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Racism in Eduction
Why do disparities continue to emerge in the statistics of students of different colors, despite an elaborate structure to eliminate racism in education?
Institutional Racism has been defined as “the systematic distribution of resources, power and opportunity in our society to the benefit of people who are white and the exclusion of people of color.”
It was a hierarchical system covering a range of institutions and policies over centuries of racially distributed resources and views. Racism germinated the treatment of the Red Indians with reservations, segregation, internment camps and the residential schools for the American Indians.
All these impacted society when it later had to deal with slavery and its banishment; followed by “institutional racism, racial stratification and disparities in employment, housing, education, healthcare, government and other sectors.” It can be seen even today that despite the ‘separate but equal” doctrine enunciated in the 1950s, inequalities still persist. (http://www.solidground.org)
International commitments expect the US to protect all children without regard to their color or race (ICCPR), to offer education as a Right (CERD) and the ensure that no child is tortured in any way – that includes the mental traumas caused by discrimination. This last, under CAT, also calls for the educating of public officials on the wide ambit of torture and how to prevent it for children.
Let us for a minute put away the obvious argument that all persons are entitled to these protections, not children alone; to concentrate on children within the educational network, for that is where the citizens of tomorrow are being nurtured.
For the record, the US government has put into place procedures for ensuring all the above, the prevention of ‘torture’, for physical integration, plus the availability of education and assistance to all who may need it.
As a matter of fact, these very procedures perhaps are plagued with executive discrimination which is in addition to the mental attitudes that have yet to go, more than 150 years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Racism in today USA is complicated by the issues of the new immigrants from South and East Asia.
Standards set for assistance eligibility have become major obstacles for minority students in three key areas: disparate funding, academic tracking and “zero tolerance” discipline policies (Rebecca L. Case, http:// racism.org).
No one will ever know whether the twisting of the Academic Tracking program was intentional or accidental. That was conceived as a case-by-case assessment of children’s potential and ability from too early an age. It was meant to afford remedial special education and/or accelerated programs to identified children; but the system ended up with the slotting of hundreds of children into lower tracks, much before they stabilized in their new environments.
The selection of the track for the child is done on the basis of their scores in standardized tests that have themselves earned a ‘Racist’ label and the perceptions of their teachers, largely middleclass whites with their own mental reservations of the ability of the child.
Remember most of these tests occur in the early school years, when the children are still immersed in their home cultures, which may be very different from the white cultures that dictate those tests.
In large numbers of cases, the inability of the parents, riddled by ignorance or language barriers, to put up a fight against the downgrading of their child has left a large tranche of children, with a majority of Latinos and African Americans end up caught in educational sink-holes difficult to climb out of.
The Coleman Report (Equality of Educational Opportunity--U.S. Office of Education) effectively placed in public discourse that environment and socio economic status does reflect in school achievement, along with issues such as per-pupil expenditure and class size.
Studies conducted in a white majority county (King’s County) found that more Latino and African American families continue to suffer food insecurity than white ones, that African Americans are more less likely to own health insurance and be located in communities closer to hazardous waste sites than white folk.
The Funding issue covers the structure of public school funding in which it is the schools with total or largely black children who get minimal funding; those school can obviously afford less of the facilities that today make for educational advancement, such as computer access, well stocked libraries, qualified teachers with small classes, or even something as basic as a safe and clean environment! Is it not understandable that students from those schools would score much less in tests than those from the more well off schools?
"Zero-Tolerance" Discipline Policies have varied fall-outs. A celebrated instance is that of the possession of weapons in all public schools that receive federal funding. It is up to the school to look at each instance on a case-by-case basis, with lesser punishments in the case of extenuating circumstances. This has, almost across the board, rebounded on minority students who do not get the second chance often offered, with lesser punishment and rehabilitation to privileged students.
In the case of ‘torture’, I will present one example from amongst scores: the government holds that that stricture holds only in instances of intentional racial discrimination in the custody of an official in a criminal setting or a mental institution. What are totally ignored are the frequent slurs enunciated when in the custody of federal funded public schools which make the US government the guardian of the children during most of their lives in school years. In addition to the slurs they encounter, consider the trauma of being subjected to remedial programs when they perhaps have the intellect and the potential to compete with the best out there, but for a wrong estimate in their primary years.
How do we deal with the fall out of this deep-rooted bigotry, reinforced by negotiating treaties and the most obvious hurdle, the inability to prove actual discrimination, which germinates in the brain?
The benefit to society from the expulsion of students from school over misdemeanors is an open question. That is where remedial action, such as rehab programs, is more important; for releasing a potentially immoral mind into society at an early age, will only accelerate its degeneration into crime.
Perhaps equally important would be to eliminate that controversial academic tracking that has created self-perpetuating little ghettos of poor achievers, created by early test scores. It is time to go back to treating people more as individuals and making provision for that, rather than more discrimination. True, the existing ghettos will not be erased, nor their children become whole again, but at least more young minds will not be lost to fresh such ghettos. (http:// www.publicschoolrenewal.org)
In this regard, a Human Relations committee has drawn up a charter that includes the banning of standardized or IQ testing to predict future achievement at any grade level and closing random access of teachers to students past records.
References:
http://www.solidground.org
http:// racism.org
http:// www.publicschoolrenewal.org
2 Dec. 2013
