Education has become one of the most important and transformative phenomena in the United States.
A very credible report issued by the Annie E. Casey Foundation (September 23, 2024) supports public data that still rank the lowest academic achievement, most suspension and expulsions and poorly funded schools in urban and urban fringe areas with a preponderance of people of color on the lowest rungs. Those groups and subgroups are characterized as Black, Latino and Native People. Regardless of what is read, the statistics and projections are dismal.
The Annie E. Casey report entitled Race, Ethnicity and Education posits the following:
The U.S. education landscape has long been a source of unequal treatments, access and outcomes based on a student’s race or ethnicity.
Black students, for example, are twice as likely as their white peers to be in inad¬e¬quate¬ly funded school districts and 3.5 times more likely to be in “chron¬i¬cal¬ly underfunded” dis¬tricts, accord¬ing to a 2024 report released by the Albert Shanker Insti¬tute. The dis¬crep¬an¬cies in fund¬ing between Hispanic and white stu¬dents are moderately smaller but still large.
Some examples of education inequality¬i¬ty throughout his¬to¬ry include:
1. Between 1740 and 1867: Anti-lit¬er¬a¬cy laws prohibited enslaved, and some¬times free, Black Americans from learning to read or write.
2. 1954: The U.S. Supreme Court famous¬ly declared that “sep¬a¬rate is not equal” in a rul¬ing that aimed to end the prac¬tice of race-seg¬re¬gat-ed pub¬lic schools. Although this case, known as Brown v. Board of Edu¬ca¬tion, end¬ed legal seg¬re¬ga¬tion in pub¬lic schools, it did not end racial inequal¬i¬ty in edu¬ca¬tion.
3. 1964: The U.S. Supreme Court passed Title VI of the Civ¬il Rights Act, which ruled that schools receiv¬ing fed¬er¬al fund¬ing could not dis¬crim¬i-nate stu¬dents accord¬ing to their race.
Though 70 years have passed since the U.S. Supreme Court pro¬hib¬it-ed seg¬re¬ga¬tion, many of America’s pub¬lic schools are still racial¬ly and eth¬ni¬cal¬ly iso¬lat¬ed. For instance: Among pub¬lic schools nation¬wide, 60% of His¬pan¬ic stu¬dents, 59% of Black stu¬dents and 54% of Pacif¬ic Islander stu¬dents attend¬ed schools where over 75% of their class-mates shared their race or ethnicity.
At the same time, white stu¬dents were most like¬ly to attend schools where less than 25% of their class¬mates were stu¬dents of col¬or, accord¬ing to fed¬er¬al data pre¬sent¬ed by the U.S. Sec¬re¬tary of Education.
The U.S. edu¬ca¬tion sys¬tem con¬tin¬ues to nav¬i¬gate race-relat¬ed issues and changes. Some of the most recent exam¬ples of this include:
• Since Jan¬u¬ary 2021: Leg¬is¬la¬tors in 44 states have intro¬duced bills ban¬ning the teach¬ing of race in pub¬lic school class¬rooms and 18 states have adopt¬ed such legislation.
• In June 2023: The U.S. Supreme Court dis¬man¬tled race-con¬scious col¬lege admis¬sion poli¬cies.
The Institute for Social Change plans to address the phenomena on multiple levels. The first level is through the Carter G. Woodson Academy of Applied Learning. This Academy will support anti bias, anti racist education at all levels. The curricula and process will be aimed at teachers. This is critical because while teachers of color have grown in recent years (Hispanic and Asian teacher populations have grown and Black teacher populations have decreased (NCES, 2018) https://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2020103.
SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS), “Public School Teacher Data File,” 2017–18.
The Carter G. Woodson Academy of Applied Learning will focus on the inclusion of student lived experiences into the classroom and curricular areas. The practices will be encased in research based methods fueled by Emdin, Tucker, Caruthers, Billings, and other renowned scholars. The primary goal here is to improve the education of poor and marginalized students by bringing their lived experiences into to classroom: this allows the student to have a skeleton on which to build and support their learning.
Based on the current political climate and the promise of the 2025 Project Mandate for Leadership, including the threat to dismantle the Department of Education as well as the recent bans on certain books, CRT (Critical Race Theory) and anti-race teaching along with revised history we feel strongly that if these young, marginalized voices will be heard and thrive then we must create and sustain a parallel system which meets these needs. The academic achievement gaps are dismal between majority and marginalized students and the unstated, prevailing thought might be that these children are “dull” and/or unwilling and unable to learn. This of course is victim blaming and supports the theory that education is designed to reproduce the parents’ social class (Croizet, et.al., November 2019).
