Educational Discrimination in USA

Educational Discrimination in USA



Educational Discrimination in USA

Introduction

While the research, theory and policy literature on race, class and gender discrimination in and through education is extensive, the problem of education-based discrimination itself - defined as the promiscuous, arbitrary and unjust denial of rights, privileges, freedoms, voice or respect to those lacking in educational achievement, credentials, ability or opportunity - has been widely overlooked. This article argues that we need to pay a lot more attention than we do now to the problem of education-based discrimination, and challenge those who have taught us not to see what has effectively become an elephant in our living room. It is not just the case that education-based discrimination has been obscured by the overlapping shadows of other forms of discrimination. Rather, the dominant ideologies of meritocracy and human capital (into which we are inculcated throughout our lives by schools, media and the government) actively proclaim that higher levels of education are and should be linked with greater reward. In a world where education is regularly and explicitly invoked in order to legitimate inequality, it can appear nonsensical even to raise concern about education-based discrimination as a matter of social injustice in the first place. If we fail to raise such concern, however, we will find ourselves unable ever to use our public system of education for universal emancipation and empowerment.

As per the ethnic origin, discrimination or prejudice is a defiance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights espoused by the United Nations. Till the present era, numerous researches have recommended that minority ethnic factions are discriminated in providing employment opportunities. But to what extent ethnic discrimination prevails in the education system is less well recognized (see the review of George Farkas 2003). We study ethnic discrimination in high school grading by comparing non-blind and blind grading of the exact same test. The methodology of varying the degree of “blindness” to detect discrimination has previously been used in economics by for instance Rebecca M. Blank (1991), Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse (2000), and Victor Lavy (2008). The study by Lavy (2008) is of particular interest here, who used a large data set from high school in the US and compared two different test scores for the same individuals: one test score based on a non-blind grading of a school exam by the student's own teacher and the other test score on a similar test graded blindly by an external examiner. We found a statistically significant discrimination of men in all the examined tests.

On one hand, the school officials consider the ideal guy as being studious and obedient, but on the other hand they emphasize the participation in extracurricular; activities as a sign of brilliant pupils. Creole is the popular image of proposing a model to follow: the "achorado" is the image of the popular Creole proposed as a model: the "living" beating, which will not be fooled or fool, or insult, which dog fight, or the "living" beating, which will not be fooled, ...