THE DISPARITY OF EDUCATION

The Disparity Of Education

Disparity of Education In Lower And Middle Class

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION2

RESEARCH QUESTION5

LITERATURE REVIEW5

The Preschool Years6

The Early Elementary School Years9

Possible Discrimination by School District Personnel14

Ability Grouping in Early Elementary School15

Retention in Grade15

Special Education Placement16

Track Placement in Middle and High School16

Teachers' Perceptions and Expectations17

Compensatory Programs17

Directions for Action18

Supplementing District Data with Surveys18

Conclusion19

References………………………………………………………………………………..20

Disparity of Education In Lower And Middle Class

Introduction

In 1903, DuBois (1986:359) saw “the problem of the color line [as] the problem of the twentieth century.” One hundred years later, despite enormous change, inequality between race/ethnicity groups is still the principal U. S. domestic problem of the twenty first century. Now, after a century in which racial prejudice and discrimination declined from very high levels, and socioeconomic disparities between Whites and other race/ethnic groups also declined but still remain at substantial levels, the knowledge necessary to make useful public policy in this area is more difficult to attain than ever. Central to this problem is the difficulty in knowing what portion of observed disparities result from discrimination, and what portion result from other causes. This is crucial, since policies to remedy discrimination are typically different, and have a different legal status, than policies to remedy inequalities from other causes.

That racial prejudice and discrimination played a major role in creating past discrepancies between African-American and White housing, education, and employment outcomes cannot be denied. That the fight for equality of educational opportunity was a major goal of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s is a historical fact. That during the current time period, racial discrimination continues to exist in housing and employment has been demonstrated by audit studies (Fix and Struyk 1994; Yinger 1995; Altonji and Blank 1999; Holzer and Ludwig 2002). How then, can we doubt that racial discrimination also continues to exist in schooling?

Documenting such discrimination, however, is not an easy matter. Audit studies, in which matched pairs of racially different testers visit either a real estate agent or a potential employer have never been tried, and are difficult to conceive of, in the education field. A more common social science methodology, in which data generated internally by an organization are analyzed statistically to search for evidence of discriminatory behavior, has for many years been used by both plaintiffs and defendants in employment discrimination cases brought under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This sort of methodology applies in a quite straightforward manner to issues of possible discrimination in education. For example, Mickelson (2001) has recently used this methodology to show that, in one urban school district, Black students are placed in lower educational tracks than otherwise identical White students.

Thus, three paths are open to investigators who wish to test for racial discrimination in education. The first is to speculate on ways in which the audit methodology might be applied to the education field. The second is to imagine ways in which existing data on schools and students might be used in statistical analyses, such as Mickelson's, to search for ...