“Still Separate, Still Unequal”, written by Jonathan Kozol, describes the reality of urban public schools and the isolation and segregation the students there face today. Jonathan Kozol illustrates the grim reality of the inequality that African American and Hispanic children face within todays public education system. In this essay, Kozol shows the reader, with alarming statistics and percentages, just how segregated Americas urban schools have become. He also brings light to the fact that suburban schools, with predominantly white students, are given far better funding and a much higher quality education, than the poverty stricken schools of the urban neighborhoods.…
schools exist in both Black and Latino communities. Disruptive actions against school communities have predominantly been concentrated in segregated communities of color in Chicago. School closings in particular have…
“According to Black Star Project Executive Director, Phillip Jackson, in 2007 there were 321 African American men enrolled at Northwestern University (1.7 percent of the student body) but four times that number – 1,207- imprisoned at Western Illinois Correctional Center (60 percent of the prison population)” (Walker, Spohn & Delone, 2012). This is only one example of the astounding percentage of young black men currently serving jail time as opposed to pursuing a college education. Something must be vitally wrong with our criminal justice system, since it allows these staggering numbers to hold truth. Overall the total percentage of young African American males is almost five times more than that of their young white or Hispanic male counterparts. I find this statistic very disturbing and chose to research the why and how this is occurring. There are many possible reasons such as limited access to public health clinics, racial profiling, unfair judicial systems, racial differences in judges, lawyers, and law makers, poverty, and parental upbringing; to name a few. How do these young men get sucked into a life of crime, do they have an alternative or a role model to seek counsel form? The numbers do not lie and there must be sound reasons behind them. In this paper I will research and discuss the various reasons why young African American males are grossly over represented in the criminal justice and corrections facilities. While the overall white population is higher than the African American population, 10.4 percent of African American men between the ages of 25-29 can expect to spend time in jail, compared with 2.4 percent of Hispanics and 1.2 percent of white men. Throughout this paper I will discuss not only the staggering numbers but also the reasoning behind them and possible solutions or at the very least a starting point to help fix the problem at hand. “…People of color are disproportionately involved in…
References: Morris, J.E. (1999). What is the future of predominatly black urban schools?. Questia Media America, Inc.. Retrieved from http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst?docId=5001865973…
In the article about the effect of mass incarceration regarding children falling behind in school, Melinda Anderson provides an overview of why children of color face a higher rate of educational issue- failing, dropping out, being held behind, etc.-in comparison to white children, due to the imprisonment of their family…
As a Bay Area resident for all my life, chapter 5 from Victor Rios’ Punished resonates with me a lot. I often praise the charter school that I went to because of the academic success I gained from it. However, the ninth grade was a time when I noticed a lot of students of minority ethnic backgrounds struggling with school enforcement. My high school did not have school resource officers (SROs), but there was a dean and vice principal who acted as that authority. This was because it was a small school; the graduating class consisted of one-hundred students. I believe that it was mainly African Americans or Latinos, as these racial backgrounds formed a majority of the school, who were caught up in trying to resist against what they perceived…
References: Adams, Ericka, & Vera Sanchez, Claudio. (2011). Sacrificed on the altar of public safety: The policing of Latino and African American youth. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice (Vol. 27). US: Sage Publications.…
Today’s incarcerated youth is made up by two-fifths African-American and one fifth Hispanic. Today’s minority youth are facing stricter punishment than their white counterparts, resulting in a larger number of minority youth jailed. The article, “Preliminary Report on Race and Washington’s Criminal Justice System” (Anonymous, 2012), states that “African-Americans are over represented in the prison population because they commit a disproportionate number of crimes”. This seems to be an unfair judgment due to the fact that minorities are more than two times more likely to be searched or stopped for any kind of criminal activity based on the color of their skin. For example, “among felony drug offenders, black defendants were 62% more likely to be sentenced to prison than similarly situated white defendants.” (Anonymous, 2012) Also once convicted, African-Americans were 21% more likely to receive harsher punishment compared to white offenders with a sentence that is 10% longer than white offenders that committed similar offences. Racism in our judicial system are present at different stages of our criminal justice system including but not limited to arrest, charging, conviction, and imprisonment. According to recent research, done by the Department of Education, minority students made up more than 70% of arrested youth in the 2009-2010 school year. Young African-Americans have a higher rate of youth incarceration and are more likely to be imprisoned as adults than white…
