Tag Archives: access to higher education

The Implied Promise of a Guaranteed Education in the United States and How the Failure to Deliver it Equitably Perpetuates Generational Poverty – Race, Racism and the Law

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Excerpted from: Anjaleck Flowers, The Implied Promise of a Guaranteed Education in the United States and How the Failure to Deliver it Equitably Perpetuates Generational Poverty, 45 Mitchell Hamline Law Review 1 (2019) (284 Footnotes) (Full Document)

AnjaleckFlowersThe United States is known as a country where anything is possible. Immigrants, foreigners, and citizens alike know what it means when someone says, “the American Dream”–that anything is achievable in the United States and that everyone has a chance to achieve their financial goals, regardless of their socioeconomic status. Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth president of the United States and a former attorney, espoused this belief in his speech on March 6, 1860:

I don’t believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich; it would do more harm than good. So while we do not propose any war upon capital, we do wish to allow the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with everybody else. When one starts poor, as most do in the race of life, free society is such that he knows he can better his condition; he knows that there is no fixed condition of labor, for his whole life. I am not ashamed to confess that twenty five [sic] years ago I was a hired laborer, mauling rails, at work on a flat-boat–just what might happen to any poor man’s son! I want every man to have the chance–and I believe a black man is entitled to it–in which he can better his condition–when he may look forward and hope to be a hired laborer this year and the next, work for himself afterward, and finally to hire men to work for him! That is the true system. Lincoln’s speech shows that the American dream should be a possibility for every person in the United States. Although this article focuses on impoverished individuals and the hardships in changing their predictable outcomes, one cannot discuss poverty without factoring in the element of race. Unfortunately, poverty and race often go hand in hand. This paper will also touch on how impoverished persons with disabilities– particularly those who are minorities–face challenges in breaking the chains of generational poverty under the United States’ current laws and unfunded educational system. These mostly invisible barriers impact impoverished students as early as preschool, in ways that affect these students’ pipelines to college opportunities and overall career earnings.

This article will show that although there is no constitutional right to education at the federal level, all states have mandated compulsory education for children. The Fourteenth Amendment and case law further support the notion that the United States has promised and expects states to educate children in an equitable manner. The United States Supreme Court came very close to declaring that education is a right in Brown v. Board of Education by stating that “[s]uch an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.” Unfortunately, United States laws and policy have not financially and explicitly supported mandates under the law. Opportunity and education gaps for impoverished students exist at astounding rates in comparison to their non-impoverished peers. Laws, policy, resources–and an inquiry into how U.S. society views the idea of providing a thorough, well-rounded, and equitable education for all–can deliver the necessary changes to reduce the gaps. These factors have the potential to create pathways for every person to realistically have an opportunity to change their financial trajectory in life, regardless of where that person’s financial journey at birth begins.

This article will also examine the history of compulsory education law and share data that reveals educational inequities relating to poverty and inadequate resources necessary to fulfill the educational obligations under the law. Finally, this article will share the research-based practical solutions shown to help reduce the implications of adverse financial outcomes of impoverished students–solutions that provide alternatives to continuing the status quo of the current U.S. education system.. .]

Closing the achievement and financial gaps ultimately helps students in poverty–including minority students and students with disabilities–to end generational poverty. Providing these students with resources to get a quality education will help them build strong financial futures. Supporting future generations of students helps strengthen the nation in its entirety. As stated in Brown v. Board of Education,“[i]n these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education.” This education must be one of quality, with standards of adequacy and minimum levels of achievement. Without education, the cycle of generational poverty simply repeats and perpetuates. Education must be the disrupter to interrupt and stop the pervasive cycle of financial disparity.

The income and achievement gaps are also signs of a bigger impact on quality of life. Sufficient and equitable education is a tool that can help everyone achieve a better quality of life. The U.S. education system may not be intentionally causing these disparities, but the U.S. education system must be intentional about bringing these disparities to an end.

Anjie Flowers currently works as the Deputy General Counsel for Minneapolis Public Schools.

Source: The Implied Promise of a Guaranteed Education in the United States and How the Failure to Deliver it Equitably Perpetuates Generational Poverty – Race, Racism and the Law

The Importance Of Historically Black Colleges And Universities | News One

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The Importance Of Historically Black Colleges And Universities

Excerpt

Key role played by black schools

HBCUs have always been the vehicles for liberty and equality in the journey toward black liberation within America.

Black Americans have long understood the relationship between education and democracy. Following the Civil War, learning the rules of the American and southern political economy was necessary to take full advantage of one’s citizenship rights.

However, at the time, not only did most people believe the formerly enslaved had no desire for education, they also thought black Americans did not possess the mental capacity to pursue it.

The fervent efforts of the formerly enslaved to establish colleges in the post-bellum South ran counter to these beliefs, although the founding of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1854, even prior to the Civil War’s conclusion, proved beyond doubt that black Americans were keen to seek education.

The point is, HBCUs played a crucial role in transforming how America was to understand and envision what it meant to be black following the Civil War. And throughout the years, these schools have served as incubators for future generations of freedom fighters.

