basic skills testing program, the tests win out (Cohen et al., 1990; Darling-Hammond, 1990b). As one teacher put it:

Teaching for understanding is what we are supposed to be doing… (but) the bottom line here is that all they really want to know is how are these kids doing on the tests? …They want me to teach in a way that they can't test, except that I'm held accountable to the test It's a Catch 22… (Wilson, 1990, p. 318).

Students in schools that organize most of their efforts around the kinds of low-level learning represented by commercially developed multiple-choice tests will be profoundly disadvantaged when they encounter more rigorous evaluations that require greater analysis, writing, and production of elaborated answers. Initiatives in some states (e.g., Connecticut, Kentucky) and cities (e.g., New York, San Diego) to develop more performance-oriented assessments that develop higher-order skills may begin to address this problem.

An equally important issue is how tests are used. If new assessments are used, like current tests are, primarily for sorting, screening, and tracking, the quality of education for minority students is unlikely to improve. Qualitatively better education will come only from developing and using assessment not for punishment but as a tool for identifying student strengths and needs as a basis for adapting instruction more successfully (Glaser, 1981, 1990). Robert Glaser (1990) argued that schools must shift from an approach “characterized by minimal variation in the conditions for learning” in which “a narrow range of instructional options and a limited number of paths to success are available,” (p.16) to one in which “conceptions of learning and modes of teaching are adjusted to individuals—their backgrounds, talents, interests, and the nature of their past performances and experiences” (p. 17).

The outcomes of the current wave of curriculum and assessment reforms will depend in large measure on the extent to which developers and users of new standards and tests use them to improve teaching and learning rather than merely reinforcing our tendencies to sort and select those who will get high-quality education from those who will not. They will also need to pursue broader reforms to improve and equalize access to educational resources and support the professional development of teachers, so that new standards and tests are used to inform more skillful and adaptive teaching that enables more successful learning for all students.

Investments in Quality Teaching

A key corollary to this analysis is that improved opportunities for minority students will rest, in large part, on policies that professionalize teaching by increasing the knowledge base for teaching and ensuring mastery of this knowledge by all teachers permitted to practice. This means providing all teachers with a stronger understanding of how children learn and develop, how a variety of curricular and instructional strategies can address their needs, and how changes in school and classroom practices can support their growth and achievement.

There are two reasons for this approach. First, the professionalization of an occupation raises the floor below which no entrants will be admitted to practice. It eliminates practices that allow untrained entrants to practice disproportionately on underserved and poorly protected clients. Second, professionalization increases the overall knowledge base for the occupation, thus improving the quality of services for all clients, especially those most in need of high-quality teaching (Wise & Darling-Hammond, 1987; Darling-Hammond, 1990a).

The students who have, in general, the poorest opportunities to learn—those attending the inner-city schools that are compelled by the current incentive structure to hire disproportionate numbers of substitute teachers, uncertified teachers, and inexperienced teachers and that lack resources for mitigating the uneven distribution of good teaching—are the students who will benefit most from measures that raise the standards of practice for all teachers. They will also benefit from targeted policies that provide quality preparation programs and financial aid for highly qualified prospective teachers who will teach in central cities and poor rural areas. Providing equity in the distribution of teacher quality requires changing policies and long-standing incentive structures in education so that shortages of trained teachers are overcome, and that schools serving low-income and minority students are not disadvantaged by lower salaries and poorer working conditions in the bidding war for good teachers.

Building and sustaining a well-prepared teaching force will require local, state, and federal initiatives. To recruit an adequate supply of teachers, states and localities will need to upgrade teachers' salaries to levels competitive with those of college graduates in other occupations, who currently earn 20% to 50% more, depending on the field. States should also strengthen teacher education and certification. In almost all states, teacher education is more poorly funded than other university departments (Ebmeier, Twombly, & Teeter, 1990). It has long been used as a revenue producer for programs that train engineers, accountants, lawyers, and doctors. Rather than bemoaning the quality of teacher training, policy makers should invest in its improvement, require schools of education to become accredited, and insist that teachers pass performance examinations for licensing that demonstrate they can teach well. Shortages should be met by enhanced incentives rather than by lowering standards, especially for those who teach children in central cities and poor rural schools.

