Criminals and Continuation Schools

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The place I have been living in all my life is not only known for teenage pregnancies, but also for continuation schools.  Some students I know, even view it as a "cool" thing to attend a continuation school because they are known to party often and don't even have to try to pass courses. According to kidsdata.com, an organization page dedicated to educational information, it states that Madera, CA has a high school drop out rate of 13.5%, which is higher than cities like Placer who has a dropout rate of 5.7% and Calaveras which has a dropout rate of 4.9%. During my last year of high school, when people get asked the most what their plans are after graduation, a couple of people assumed where my friend and I where going. Without knowing us much they asked if we were enrolled at Madera Community College. My friend and I always shrugged those comments off and said that we were actually going to UC Davis and UC Merced. It did not shock me why they assumed we were going to community because there is a "Madera" ideology that only minorities attend continuation schools because they get pregnant or arrested often. 

When I was a freshman at Madera South High School, our school was overpopulated for the first two months. The district did not even bother to hire more teachers or to open up more classrooms because they knew the student population was going to fail classes and switch to one of the continuation schools. A little town like Madera has only two high schools, while having three continuation schools. As the city kept growing, city officials finally decided to act on the overpopulation of schools, but they are solving the problem the wrong way. While they are going to be creating more elementary schools and middle schools, they will be expanding one of the three continuation schools instead of creating another high school.

This is not the first time city officials expand the wrong type of help. According to a statistical chart in the book, Race and Racism, it demonstrated how adults under correctional supervision has dramatically increased from 1980 up to 2000 and since then, has been steadily increasing. Why does this chart relate to continuation schools? According to Golash-Boza, a sociology professor at the University of California Merced, stated that California from 1852 and 1964 had built only twelve prisons, but from 1984 till 2004 has built twenty-three major new prisons. Ever since California built those prisons, they have created stricter laws that only filled up the new prisons. Since they are expanding the continuation school, I believe the city will create new requirements that will only make it easier for students to attend continuation schools. 

This is an example of institutional racism. By expanding continuation schools the city is assuming that more students will be dropped or kicked out of high school because why else would they be expanding it? The new policy to expand continuation schools will keep creating racial inequality. While some families can pay for tutoring for their child to avoid continuation schools, other students can't afford that same help, especially if their parent/s are barely making ends meet. 

Even though laws do not permit it, racism continues to exist.  For example, if someone does not like a certain skin color, they can create inequality without precisely breaking the law. If someone black applies for a job, and does not get hired, that person does not know if it was or wasn't due to their skin color. If it was due to their skin color, the applicant would never know, unless the employer would openly admit it, which rarely happens. Additionally, even our own American laws can create inequality. As stated in the book, both white and black people are known to do drugs, but at times cops only patrol poor neighborhoods that usually consist of minorities. These are just some examples out of many that demonstrate how inequality can be taken place without any laws actually being broken.