It was HBCUs, for example, where the carefully crafted educational strategies that birthed the mass protests and civil unrest of the 1950s and 1960s emerged, a fact that many people today may fail to appreciate adequately.

Contributions of black colleges

HBCUs influenced the character of the black liberation struggle. They trained the leaders and served as key sites of exchange where ideals about the best paths toward freedom took shape.

Take Howard University, an HBCU founded in 1867, as an example. Without this school, our understanding of equality and access would be quite different.

It was Howard graduates who would use the law to challenge the idea that separate educational facilities could ever produce equal outcomes for black Americans.

Charles Hamilton Houston, vice dean of Howard Law School, viewed the school as a laboratory that would “create the select and talented corps of lawyers who would work to fulfill constitutional promises.”

So it did.

Thurgood Marshall, the lawyer who would argue the Brown v Board of Topeka case and later became a Supreme Court justice, emerged from this environment. He came up with a brilliantly constructed critique of racially segregated education that persuaded the Supreme Court to strike down the system.

Past and present challenges

Predictably, black schools faced many challenges. From the start, defenders of white supremacy have understood HBCUs as spaces intricately connected to the fight for civil rights and black liberation.

To impede these schools’ ability to become training grounds for equality, political foes did all they could to make sure HBCUs remained underfunded, underresourced and understaffed.

For instance, southern state legislative bodies routinely diverted money away from HBCUs, leaving the schools to operate on razor-thin budgets.

In the 1920s, foundations urged the schools to limit their curriculum to politically neutral yet economically relevant subjects such as domestic service and agriculture, which were not likely to inspire students to challenge a system that denied their humanity.

Unfortunately, some of these challenges continue to this day.

Data from the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities indicate, for example, that between 2010 and 2012, the state legislature underfunded South Carolina State University by more than US$6 million.

Impact of black colleges

Questioning the contemporary relevance of HBCUs is the modern-day equivalent of such efforts.

It is true that only about 9% of all blacks enrolled in college attend HBCUs. And I can agree that if we understand the role of HBCUs only in terms of the numbers educated, then these schools are not as relevant to the majority of black Americans as they once were.

However, if we are to understand the role of HBCUs as vehicles of freedom and black liberation, then they still have an important role within our society.

In fact, when compared to predominantly white colleges, HBCUs continue to have a disproportionate impact on the production of college-educated black Americans. They may account for approximately 3% of all colleges and universities, but well over 20% of black Americans continue to earn their degrees at these schools.

And about 25% of black Americans earning STEM degrees do so at HBCUs.

Why we need black colleges today

So, I find it troubling when people question their contemporary necessity.

Also, doubts about these schools’ continued relevance underestimate the relationship between HBCUs and the struggle for black liberation within America that continues to this day.

Students of these schools have been at the forefront of peaceful protests. Learning from past efforts that used art as a tool for black liberation, students at Morgan State University created a large-scale photo installation around the theme of “Black Lives Matter.”

Students from Howard University gathered in front of the White House to protest the grand jury decision in the Michael Brown case. Likewise, Morehouse College students staged a march and, in conjunction with students from nearby Clark Atlanta University and Spelman College, also held a peace rally protesting the decision.

The contemporary economic, political and social precariousness of black life in America indicates that we need more settings like HBCUs, not fewer.

If we as a society come to recognize that black lives matter, then we must do the same for the venues that cultivate and nurture these lives as well.

In fact, no set of institutions better exemplifies the American ideals of civil rights and equality than historically black colleges and universities.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Source: The Importance Of Historically Black Colleges And Universities | News One

The Negative Effects of Privilege on Educational Attainment: Gender, Race, Class, and the Bachelor’s Degree [Paper]

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The Negative Effects of Privilege on Educational Attainment: Gender, Race, Class, and the Bachelor’s Degree*

First published: 14 January 2014
https://doi.org/10.1111/ssqu.12003
Cited by: 1
*The author thanks Eric Lopez for outstanding research assistance. The article benefited from comments by Tad Krauze, Marc Silver, and the anonymous reviewers at SSQ. This research uses data from Add Health, a program project directed by Kathleen Mullan Harris and designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and funded by grant P01‐HD31921 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations. Special acknowledgment is due to Ronald R. Rindfuss and Barbara Entwisle for assistance in the original design. Information on how to obtain the Add Health data files is available on the Add Health website (<http://www.cpc.unc.edu/addhealth>). No direct support was received from grant P01‐HD31921 for this analysis.

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Abstract

Objective

To show that in the contemporary United States, traditionally privileged categories of people—men, whites, and the super‐rich—complete four‐year college degrees at rates lower than their nonprivileged counterparts—women, nonwhites, and the “99 percent.”

Methods

Logistic regression and an educational transitions method are used on the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Waves 1 and 4) to predict, given college entrance, who completes a bachelor’s degree.

Results

Women, the lower 99 percent of the income distribution, and when economic resources are present, nonwhites all complete college at higher rates than men, the richest 1 percent, and whites, respectively. In a final model, rich white men as a single category are shown to complete college less than everyone else.

Conclusion

As previously excluded categories of people have gained access to higher education, the privileged are shifting their reproduction strategies away from schooling.