Race Still Matters

Yun Ting (Claudia) Chao

ASA Section 2

Week 3

Race still matters

            According to the data, less than 1/3 of white students attend schools comprised mostly of minorities, this is one of the first information presented by this collage. I know this is trying to show how outrageous racial segregation in educational systems still exists; yet this information seems redundant and confusing at the same time. Since if this were a school “comprised of mostly minorities” why would there be a lot of white students anyways. Personally I do not even think a school comprising mostly of a certain racial group is a problem. People are social animals and they do like living within their cultural communities, which can result in the school district in the area to be mostly comprised of a single race. The problem lies in the fact that schools with more minority students receive less funding and put less of an effort in giving their students an option to go for higher education. With less resources or money spent on those schools, students of those schools (both minority and whites) end up with lower test scores, which can hinder their path to good universities. The collage also pointed out that only 2.5% students at a predominantly Hmong school fulfill UC schools requirements, whereas a predominantly Chinese school elsewhere that number is 41.2%, showing that schools filled with different racial groups provide different resources to their students. Lastly, only 32.6% public high schools in the US offer AP courses in four core subject areas, this seems a problem in the educational system itself, none related to race. And students who come from lower income tier families score much lower on SAT tests, compared to students from higher income tier families. All in all, many of these problems can snowball and turn into a cycle, so the question is what is the government doing to pinpoint the exact problem in why schools with different racial profiles are getting different amounts of resources and funding, when the amount of funding should be based on how many students are at a school in the first place?