For instance, my high school had access to numerous extracurricular activities, college preparatory help, and support systems for its mostly white population of students from dual enrollment to support for young caregivers. A sociological perspective would comprehend with their description that, “educational attainment appears to be related to race rather than being a random phenomenon….Overall dropout rates declined between 1972 and 2005, from 15 percent to 9 percent, but dropout rates are still much higher for many minority youth” (Fitzgerald, 2014, p. 217-218). These statistics account for individuals’ capability to pursue higher education which encompasses structural circumstances, such as how race and class privilege are key roles in their high school opportunities. In essence, the disparities of schooling paint hard truths of restrictions even before they obtain a postsecondary degree following educational inequalities along racial lines or achievement…
In addition, given that most drivers stopped in “profile” checks are in fact not drug traffickers, these practices often contribute to African American distrust of law enforcement. Race and Class Effects As the trials of O.J. Simpson illustrated so clearly, discussions of race and the criminal justice system are often heavily overlaid with considerations of class as well. Racial disparities are related in part to the volume of crime committed by various groups, but they are also a function of differing forms of treatment that relate to the background and resources of the offender. Criminologist Delbert Elliott has conducted analyses of youthful offending and its relation to race and class.8 In longitudinal studies of data from the National Youth Survey he has found several intriguing patterns: • Self-reported rates of offending behavior by young males are high across all racial groups, with 42% of males reporting that they have engaged in some form of violent offending – aggravated assault, robbery, or rape – by the age of 27. Black males engage in serious violent offending at higher rates than white males, but not dramatically so. By age 27, 48% of black males have reported at least one instance of such behavior, compared to 38% of white males, a ratio of about 5:4. For lower class males, the differences are even smaller, about 7:6 black to white. Offenses by blacks are more likely to lead to arrest than those of whites. While the selfreported involvement of…
When you first come across the topic of Racial Profiling terms such as violence, racial conflicts, brutality, law enforcement, and injustice tends to surface in your thoughts. But have you ever considered how the term education is related to racial profiling. We often hear about racial profiling occurring between law enforcement officials and individuals, who are being suspected or targeted due to race, ethnicity, religion, or other factors. But racial profiling can also affect anyone who is seeking an education, so that means you. Aside from the prominent and crucial issue of its existence in numerous neighborhoods and in communities worldwide it is also very dominant and evident within the education system. As students attend schools, universities,…
In his essay “Still Separate, Still Unequal,” Jonathan Kozol gives us a very detailed presentation of the emergent trend of racial segregation within America’s urban and inner-city schools. Kozol provides substantiation to his claim based on his research and observations of different school environments, its teachers and students, and personal interviews with them. It is very clear that color of education in America is not green like the dollar bill; it is white if you’re rich and brown if you’re poor. What’s more atrocious is how the government of the people gives more educational benefits to the rich and less to the poor.…
According to the Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial: Black Male dropouts. “Nationally 12 percent of black males, ages 16 to 24, were dropouts, compared with 6 percent for white males. The high school dropout rate for black males was 53 percent in Philadelphia in 2005.” According to the Manhattan Institute study, “Leaving Boys Behind: Public High School Graduation Rates.” The gender gap was wider, this is because 59 percent of African American female students graduated compare to only 48 percent of their male counterparts. Between the year 2005 and 2010 in the city of Philadelphia, only “two-thirds of African American females finish high school in six years and about half of the males do” ( Philadelphia Public School Notebook). In six years more than “60 percent of Latino students finish high school- 40 percent of black students, 40 percent of Whites’, and 30 percent of Asians” (Philadelphia Public School Notebook). These statistics show that all ethnic groups have many peers who are or will be in high school dropouts. However, there are many reasons why this crisis is occurring in the African American…
Education is a vital tool to economic security. However, Melissa Marschall (1997) has found that current policies demonstrate minorities have been denied equal access to education. She has found that assignment systems based on assessments of language deficiencies or other individual needs are used to separate non-whites from whites. According to Jeffrey J. Mondack and Diana C. Mutz (1997), inequitable school financing is equally detrimental to non-white students. Funding for public schools comes from property taxes. They go along to say that predomintly non-white schools tend to be in central inner city school districts which have a smaller property tax…
American communities have become marginalized. One fundamental aspect of this marginalization is the disparate treatment of persons of color which occurs incrementally across the entire spectrum of America’s criminal justice system. Racial and ethnic disparity foster public mistrust of the criminal justice system and this impedes our ability to promote public safety (Cole 1999).…