Inequalities Between Pearl-Cohn And Hume-Fogg: An Analysis

One factor that contributes to the inequalities between Pearl-Cohn and Hume-Fogg is the racial makeup of each school: Hume-Fogg is predominately white, with 61.2% of their students being classified as so, and with Pearl-Cohn is predominately black, with 89.9% of their student body is classified as so (“Report Card,” 2016). According to The Concept of Equality of Educational Opportunity, “There is inequality of education within a school system so long as the schools within the system have different racial composition.” This means if two schools within a school system are of two distinct races (Hume-Fogg and Pearl-Cohn), they are unequal (Coleman, 1968, p. 16). Although segregation is most certainly illegal in the United States and integration efforts have been ongoing since the Brown v. Board decision in the 1950s (albeit slowly), those efforts did nothing to prevent the clear distinction between …show more content…
Though he attended an “integrated” school along with other minorities and “dirt poor” white students the facilities and educational quality of all the public schools Ogletree attended in Merced, California were inferior to the wealthy, white schools across the train tracks (Ogletree, 2004, p. 29). Even though integration was the law, schools were still segregated based on race and wealth, and this denied the students the opportunity to receive the same benefits of the white schools. This can be applied to Pearl-Cohn and Hume-Fogg by the following statement: because poor black students of Pearl-Cohn don’t attend the wealthy white school of Hume-Fogg, they don’t receive the same benefits that Hume-Fogg students receive as the wealthy students and members of the privileged race. Therefore, Pearl-Cohn and Hume-Fogg are unequal because of their predominant racial