EDUCATION SYSTEM

Inadequate Achievement By Minority Students In American Schools



Inadequate Achievement By Minority Students In American Schools

In understanding what accounts for inadequate achievement by Latinos students in the American Public Education System, a number of factors must be examined: poverty, family circumstances, cultural issues between families and schools, and the lack of resources in schools that have large Latinos populations. (Landsman 2004)It will be my objective to carefully examine these factors, offer an explanation for the continued existence of each, and strategize on how we, as educators, can combat inequalities through the use of different programs and policies. Just as important, paper will offer insight into how the achievement gap in our schools came about, for it is only when we understand our past that we can finally recognize our present and what needs to be done to secure our future.

The overall purpose of the paper is to examine Affirmative Action that happened in the education system and how it apply on the students, overall access and equality especially on the Latinos. Success for Latinos students is a controversial topic in today's public schools. America's Latinos student population is faced with a performance gap that is deeply troubling (Farmer, 2005) insofar as a burgeoning population of Latinos children are ill-educated and, in severe instances, marginalized. If government is unprepared to look at this growing problem, then educators will continue to shoulder the burden, as will the families of these struggling young people. It should not be assumed that these problems are rooted in the near past; America has had trouble addressing the plight of Latinos students because America, like most societies, has had trouble addressing racist attitudes and tensions.

In 1954 the U.S. Supreme Court handed down the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision that outlawed state-mandated segregated schools. In the early years of desegregation most of these plans focused on the South — most integrated schools were located in the South by the early 1970s. From the late 1960s on, districts in all parts of the country began implementing such plans, although the courts made it much more difficult to win desegregation orders outside the South, and the 1974 Supreme Court decision against city/suburban desegregation made real desegregation impossible in a growing number of overwhelming Latinos central cities. It is now almost 50 years after the initial Supreme Court ruling banning segregation and more than a decade into a period in which the U.S. Supreme Court has authorized termination of desegregation orders, yet even as racial segregation in the formal sense ended years ago, the soft bigotry of diminished expectations for African-American and Latinos students — the sort of diminished expectations that permits something like the achievement gap to remain with us after all this time — is as virulent now as ever (Landsman, 2004). America's policy-makers must start looking at lingering prejudices if any substantive progress is to be made in the fight against flagging student grades among our growing Latinos ...