Essay On Unequal Access To Education

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