School Segregation

        In today’s society, we now know integration in almost every aspect of schooling has a positive effect on students.  This is what prompted the Supreme Court’s decision to desegregate schools back in 1954. This concept is meant to be more than just seating black, whites, and Latinos next to each other in classrooms, it is not solely about race. Often schools are also segregated by where these students live based on parents salaries. Minorities attending racially isolated schools leads to inadequate educational opportunities and are held to a lower curriculum level. Due to this, they tend to have lower rates of academic achievement compared to students in middle-class schools. Many studies have shown a significant increase in both education and occupational achievements, quality of secondary education, salary earned later and reduce likely hood of incarceration among African American students. Integration actually is beneficial to middle-income and white students providing situations that improve critical thinking skills and better prepare students to move into our multicultural world they will face as they become adults. Segregation of schools only leads to a huge achievement gap in students.

        It is seen that in schools with the biggest disadvantages of African American children are segregated due to school zoning based on high-poverty neighborhoods. Nationally, in more aspects then just education, African American and Hispanic students are 3 times (35% and 34.5%, respectively) as likely as White students (12.5%) to be born into poverty, have less adequate access to health care, and tend to attend schools with inadequate physical facilities, and less highly qualified and trained teachers. (Carter 2016) The outcome from this is negative for these minority students because they are not only segregated from white students but also not given the chance to be exposed to students in the middle-class, believed to alter academic success.