Education: Unequal

Does everyone have the right to achieving success? Education is the key for everyone to achieve their own triumph in life. Education’s job is to provide the knowledge and the resources to help the student find the path to his or her goals. Thus, everyone should be able to have the right to education to achieve their success but today, the United States education system is skewed. It creates an unequal distribution of funding that causes the gap of the wealthy and the poor to widen. I went to a public high school that was part of an underfunded school district. When I was a first year in high school, I remember my world history teacher showing us a graph of the budget plan of next year and he said, “We have no money for sports, needed supplies, …show more content…
It allows the wealthy school districts to be more prepared and get more wealthy while the inner city poor school districts are not equipped with the right tools and leading them to be less prepared for society. I began to research about the correlation between school funding and socioeconomic status through different data bases. I found that there is a definite correlation between the two. Studies have shown that a low-income student tends to not perform well on standardized test. Low income families tend to have low wage jobs so the parents will not be able to provide the perfect resources or environment for their children to learn and grow and due to the No Child Left Behind Act, standardized test scores are used to determine how much funding the school gets from the government. Therefore, the schools that low-income students attend will receive less funding because the scores are lower compared to other schools that have better socioeconomic status students. I then began to research the history of standardized testing to see why the government uses assessment scores to determine how much a funding a school gets. I found that the purpose of standardized testing was to help identify the needs of the schools. Standardized testing no longer serves that purpose. Instead, it is now a way for the government to cut school funding from schools that need the funds. In 2011, Pennsylvania cuts $1 billion dollars from school funding. With the budget being cut each year, I started to wonder how much money is distributed to the public schools and private schools or charter schools. I found that many parents believe that private schools are better than public schools when it comes to academics and environment. Private schools also get funding from the government but they also required parents to pay tuition. Thus, parents that can afford to send their