The federal government can play a leadership role in providing an adequate supply of well-qualified teachers just as it has in providing an adequate supply of qualified physicians. When shortages of physicians were a major problem more than 30 years ago, Congress passed the 1963 Health Professions Education Assistance Act to support and improve the caliber of medical training, to create and strengthen teaching hospitals, to provide scholarships and loans to medical students, and to create incentives for physicians to train in shortage specialties and to locate in underserved areas. Similarly, federal initiatives in education should seek to:

Recruit new teachers, especially in shortage fields and in shortage locations, through scholarships and forgivable loans for high-quality teacher education.

Strengthen and improve teachers' preparation through improvement incentive grants to schools of education and supports for licensing reform.

Improve teacher retention and effectiveness by improving clinical training and support during the beginning teaching stage when 30% leave. This would include funding mentoring programs for new teachers in which they receive structured coaching from expert veterans.

If the interaction between teachers and students is the most important aspect of effective schooling, then reducing inequality in learning has to rely on policies that provide equal access to competent, well-supported teachers. The public education system ought to be able to guarantee that every child who is forced by law to go to school is taught by someone who is knowledgeable, competent, and caring. That is real accountability. As Carl Grant (1989) put it:

Teachers who perform high-quality work in urban schools know that, despite reform efforts and endless debates, it is meaningful curricula and dedicated and knowledgeable teachers that make the difference in the education of urban students (p. 770).

When it comes to equalizing opportunities for students to learn, that is the bottom line.

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Unequal Opportunity: Race and Education

Subscribe to governance weekly, linda darling-hammond ld linda darling-hammond.

March 1, 1998

• 13 min read

W.E.B. DuBois was right about the problem of the 21st century. The color line divides us still. In recent years, the most visible evidence of this in the public policy arena has been the persistent attack on affirmative action in higher education and employment. From the perspective of many Americans who believe that the vestiges of discrimination have disappeared, affirmative action now provides an unfair advantage to minorities. From the perspective of others who daily experience the consequences of ongoing discrimination, affirmative action is needed to protect opportunities likely to evaporate if an affirmative obligation to act fairly does not exist. And for Americans of all backgrounds, the allocation of opportunity in a society that is becoming ever more dependent on knowledge and education is a source of great anxiety and concern.

At the center of these debates are interpretations of the gaps in educational achievement between white and non-Asian minority students as measured by standardized test scores. The presumption that guides much of the conversation is that equal opportunity now exists; therefore, continued low levels of achievement on the part of minority students must be a function of genes, culture, or a lack of effort and will (see, for example, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve and Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom’s America in Black and White).

The assumptions that undergird this debate miss an important reality: educational outcomes for minority children are much more a function of their unequal access to key educational resources, including skilled teachers and quality curriculum, than they are a function of race. In fact, the U.S. educational system is one of the most unequal in the industrialized world, and students routinely receive dramatically different learning opportunities based on their social status. In contrast to European and Asian nations that fund schools centrally and equally, the wealthiest 10 percent of U.S. school districts spend nearly 10 times more than the poorest 10 percent, and spending ratios of 3 to 1 are common within states. Despite stark differences in funding, teacher quality, curriculum, and class sizes, the prevailing view is that if students do not achieve, it is their own fault. If we are ever to get beyond the problem of the color line, we must confront and address these inequalities.

The Nature of Educational Inequality

Americans often forget that as late as the 1960s most African-American, Latino, and Native American students were educated in wholly segregated schools funded at rates many times lower than those serving whites and were excluded from many higher education institutions entirely. The end of legal segregation followed by efforts to equalize spending since 1970 has made a substantial difference for student achievement. On every major national test, including the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the gap in minority and white students’ test scores narrowed substantially between 1970 and 1990, especially for elementary school students. On the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), the scores of African-American students climbed 54 points between 1976 and 1994, while those of white students remained stable.

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Even so, educational experiences for minority students have continued to be substantially separate and unequal. Two-thirds of minority students still attend schools that are predominantly minority, most of them located in central cities and funded well below those in neighboring suburban districts. Recent analyses of data prepared for school finance cases in Alabama, New Jersey, New York, Louisiana, and Texas have found that on every tangible measure—from qualified teachers to curriculum offerings—schools serving greater numbers of students of color had significantly fewer resources than schools serving mostly white students. As William L. Taylor and Dianne Piche noted in a 1991 report to Congress: Inequitable systems of school finance inflict disproportionate harm on minority and economically disadvantaged students. On an inter-state basis, such students are concentrated in states, primarily in the South, that have the lowest capacities to finance public education. On an intra-state basis, many of the states with the widest disparities in educational expenditures are large industrial states. In these states, many minorities and economically disadvantaged students are located in property-poor urban districts which fare the worst in educational expenditures (or) in rural districts which suffer from fiscal inequity.

