Short Introduction to Racial Inequalities in American Education (PDF)

Essay from the year 2018 in the subject History - America, grade: 5.0, , language: English, abstract: Education affects every part of human beings' lives. For the majority of people education level is the factor which decides about the level of income, place in the class system, and even health care. Without the education on an average level from the very beginning, the person immediately is exposed to a severe disadvantage in comparison with those who receive it.
During the process of gathering the materials for this thesis, the author of this thesis has found the most important obstacles in the history of American equal education. Sadly, the problems of education inequality are deeply rooted throughout American history. In the South segregation was justified in the Supreme Court in the Plessy vs Ferguson Case from 1896 which mandated that schools should to be segregated into black and white.

Basically, in the North there were no segregation laws, but school administrators consciously arranged the districts with the purpose of segregation. Segregation caused inferior education for Blacks because the districts in which they were taught obtained definitely less money. This meant that the schools could not afford quality teachers or sufficient facilities.
The American nation had to wait until 1954 when the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, and finally reversed the position it held since 1896. By 1980 the federal courts largely succeeded in eliminating the system of legalized segregation in southern schools.

The federal government also investigated many northern cities and ordered that the school districts need to be re-arranged so that they can include minorities. Interestingly, the government also, in some cases, ruled the busing of minorities to other districts in an attempt to make education equal between districts. In order to present what factors led to such a situation in American schools, the author decided to divide the paper in three parts - each discussing different period of inequalities found in educational history.