The wealth gap between whites and blacks in the United States ismuch larger than the gap in earnings.
The gap in earning is only part of the problem with the education discrepancy between races. There are countless obstacles in place. A big problem is the socio-political power of white America vs black America. Social status ties directly to economic opportunity and influence in society. This leads to a chain of problems, all leading back to the limited opportunities available to black America.
A brief perusal of some of the history of public schooling in theUnited States documents the way that we have accumulated aneducation debt over time. In 1827 Massachusetts passed a law mak-ing all grades of public school open to all pupils free of charge. Atabout the same time, most Southern states already had laws for-bidding the teaching of enslaved Africans to read. By 1837, whenHorace Mann had become head of the newly formed Massachu-setts State Board of Education, Edmund Dwight, a wealthy Bostonindustrialist, felt that the state board was crucial to factory ownersand offered to supplement the state salary with his own money.What is omitted from this history is that the major raw material ofthose textile factories, which drove the economy of the East, wascotton—the crop that depended primarily on the labor of enslavedAfricans (Farrow, Lang, & Frank, 2005). Thus one of the ironiesof the historical debt is that while African Americans were enslavedand prohibited from schooling, the product of their labor was usedto profit Northern industrialists who already had the benefits ofeducation.
You can see how the education problems and disparities we are facing today were really paved over the last two centuries. Black slaved were barred from education and used for the manufacturing and production of goods. At the time where "cotton is king" the planation economy was raving in the eastern United States, where the labor of the black slaves was ultimately used to further build a bridge between their own education and that of white America. It's crazy to think the effect of King Cotton still leaves it mark on todays education system.
But I want to use this opportunity to call into question the wis-dom of focusing on the achievement gap as a way of explaining andunderstanding the persistent inequality that exists (and has alwaysexisted) in our nation’s schools.
Billings' brings up many point that tie back into the problem of the achievement gap in schools. Essentially, this is a product of the inequality that exists with the education system. We can see this from the disparities and limited allocation of resources between white and urban schools. More importantly, billings' shines a light to the reality of the situation, it seems that in these inequalities we have created the disparity in standardized tests.
Why do factors like race and class continue to be strongpredictors of achievement when gender disparities have shrunk?
I found this question to be very interesting as it also seems to hold the solution to the problems raised in this piece. The disparities in test course still remains high between class and races in todays education system, while gender disparities have significantly improved. Looking at how exactly these gender barriers improve might hold the key to further improving disparities in education. For instance, there are countless clubs and organization that work specifically toward female empowerment in education. You have programs like women in STEM, in tech, and just about every field you can think of. You even have all women schools like Barnard, an extension of Columbia University, whose goal is to put out more women into the world who have the education to make a difference. Perhaps if ore programs and schools catered specifically to black and latino races, or immigrants students, we would see more of an upward trend improvement, like that of the gender barriers. But how exactly are these programs to be funded and implemented is the question?