Jonathan Kozol s 1991 Savage Inequalities described the striking differences between public schools serving students of color in urban settings and their suburban counterparts, which typically spend twice as much per student for populations with many fewer special needs. Contrast MacKenzie High School in Detroit, where word processing courses are taught without word processors because the school cannot afford them, or East St. Louis Senior High School, whose biology lab has no laboratory tables or usable dissecting kits, with nearby suburban schools where children enjoy a computer hookup to Dow Jones to study stock transactions and science laboratories that rival those in some industries. Or contrast Paterson, New Jersey, which could not afford the qualified teachers needed to offer foreign language courses to most high school students, with Princeton, where foreign languages begin in elementary school.

Even within urban school districts, schools with high concentrations of low-income and minority students receive fewer instructional resources than others. And tracking systems exacerbate these inequalities by segregating many low-income and minority students within schools. In combination, these policies leave minority students with fewer and lower-quality books, curriculum materials, laboratories, and computers; significantly larger class sizes; less qualified and experienced teachers; and less access to high-quality curriculum. Many schools serving low-income and minority students do not even offer the math and science courses needed for college, and they provide lower-quality teaching in the classes they do offer. It all adds up.

What Difference Does it Make?

Since the 1966 Coleman report, Equality of Educational Opportunity, another debate has waged as to whether money makes a difference to educational outcomes. It is certainly possible to spend money ineffectively; however, studies that have developed more sophisticated measures of schooling show how money, properly spent, makes a difference. Over the past 30 years, a large body of research has shown that four factors consistently influence student achievement: all else equal, students perform better if they are educated in smaller schools where they are well known (300 to 500 students is optimal), have smaller class sizes (especially at the elementary level), receive a challenging curriculum, and have more highly qualified teachers.

Minority students are much less likely than white children to have any of these resources. In predominantly minority schools, which most students of color attend, schools are large (on average, more than twice as large as predominantly white schools and reaching 3,000 students or more in most cities); on average, class sizes are 15 percent larger overall (80 percent larger for non-special education classes); curriculum offerings and materials are lower in quality; and teachers are much less qualified in terms of levels of education, certification, and training in the fields they teach. And in integrated schools, as UCLA professor Jeannie Oakes described in the 1980s and Harvard professor Gary Orfield’s research has recently confirmed, most minority students are segregated in lower-track classes with larger class sizes, less qualified teachers, and lower-quality curriculum.

Research shows that teachers’ preparation makes a tremendous difference to children’s learning. In an analysis of 900 Texas school districts, Harvard economist Ronald Ferguson found that teachers’ expertise—as measured by scores on a licensing examination, master’s degrees, and experienc—was the single most important determinant of student achievement, accounting for roughly 40 percent of the measured variance in students’ reading and math achievement gains in grades 1-12. After controlling for socioeconomic status, the large disparities in achievement between black and white students were almost entirely due to differences in the qualifications of their teachers. In combination, differences in teacher expertise and class sizes accounted for as much of the measured variance in achievement as did student and family background (figure 1).

Ferguson and Duke economist Helen Ladd repeated this analysis in Alabama and again found sizable influences of teacher qualifications and smaller class sizes on achievement gains in math and reading. They found that more of the difference between the high- and low-scoring districts was explained by teacher qualifications and class sizes than by poverty, race, and parent education.

Meanwhile, a Tennessee study found that elementary school students who are assigned to ineffective teachers for three years in a row score nearly 50 percentile points lower on achievement tests than those assigned to highly effective teachers over the same period. Strikingly, minority students are about half as likely to be assigned to the most effective teachers and twice as likely to be assigned to the least effective.

Minority students are put at greatest risk by the American tradition of allowing enormous variation in the qualifications of teachers. The National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future found that new teachers hired without meeting certification standards (25 percent of all new teachers) are usually assigned to teach the most disadvantaged students in low-income and high-minority schools, while the most highly educated new teachers are hired largely by wealthier schools (figure 2). Students in poor or predominantly minority schools are much less likely to have teachers who are fully qualified or hold higher-level degrees. In schools with the highest minority enrollments, for example, students have less than a 50 percent chance of getting a math or science teacher with a license and a degree in the field. In 1994, fully one-third of teachers in high-poverty schools taught without a minor in their main field and nearly 70 percent taught without a minor in their secondary teaching field.

