Educational Equity
A solid public education is fundamental to the reduction of social inequality and to the eventual elimination of racial disparities in both educational outcomes and employment opportunities. American schools all too often maintain and reproduce racial inequality. As a microcosm of larger society, schooling represents our society’s lack of commitment toward racial and social justice. Regrettably, the schooling process all too often reflects, produces, and reproduces racial hierarchies and social and economic divisions that exist in larger society and culture.
Forum 2003 Program
Schooling further stratifies groups into those that are superordinate and those that are subordinate. Students at the top of the economic ladder are rewarded with access to better teachers and classes while those at the bottom are punished and relegated to remedial classes with badly trained and unmotivated teachers. Some racial groups receive more attention and therefore flourish, while their counter groups are virtually ignored and doomed to failure. In fact, with better teachers and classes, white middle-class youth are assured of maintaining their racial and class status in schools and hence their social, political, and economic positions are reproduced in larger society.
What can be done?
Although schools initiate the “production” of racial systems of inequality, new forms of oppositional structures do emerge to resist and transform the American educational landscape. In this Forum, prominent researchers, policy makers, and practitioners gathered to explore the effects of race and ethnicity on school experiences among a diverse and complex student population. In so doing, the forum was able to highlight how race and ethnicity structure unequal educational experiences in school that reflect the existing racial and ethnic hierarchy in American society and culture. However, aiming to inspire more just educational practices, the forum speakeres emphasized how students and teachers may begin to dismantle racial inequality through distinct community and school practices.
Through this forum, the César E. Chávez Institute aimed to unveil the complexities of race and ethnicity within the United States beyond a Black and White perspective. We believe that race, ethnicity and student success must be situated at the center of educational analysis through a comparative racial formation lens that includes distinct student populations. While many minority youth perform poorly in school, many others attain urban school success. The racial minority student population reflects not a monolithic entity in which all youths perform poorly, but a heterogeneous one in which some perform well and others do not. The inter-group and intra-group differences among racial minority youth need further exploration.
This important forum on education helped us tale a step in this direction.