Education Inequality in Race and Low Socioeconomic Neighborhoods

In an effort to understand the cause of this racial segregation, this study explores education inequality in race and low socioeconomic neighborhoods in the Bronx. A review of the literature reveals that such segregation continues to exist due to lack of socioeconomic integration, unconstitutional gerrymandering of school districts, colorblind school choice policies and avoidance of the predominant White teachers from talking about racial issues. The researcher, therefore, aims to conduct a qualitative research through interviews within the Bronx, New York to determine the real causes of racial segregation in schools and thus suggest ways to address this inequality with regards to equal access to educational opportunities within the United States education system. Introduction The topic for this study is Education Inequality in Minority and Lower Socioeconomic Neighborhoods in the Bronx.

The major focus will be on how schools in the Bronx are segregated along racial lines. This question is important as it addresses one of the hot topics currently in the American judicial system. Gerrymandering has often been used to politically marginalize minorities. It is important to understand how such political marginalization has an effect on racial segregation in public schools. The likely answer is that gerrymandering indeed fosters segregation in public schools. Does colorblind school choice policies exacerbate stratification and segregation? Colorblind school choices are policies that have been used to foster greater competition for students and innovation. The only way to ensure that there is integration is to ensure that everyone has equal economic resources to enable them to afford any type of education they want.

In addition, the reason why minorities are discriminated against is because of the perceived inferiority as they are generally poor. Therefore, as per McUsic (2004), economic integration will remove the superiority perception among the White population which will, in turn, translate into increased integration in the education system. Gerrymandering of district boundaries foster inequality in the access to education and worsen segregation in public schools. Gerrymandering in itself is a controversial topic within the United States. It’s no secret that majority of the teachers in the US are White. Buchanan (2015) revealed that 96% of the teachers were White. Further, for most of these teachers, their racial identities influenced rare relations and experiences. In fact, 91% preservice teachers feel that race is controversial and therefore completely ignore speaking about race (Buchanan 2015).

The problem is that failing to talk about race in the classroom results in many of issues of racial segregation not being addressed. It's no secret that minority children, Hispanics, and African-Americans, are on average poorer than white children. Therefore, the equalizing funding efforts have provided more opportunities to the minority groups. However, McUsic (2004) notes that this equalization funding as a result of Brown has confirmed its basic underlying assumption that “separate but equal” principle is sham. This is because, even with equal resources, segregated schools can never be equal. McUsic (2004:1335) thus suggest that “integration by economic class is the most effective, least expensive way to provide a quality education to all children. There have been many such cases across the United States with a similar ruling made in August 2017 where the court held that two Texas districts had been racially gerrymandered to dilute the Hispanic voters influence.

Similarly, the district school district borders have been gerrymandered in the same fashion. The many of the school zones are increasingly replicating irregular shapes rather than natural, cohesive communities. The same way that gerrymandering is used to consolidate power and reduce the influence of the minorities, it also has an effect of discriminating against minorities in public schools. Richards (2014) studied a national sample of 15,290 attendance zones in 663 districts and the results demonstrated that this process of gerrymandering in school zones worsen segregation and has a much greater effect in Blacks and Hispanics. While trying to demonstrate how colorblind choice policies promote racial segregation, Roda and Wells (2013), hypothesized that colorblind choice policies lead to self-fulfilling prophecies of “bad” and “good” schools. This is because schools that enroll the most students from the financially advantaged kin are inevitably perceived as “better” schools.

Wells et al. (2009), argues that once such labels have been established, the affluent White children will have more access to the utmost exclusive schools compared to the Hispanics or African-American parents. Therefore, “colorblind school choice policies and processes often exacerbate stratification and segregation” (Roda and Wells 2013:263). DiAngelo (2012) contents that many of these teachers do not foster segregation on purpose or to maintain the status quo rather these implications are exacerbated by the teachers’ own perception and reality of what it means to be White, especially because a lot of of these White teachers’ most likely have never lived around people of color or had an authority figure of color. As a result, they have wrong perceptions of race and despite their good intentions, they are incapable of bringing about real change and foster integrations within schools.

Moreover, Orelus (2013) argues that avoiding to talk about race is one of the biggest contributors to racial segregation. Through the words of the former US attorney general Eric Holder, Orelus (2013:573) states “though race-related issues continue to occupy a significant portion of our political discussion, and though there remain many unresolved racial issues in this nation, we, average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about race. ” Having more discussion about race is a critical first step in exploring the multifaceted aspects of race and the ways in which it has utilized to hinder the life opportunities of the people of color. It is, therefore, clear that America still has a long way to go in regards to desegregation of its education system so as to foster equal educational opportunities for the minorities.

Study Description: Research Methods Research Strategy Research strategy denotes to a technique that enables a researcher scrutinize the study problem and answer the study question (Saunders, Lewis, and Thornhill 2009). The first step was to review literature through reading secondary sources on the topic under study. The second step involved the collection of data through interviewing the study participants. It was important to conduct a literature review because according to Rubin and Babbie (2011), literature review helps the researcher to get important insights into the topic under review and also to avoid incidental plagiarism. These will include students, parents, and teachers in these low socioeconomic neighborhoods. Also, it will be vital to hear the perspective of those from rich socioeconomic neighborhoods. It is critical to make use of a flexible sampling strategy that will result in a maximum data collected.

Due to the limited time available, the researcher will utilize convenience sampling. In the convenience sampling, the researcher selects the sample that is the easiest to reach among the population. ” Interviews also offer a comprehensive understanding of the social occurrences under study. Further, interviews are appropriate where a detailed insight is the study from the individual participants is required or where little information is known about the study phenomena. Most importantly, interviews are appropriate where the study is exploring a sensitive topic and the participants prefer not to talk in a group environment (Saunders et al. Analysis This study will make use of semi-structured interviews. These interviews utilize open-ended questions and thus the responses are more likely to be highly varied.

In addition, the study will be purely voluntary and participants will be required to sign consent letters. For underage participants, their parents will also have to consent to their participation. In addition, the study anticipates to encounter some problems of access to participants and as such convenience sampling will be used to make it easy to replace participants in case such problems arise. However, the disadvantage of convenience sampling is that the researcher may end up replacing participants from hard-to-reach areas but who may have very good information about the topic being studied. The other limitation will be from time and financial resources. Buchanan, Lisa B. “We Make It Controversial”: Elementary Preservice Teachers' Beliefs about Race. Teacher Education Quarterly, 42(1), 3-26. Retrieved from http://www.

jstor. JSTOR, JSTOR, www. jstor. org/stable/10. 7709/jnegroeducation. DiAngelo, Robin. King, Jr. No Blacks Allowed: Segregated Gifted Education in the Context of Brown v. Board of Education. The Journal of Negro Education, 83(3), 300-310. doi:10. Belmont, CA:Wadsworth Publishing. Gubrium, Jaber F, and James A. Holstein.  Handbook of interview research: context & methods. Thousand Oaks CA: Sage Publications. Retrieved March 8, 2018 (http://www. jstor. org. lehman. ezproxy. Mickelson, Roslyn A. , Martha Bottia, and Stephanie Southworth. School Choice and Segregation by Race, Class, and Achievement. Policy brief, Education Policy Research Unit, Arizona State University, Tempe, and Education and the Public Interest Center, University of Colorado, Boulder, http://nepc. colorado. edu/stable/24572856 Richards, Meredith P. “The Gerrymandering of School Attendance Zones and the Segregation of Public Schools: A Geospatial Analysis.