Studies of underprepared teachers consistently find that they are less effective with students and that they have difficulty with curriculum development, classroom management, student motivation, and teaching strategies. With little knowledge about how children grow, learn, and develop, or about what to do to support their learning, these teachers are less likely to understand students’ learning styles and differences, to anticipate students’ knowledge and potential difficulties, or to plan and redirect instruction to meet students’ needs. Nor are they likely to see it as their job to do so, often blaming the students if their teaching is not successful.

Teacher expertise and curriculum quality are interrelated, because a challenging curriculum requires an expert teacher. Research has found that both students and teachers are tracked: that is, the most expert teachers teach the most demanding courses to the most advantaged students, while lower-track students assigned to less able teachers receive lower-quality teaching and less demanding material. Assignment to tracks is also related to race: even when grades and test scores are comparable, black students are more likely to be assigned to lower-track, nonacademic classes.

When Opportunity Is More Equal

What happens when students of color do get access to more equal opportunities’ Studies find that curriculum quality and teacher skill make more difference to educational outcomes than the initial test scores or racial backgrounds of students. Analyses of national data from both the High School and Beyond Surveys and the National Educational Longitudinal Surveys have demonstrated that, while there are dramatic differences among students of various racial and ethnic groups in course-taking in such areas as math, science, and foreign language, for students with similar course-taking records, achievement test score differences by race or ethnicity narrow substantially.

Robert Dreeben and colleagues at the University of Chicago conducted a long line of studies documenting both the relationship between educational opportunities and student performance and minority students’ access to those opportunities. In a comparative study of 300 Chicago first graders, for example, Dreeben found that African-American and white students who had comparable instruction achieved comparable levels of reading skill. But he also found that the quality of instruction given African-American students was, on average, much lower than that given white students, thus creating a racial gap in aggregate achievement at the end of first grade. In fact, the highest-ability group in Dreeben’s sample was in a school in a low-income African-American neighborhood. These children, though, learned less during first grade than their white counterparts because their teacher was unable to provide the challenging instruction they deserved.

When schools have radically different teaching forces, the effects can be profound. For example, when Eleanor Armour-Thomas and colleagues compared a group of exceptionally effective elementary schools with a group of low-achieving schools with similar demographic characteristics in New York City, roughly 90 percent of the variance in student reading and mathematics scores at grades 3, 6, and 8 was a function of differences in teacher qualifications. The schools with highly qualified teachers serving large numbers of minority and low-income students performed as well as much more advantaged schools.

Most studies have estimated effects statistically. However, an experiment that randomly assigned seventh grade “at-risk”students to remedial, average, and honors mathematics classes found that the at-risk students who took the honors class offering a pre-algebra curriculum ultimately outperformed all other students of similar backgrounds. Another study compared African-American high school youth randomly placed in public housing in the Chicago suburbs with city-placed peers of equivalent income and initial academic attainment and found that the suburban students, who attended largely white and better-funded schools, were substantially more likely to take challenging courses, perform well academically, graduate on time, attend college, and find good jobs.

What Can Be Done?

This state of affairs is not inevitable. Last year the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future issued a blueprint for a comprehensive set of policies to ensure a “caring, competent, and qualified teacher for every child,” as well as schools organized to support student success. Twelve states are now working directly with the commission on this agenda, and others are set to join this year. Several pending bills to overhaul the federal Higher Education Act would ensure that highly qualified teachers are recruited and prepared for students in all schools. Federal policymakers can develop incentives, as they have in medicine, to guarantee well-prepared teachers in shortage fields and high-need locations. States can equalize education spending, enforce higher teaching standards, and reduce teacher shortages, as Connecticut, Kentucky, Minnesota, and North Carolina have already done. School districts can reallocate resources from administrative superstructures and special add-on programs to support better-educated teachers who offer a challenging curriculum in smaller schools and classes, as restructured schools as far apart as New York and San Diego have done. These schools, in communities where children are normally written off to lives of poverty, welfare dependency, or incarceration, already produce much higher levels of achievement for students of color, sending more than 90 percent of their students to college. Focusing on what matters most can make a real difference in what children have the opportunity to learn. This, in turn, makes a difference in what communities can accomplish.

