Unequal? I Think So.

After watching the Time Wise videos, doing a little reading about the Brown vs. Board of Education case, and reading the article in the New York times it became very clear to me that education in schools is said to be equal, but it clearly is not. In the first Time Wise video he states that "we are nowhere near a post racial America." He says that "people are still being racist and discriminating against average, everyday folks of color whether it has to do with housing, education, criminal justice, employment, healthcare, or elsewhere." I completely agree with what he is saying. I especially agree with the education portion of this quote. It really is apparent that racism and discrimination still exists in education. The Brown vs. Board of Education case was supposed to stop this sort of thing from happening. It created schools to be separate, but equal. It appears to me that people of color often go to schools that are poor and most of the students are at or below the poverty level.


In the article by Bob Herbert he states, "Schools are no longer legally segregated, but because of residential patterns, housing discrimination, economic disparities and long-held custom, they most emphatically are in reality." White people often go to schools that are filled with students who are middle class or above and they have nice facilities while African Americans or Hispanics do not have nice facilities. They often get provided with outdated books and often not even enough books for every student. Does that seem equal to you? It also seems like it is separated by race and class. It almost seems as if the Brown vs. Board of education only changed things a small amount. Here is a chart showing the rates of poverty of different races.

I also noticed from my service learning that being in a Providence school compares to the schools that I have been to all my life. The Providence school's facilities are not as nice as the facilities of the schools that I have been to. Also, I noticed that the Providence schools is predominately African American and Hispanic and the schools that I have been in are predominately white. The school that I went to had a nice playground and we had enough books for all of the classmates. At my service learning school there is no playground, just an empty parking lot for the children to play in for recess. I think that the schools should definitely be more integrated. They should try to mix the students so that people who live in poverty can go to a school with better teachers and a nice facility. In the New York Times article Herbert says that " The best teachers tend to avoid such schools. " He is referring to schools in poverty. I think that this article shows why there might be a problem with the racism and discrimination in education in the first couple of paragraphs. I think that people born into a disadvantage deserve a better chance to succeed starting with education. It just isn't fair to them because they never even got a chance to do well in the first place.