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Why Does The Education System Not Treat All Students Equally?

Inequality in education is one of the leading reasons why the dropout rate has risen in the last couple of years. Students in the United States are not given an equal quality of education; it is a sad fact that some students are learning a lot more than other because their school has better facilities than the others. Why is there inequality in the educational system, and can it be remedied?

The Problems

The most common reason for educational inequality is the amount of property tax an area generates. The more affluent an area is, the property taxes for the citizens will also be higher. And the more taxes that an area collects the school district will also get more funding as well. When the roles get reversed and the area does not collect as much revenue, the school district gets hit the hardest.

It is sad knowing that only the rich who can afford to live in a wealthy neighborhood has access to a better quality education because the school is well-funded, while the other classes will have to settle for a lower-class school where the education that they will get is average at best, causing the gap between the rich and the poor to widen.

The reason stated above is the reason why there is such a lack of social movements in the past few years. Social movement is the increasing in status of a family from one generation to the next, a sort of rags to riches story if you will. The number of social mobility in the has remained unmoving in the past few years, some analysts even say that they have decreased in number. This is all due to the stratified educational system in the US where some schools get more funding than the others, thus giving their students a better quality of education.

Because only the rich have access to higher quality education they are the only ones that are given enough opportunities to attain success. Though there are exceptions among the poor that truly have risen from rags to riches thanks to their hard work and perseverance, if there is no educational inequality the number of students who will become successful will be a lot higher.

The government is now getting concerned about the rising number of high school dropouts due to the inequality in education. Because most jobs these days require that you at least get a high school diploma, a lot of people are unable to find jobs. This means that the government is losing millions of dollars in income because of the dwindling workforce, which is why the government has proposed solutions that they believe will solve the problem of educational inequality.

One of the solutions proposed by the government is allowing students to transfer into another school within the district if their parents are not satisfied with the quality of education they get from their current school. And some lawmakers are vouching for the privatization of schools so that they will be run like businesses, and by doing so they will force the schools to improve themselves to get ahead of their "competition". But many people are still unsure about the proposed solutions.

Take the School Choice solution for example, people feel that this will just be a "band-aid" solution to the real problem because this will only solve the problem of a selected few of the children, taking a single student's situation rather than solving the problem for the whole school.

It is sad to know that due to inequality in education, a lot of students will not reach their full potential.

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