An Entitlement to Good Teaching

The common presumption about educational inequality—that it resides primarily in those students who come to school with inadequate capacities to benefit from what the school has to offer—continues to hold wide currency because the extent of inequality in opportunities to learn is largely unknown. We do not currently operate schools on the presumption that students might be entitled to decent teaching and schooling as a matter of course. In fact, some state and local defendants have countered school finance and desegregation cases with assertions that such remedies are not required unless it can be proven that they will produce equal outcomes. Such arguments against equalizing opportunities to learn have made good on DuBois’s prediction that the problem of the 20th century would be the problem of the color line.

But education resources do make a difference, particularly when funds are used to purchase well-qualified teachers and high-quality curriculum and to create personalized learning communities in which children are well known. In all of the current sturm und drang about affirmative action, “special treatment,” and the other high-volatility buzzwords for race and class politics in this nation, I would offer a simple starting point for the next century s efforts: no special programs, just equal educational opportunity.

The Brookings Institution is committed to quality, independence, and impact. We are supported by a diverse array of funders . In line with our values and policies , each Brookings publication represents the sole views of its author(s).

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Unequal opportunities, o the current academic gap between the most disadvantaged school children and their wealthier classmates by the, time they sit their gcses is two years., o it will take 50 years to close the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their wealthier peers at the, current rate of progress., o school children are 24 months behind on eligibility for free school meals 80% of their time at school., o the education policy institute (epi) conducted the report on the attainment gap., o the attainment gap varies across different regions of england because some areas are significantly lagging behind, o report says the most disadvantaged students struggle the most at the region of isle of wight., o students in the isle of wight are two and a half years behind their peers across the country., o the attainment gap in more successful areas like hackney, islington, and barnet is eight months., o paul whiteman describes the situation regarding equality of opportunity for young people in britain an, o david laws talked about the progress being made in narrowing educational gaps and said that progress is being, made, but significant challenges remain., o there was an attainment gap for 23 months for poorer pupils compared to their richer peers in 2007., o since 2007, there has been a change in the attainment gap and it has been widened by 0 months based on, government statistics., o the attainment gap for poorer pupils is 23 months compared to their richer peers in 2016., o jo hutchinson says the attainment gap for persistently disadvantaged pupils has grown since 2007., o angela rayner attributed the concerning findings to budget cuts and teacher shortages., o the department for education claimed the attainment gap has narrowed since 2011., o there is £2 billion of additional funding being invested this year to support schools raising the attainment of, disadvantaged pupils., o pupil premium is aiming to support schools in raising the attainment of disadvantaged pupils according to the, department for education., o overall, the report indicates it could take until 2070 for the future timeline to close the attainment gap if no, significant improvements are made., i think it’s important to close the attainment gap because results show many 19-year-olds are underperforming, and leaving education without qualifications in english and maths. this greatly limits their options for future.

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Home — Essay Samples — Education — Education Inequality — Lack of Education: Causes, Effects, and Solutions

Lack of Education: Causes, Effects, and Solutions

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Published: Sep 12, 2023

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Causes of lack of education, effects of lack of education, benefits of education, addressing the effects of lack of education.

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Essay On Unequal Access To Education

Show More The American Dream is a longstanding idea that the United States holds endless opportunities with few barriers other than hard work and perseverance. However, the difficult truth is that it is a land filled with unequal opportunity, allowing certain people to prosper over others. Unfortunately this harsh reality is a very prevalent issue in school systems throughout America due to educational inequality. This problem is especially demonstrated through students’ unequal access to education. It can be defined as inequitable conditions that cause students to receive different educations. It is a concern that can either hinder or advance children’s learning, ultimately producing varying results from different groups of students. Unequal access to education is unjust because it creates an imbalance within society, providing educational opportunities to some children that are not offered to …show more content… The disparities of this problem are often linked to the neighborhood in which a child resides. Unequal access to education is largely determined by the neighborhood with the opportunity to attend schools with certain performance levels being affected. The Schott Foundation for Public Education recently introduced a report that reveals the causes of unequal educational access specifically within New York. The report describes the various communities like the predominantly white and Asian communities in Manhattan and Queens that have excellent schools and the “highly segregated, impoverished” Latino and Black neighborhoods in the Bronx and Brooklyn. The report illustrates how communities with middle-class, predominantly White, and Asian enrollments tend to have well-resourced schools whereas schools that serve lower-income families are under-resourced (schottfoundation.org). The Schott Foundation’s examples present a similarity between their findings and what I witnessed of this social

