outline for reaser

Outline for Part 1

Working Thesis: The education system is far from being the “great equalizer” and rather, is full of inequalities.

1. Background info into the education system and the inequalities which exist.

(P) Educational inequality is a worldwide phenomenon. Hundreds of millions of children receive an excellent education while billions receive little or even nothing.

· On average, students from non-European ethnic backgrounds, especially African Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanic Americans, poor, rural, migrant, and homeless students, and students whose school experiences are adversely affected by gender and sexual orientation, biases do not succeed in our schools.

· The U.S. public educational system remains one of the most unequal of the industrialized nations

· In the United States, just as in the rest of the world, student’s living conditions, their socioeconomic, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, their gender are related to the number of years they attend school, their courses of study, their achievement and the specific knowledge and skills they acquire.

Source Support: Grossman, Herbert. Achieving Educational Equality. Charles C Thomas, 1998.

2. The history/major events that have taken place affecting the inequalities in education today.

(P) Inequalities within the education system is a deep rooted and long lasting issue that society has been dealing with for years.

· Brown vs. Board of  Education  (1954): the Supreme Court declared separate schools to be “inherently unequal” and outlawed segregation in schools.

· San Antonio School District vs. Rodriguez (1973): banded any reading of Brown arguing that education is a federal constitutional right under the 14th amendment and the phrase “equal terms” therefore requires the federal government to guarantee equal funding of education to all children

· Milliken vs. Bradley (1974): cemented that both poor and minority children in underfunded urban school systems would struggle

· Board of Education of Oklahoma vs. Dowell (1991

Source Support: Clinchy, Evans. The Rights of All Our Children. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1998.

3. The socioeconomic inequalities that cause this issue.

(P) There are multiple mechanisms within families and schools which reproduce social and economic disparities in schooling.

(I) Family background, especially income, is consistently found to be related to educational outcomes such as grades, test scores, school dropout, and educational-degree attainment. (E) Schools with lower percentages of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunches have higher proportions of high school graduates, as do schools in districts with lower poverty rates (Shelley and Lee). (S) The higher the social class is at home, the higher the achievement level of the student.

Source Support: Nelson, Shelley L., and Jennifer Catherine Lee. "Socioeconomic Inequality In Education." Encyclopedia of the Life Course and Human Development, edited by Deborah Carr, vol. 1: Childhood and Adolescence, Macmillan Reference USA, 2009, pp. 462-467. Gale Virtual Reference Library, go.galegroup.com.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/ps/i.do?p=GVRL&sw=w&u=wash_main&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CCX3273000122&asid=24f0346d8380e17770afc07642dca77b. Accessed 7 Nov. 2017.

4. The racial inequalities that cause this issue.

(P) The education system has been a battleground for racial and ethnic minorities fighting to gain access to valued resources and credentials.

(I) Many students in the public education, especially those of color, are raised in poverty (E) Studies indicate that, when school is in session, Black and White children in segregated schools learn more than students in integrated schools (“Racial Inequality”). (S) If one is of color or a minority, they automatically have disadvantages and road blocks that a white student doesn’t have to deal with. Simply at birth, they are less likely than their white to peers to be successful.

Source Support: "Racial Inequality In Education." Encyclopedia of the Life Course and Human Development, edited by Deborah Carr, vol. 1: Childhood and Adolescence, Macmillan Reference USA, 2009, pp. 383-388. Gale Virtual Reference Library, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GVRL&sw=w&u=wash_main&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CCX3273000103&asid=f73395c613bce5b01552cdb64e7fdc52. Accessed 2 Nov. 2017.

5. How segregated schools cause inequalities among the education system.

(P) Today, because of how district lines are drawn, you naturally go to school with those who live around you so the kids from wealthy families go to school with other kids from wealthy families and kids who came from poor families, go to school with other kids from poor families. (I) When African American and Latino students are segregated in schools where the majority isn’t white, these children find themselves in high poverty schools while segregated white students are almost always enroll high proportions of students from the middle class. Concentrated poverty is linked to lower educational achievement

(E) “As of 2006, many Latino and African American students are attending schools with more than 90 percent Latino and black enrollment” (Frankenberg).

(S) Desegregated schools tend to provide better conditions for students of color than segregated schools.

Source Support: Frankenberg, Erica. "Segregation, School." Encyclopedia of the Life Course and Human Development, edited by Deborah Carr, vol. 1: Childhood and Adolescence, Macmillan Reference USA, 2009, pp. 420-424. Gale Virtual Reference Library, go.galegroup.com.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/ps/i.do?p=GVRL&sw=w&u=wash_main&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CCX3273000112&asid=3b72bfb7f969671a3dd3db8ab7e2fc8b. Accessed 7 Nov. 2017.

Clinchy, Evans. The Rights of All Our Children. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1998.