Thursday, October 4, 2012

The Effects of the Jim Crow Laws


Between 1876 and 1965, The Jim Crow laws were prevalent in the United States, which delegated the “separate but equal” status for African Americans. However, if things were “separate,” they were innately not “equal.” This separation of services and areas for different racial groups inevitably led to the inferiority of the environments for African Americans in comparison to those of white Americans, which instigated economic, educational, and social disparities between the two races. However, in 1954, state-sponsored school segregation was deemed to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States in the famous Brown versus Board of Education case, whose ruling invalidated that of Plessy versus Ferguson.
   
W.E.B. DuBois ardently voiced the importance of education in his statement: “Of all the civil rights for which the world has struggled and fought for 5000 years, the right to learn is undoubtedly the most fundamental.... The freedom to learn ... has been bought by bitter sacrifice.  And whatever we may think of the curtailment of other civil rights, we should fight to the last ditch to keep open the right to learn, the right to have examined in our schools not only what we believe, but what we do not believe; not only what our leaders say, but what the leaders of other groups and nations, and the leaders of other centuries have said.  We must insist upon this to give our children the fairness of a start which will equip them with such an array of facts and such an attitude toward truth that they can have a real chance to judge what the world is and what its greater minds have thought it might be.”

Here, he highlights how crucial it is to invest in a meaningful education that would provide not mediocre skills but would allow for students to immerse themselves in critical thinking and creative brainstorming. This would allow them to develop an intrinsic interest in education and would give them the freedom to shape their own path of learning. The consolidation of education systems in the past have led to greater educational equality, but a color line is still apparent in our education system today.

For example, in today’s education system, standardized test scores depict that there are still evident gaps in achievement between white and minority students, excluding Asians. In fact, according to the National Education Association, statistically, in 2000, the percentage of graduation from high school of African Americans over the age of 25 years was 72 percent while the percentage of their white American counterparts was 85.5 percent. In addition, the percentage of African Americans with bachelor's degrees was 14 percent while 27 percent of their white American counterparts had bachelor’s degrees. Clearly, something must be remiss in the education system to have such a large achievement gap between the two races.

These statistics inform us that African American students have an unequal access to educational resources, such as skilled teachers and challenging yet stimulating curriculum. In fact, compared to European and Asian education systems that fund schools uniformly and centrally, the United States education system is unequal in giving students the same learning opportunities based on the family’s income because the wealthiest private schools in the United States spend multiple times more than the poorest ten percent of public school districts on resources that foster educational growth. This is what drives the achievement gap because more time and money are spent on the children who come from wealthy backgrounds, who statistically are white Americans, while nothing is spent on the poor children, who are usually minorities.
   
Closing this achievement gap will require the creation of public policies and legislation that fund the rise of public schools that are committed to challenging and stimulating students and support the teachers and students in their endeavors. It will also require communication and the working together of many different community partners, organizations, leaders, teachers, and parents. The school should be integrated and thriving in the community.  

1 comment:

  1. To this day, over fifty years after the end of the Jim Crow era, strong differences exist between the levels of education that most black Americans receive compared to their peers. I agree with you in that I believe this contrast is rooted in the forced segregation that used to exist in our country. I think that today, however, disparities in education exist not because African Americans have unequal access to educational resources but because many inner city populations lack these resources, and as a result or mass migration of many white Americans from these inner city populations, most of the children there are African American. Strangely enough, the migrations that led to these differences in economic, educational, and social differences may actually stem from integration of schools in order to end segregation. I know at first this seems very backwards to think about- how could the bringing together of white and black communities into the same facilities lead to further inequality? Historically, however, it has been noted that once integration of schools occurred, and black Americans were no longer forced to live separately from others, white Americans simply moved out of the cities and into more expensive areas that blacks could not afford. This led to the continuation of segregation. Although the segregation that existed during Jim Crow no longer exists to the same extent, it has definitely left a mark on today’s society in ways such as these. Solving the problem of public school disparities will mostly take money to pay for extracurricular programs and good teachers to work in disadvantaged populations. It will also take a lot of devotion to helping current students of poor school systems to understand the importance of continuing their education.

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