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Education in America: Navigating through a World of Unequal Opportunities

How it works

• 1 Introduction
• 2 History of Education
• 3 Early Education
• 4.1 Race- As described in The Souls of Black Folk
• 5 Gender-As described in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
• 6.1 Funding Gap and the Legitimacy of Schools
• 7 Today’s Education
• 8 Conclusion
• 9 Works Cited

Introduction

Education is the key to success—A phrase many renowned scholars, influencers, and advocates have adopted to shape their lifestyles and moral beliefs. We are taught early on in life that acquiring a good education can be the difference between a low paying job and a high paying job, and we are encouraged to pursue a higher education so that we will be of the small percentage of people who are making a substantial income to support our cost of living. Need a custom essay on the same topic? Give us your paper requirements, choose a writer and we’ll deliver the highest-quality essay! Order now

History of Education

We can credit the history of certain educational practices and thought processes to philosopher, Socrates, who is said to have laid the foundation for modern western philosophy and education. As learned in earlier classes, Socrates was put on trial by the Athenian democracy for corrupting the minds of youth and going against the gods of that time. However, the early history of education that he so vividly displayed showed the emphasis he put on educating children at a young age. On page 6, when Euthyphro asked Socrates what indictment was brought upon him, Socrates responded by saying: “For it is correct to take care of the young first, to make them the best as possible, just as it’s reasonable for a good farmer to take care of the young plants first and all the others afterwards” (Reeve 6). His dedication to educating the youth and spreading his philosophy jump-started the early educational movements that would later take over America. Higher education in the United States was not initially intended for everyone however. In fact, education during the 16th century was merely a concept for most, with only wealthy white families being granted true opportunity to gain knowledge through private schooling carried out by churches and ministers. Then, in 1852, Massachusetts became the first state to create a compulsory education law that required every city and town to offer primary schooling for children--which showed the early emphasis our country put on education (“Education Laws”). The question is: did our country truly want education for all people to be possible, or was it built on the premise that only whites should be educated?

Early Education

Unequal opportunities within education, race- as described in the souls of black folk.

For minorities, and black people in particular, education has tended to be a concept much harder to grasp due to obstacles put in place to keep us behind. Although laws such as affirmative action have been enabled to help people of color get equal opportunity in comparison with white counterparts, educational opportunities are still much harder for us to receive because of the system our country operates on. As talked about in Dubois’ The Souls of Black Folk, we are often seen as a problem in our society. He discusses the problem of the color line and ‘living behind the veil,’ or in other words--living while bearing the hardships of both prejudice and segregation, all while remaining largely invisible in the eyes of white people (Dubois 3). He felt that no matter how many strides our society makes to help us gain true equality under the law, we will always be seen as somebody’s problem and ultimately someone’s job to fix.

Americans often forget that as late as the 1960s, most African-American, Latino, and Native American students, if educated at all, were educated in segregated schools that had low rates of funding. Because of that, minority students performed lower on national tests, with the gap in minority and white students’ test scores narrowing substantially between 1970 and 1990 (Darling-Hammond).

Educational experiences for minority students have continued to be substantially separate and unequal. Two-thirds of minority students still attend schools that are predominantly minority, most of them located in central cities and funded well below those in neighboring suburban districts (Darling-Hammond). It is evident that racial prejudices affect individuals on a deeper level, but when it comes to education, Dubois felt that we must all come together as one to further the educating of individuals overall. He said, “..In this great question of reconciling three vast and partially contradictory streams of thought, the one panacea of Education leaps to the lips of all:—such human training as will best use the labor of all men without enslaving or brutalizing; such training as will give us poise to encourage the prejudices that bulwark society, and to stamp out those that in sheer barbarity deafen us to the wail of prisoned souls within the Veil, and the mounting fury of shackled men” ( Dubois 7).

