A Minute Analysis of Educational Inequality

I’ve taught high school seniors for two years through two different programs offered at Loyola Marymount University, Street Read and Street Write. In my experiences at both Westchester High and Culver City High-I have witnessed the results of gerrymandering and have witnessed how our political environment severely effects the students in their everyday classrooms and lives.

One semester my partner Miquel and I wrote an investigate piece on Westchester High, in which we highlighted how although a magnet school-required by law to have a 70% minority ratio- fixed their CAHSEE scores to appeal to prospective students. All the while, in our class of 45 seniors, only 7 applied to college and most, if not all, were either illiterate or still reading at a 7th grade to an “advanced” freshman level.  It was heart breaking.

As the numbers show, under performance is an issue facing many schools in LAUSD, but for magnet schools something else plays a very distinctive role. Joanne Bernstein, our supervising instructor, recalls working as the Magnet Coordinator for Westchester High, a job in where she sarcastically claimed that she, “was replaced for a younger, newer model.” At that time, she received a call from the then superintendent Ramon Cortines who she reported as saying,

“Why the hell am I sending these kids to you to fail, when they can just fail at home?”

We came into the classroom every day, and I still do, with the high hope of reaching out to these students, and if we managed to help a handful, we would call that in of itself a blessing. These students came from backgrounds unfamiliar to most of the privileged LMU community. One student, for example, Ryan, is 17 years-old and he is homeless. He doesn’t know where to sleep at night, or what he will eat.

These students have no positive reinforcement. No one to tell them they could be greater than what society tells them to be-gangsters, drug dealers, laborers, prostitutes-they have no aspirations because they are systemically taught to not have any.

With this being said, one would think that their unfortunate circumstances would motivate teachers to do everything in their will-power to positively enhance these students’ lives. Though, this issue of racialized educational inequality predominately stems from America’s long history of racism and slavery targeted towards most, if not all, minorities.

For example, did you know that the liberation from Spanish rule in 1821 and the US conquest of territories beginning in 1845 did not allow Chicanos the time required to stabilize cultural, legal and economic boundaries.  Acknowledging the Chicano people’s vulnerability, the newly American states fully imposed its social hierarchy on them; blatantly disregarding The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. With this, legal forms of disenfranchisement began to implement into Chicano culture.

Subsequently the American states, founded on a social hierarchy on the premise of color, “proposed that only free whites would receive the full benefits of citizenship; leaving those of color with limited civil rights” (Menchaca, 584). The Anglo’s blatant disregard of Chicano people and culture perpetuated segregation, racism and disenfranchisement; further fragmenting the relationship between the two cultures to this day.

Continuously, writer and activist Virgilo Elizondo reflects upon his experiences in the American school system as a Chicano American student and he describes how:

“The schools had done a good job of convincing [them] that [they] were different…all the courses indicated this by pointing to the Anglo-American models of existence as the only normal existence of intelligent, civilized human beings” (Elizondo, 18).

The imperialistic ideology that the white man is the ideal human being has been embedded within the education system. Teachers regurgitated these ideologies onto Chicano-American students, obstructing the quality of education they receive. Elizondo’s academic accounts aid in depicting that “policymakers and educators are failing Mexican-American students and cementing their low status in American society” (127); again highlighting educational inequality as a continual systemic issue.

It is so depressing to know and witness these drastic levels of educational inequality in 2017. We live in a time of consciousness, where we have information at the tips of our fingertips. If only actual effort, at the state and federal level, was implemented into helping these students. However, any social movement begins with word of mouth, and information.

Ideally, the white American population needs to begin a dialogue in regards to the continual marginalization of minorities in the education system; acknowledging the personal accounts of these students, their cultures and histories. As the dialogue progresses, the understanding of educational inequality will reach policy makers, who will be in a federal position to mend current racist and derogatory policies; resulting in the positive enhancement of minority lives.