Within A Letter to the Grand Duchess, Galileo writes to the Duchess and talks about those who were defying him. He says on page 1, “There were others who denied them or remained in doubt only because of their novel and unexpected character...but some, besides allegiance to their original error, possess I know not what fanciful interest in remaining hostile not so much toward the things in question as toward their discoverer. No longer being able to deny them, these men now take refuge in obstinate silence, but being more than ever exasperated by that which has pacified and quieted other men, they divert their thoughts to other fancies and seek new ways to damage me” (Galilei 1).

Gender-As described in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

With many similarities to race, gender can and has also served as a setback for those trying to gain a higher education, let alone an education at all. As soon as we come into this world, we are automatically assumed to be either male or female, and in an instant, gender roles are assigned to us--setting a standard for how we are supposed to act as either male or female. “A gender role is a social role that includes a range of behaviors and attitudes that are generally considered acceptable, appropriate, or desirable for people based on their actual or perceived sex” (Fry) and assigning gender roles is the very reason why women are often discouraged to gain a higher education and occupy spaces that are very much male-dominated.

Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to criticize and challenge these societal gender roles as well as advocate for proper education of women so that they could indeed occupy those male dominated spaces and feel comfortable in doing so. She felt as though the neglect of young girls’ education is largely to blame for the condition of adult women. Within chapter 2, Wollstonecraft explained that women are expected to be ‘innocent’ in the eyes of man, or in other words naïve and weak. She also stated that in our society, women are assumed to have a soft temperament and in turn are expected to be subordinate beings that wait on men. On page 13, she said, “Women are told from their infancy, and taught by their mothers’ example, that a little knowledge of human weakness (properly called ‘cunning’), outward obedience, and scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety will obtain for them the protection of man: and if they are also beautiful, that’s all the need for at least twenty years” (Wollstonecraft 13). From times dating back to as early as the first wars, women were viewed as docile beings that had a place in the home and the home only. It has been ingrained in women’s minds that we are supposed to live a life that benefits the man and live in their shadows rather than emerge and conquer the world in the same way they can and do, and in certain areas, our education system still mimics these ideologies.

Evolution of Education and Education Today

Funding gap and the legitimacy of schools.

Although we have come a long way in regard to education and access to it in general, we still have many issues within our educational system--the first being the funding gaps within the system. Some school districts and systems are very poor, which makes it harder for the students placed in those school systems to excel. To contrast with that, the schools that have more money, are in better locations, and ultimately are better school systems, send out children that are more well-rounded and will ultimately end up with better jobs and opportunities in the long-run. “Recent analyses of data prepared for school finance cases in Alabama, New Jersey, New York, Louisiana, and Texas have found that on every tangible measure—from qualified teachers to curriculum offerings—schools serving greater numbers of students of color had significantly fewer resources than schools serving mostly white students” (Darling-Hammond).

Today’s Education

Works cited.

• Darling-Hammond, Linda. “Unequal Opportunity: Race and Education.” Brookings, Brookings, 28 July 2016, www.brookings.edu/articles/unequal-opportunity-race-and-education/.
• Reeve, C. D. C., et al. The Trials of Socrates: Six Classic Texts. Hackett Pub. Co., 2002.
• Fry, Katherine. “Sex, Gender, and the Feminist Movement.” Thrive Global, 1 Feb. 2019, https://thriveglobal.com/stories/sex-gender-and-the-feminist-movement/.
• Galilei, G. Letter to the Grand Duchess Cristina of Tuscany, 1615 Retrieved from https://scitech.au.dk/fileadmin/site_files/science.au.dk/NF/Komm/DenbevaegedeJord/Letter_to_the_Grand_Duchess_Christina_of_Tuscany.1615__Gallilei.pdf
• Dubois, W E B. The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Retrieved from http://www.bartleby.com/114/100.html
• “Compulsory Education Laws: Background.” Findlaw, https://education.findlaw.com/education-options/compulsory-education-laws-background.html.
• Wollstonecraft, M. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1793) Retrieved from https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/wollstonecraft1792.pdf
• Olivier. “Access to Education in the United States = Inequality.” Humanium, 7 July 2015, www.humanium.org/en/access-to-education-in-the-united-states-inequality/.
• Chesler, Belle. “Stop Defunding Our Public Schools.” The Nation, 18 Apr. 2019, www.thenation.com/article/oregon-education-defunding-public-schools/.
• Goldin, Claudia. “A Brief History of Education in the United States.” Historical Paper 119, Aug. 1999.

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