Education In The Ghetto

               I am from Richmond, California, a city with a lot of history. It is a well-known city because of its history during the Second World War, but also because of the high crime rates, and low socioeconomic status. With such high crime rates, it was difficult to find teachers who were willing to teach in the area. This was the ghetto and it was very rare for others who were not from Richmond to come to Richmond. I went to a small school named Lincoln Elementary. At school, we were always given the oldest textbooks, which were torn and sometimes had missing pages. The school was old and did not have much space. There were so many students attending the school that the school had to get portable classrooms to be placed outside the main building. Most of my years at Lincoln, I was in those portable classrooms that felt like a prison. These rooms had two windows that were very small. It was nothing like the movies where the student looked out these huge windows to a view of trees, flowers, and birds. My view was very different. My view was of a barred up window with nothing but huge bushes and garbage on the other side. Why is it that there was not enough funding for the school to expand? One explanation given in the book Race & Racism: A Critical Approach by Tanya Golash-Boza to the education disparities is that public education in the United States also relies on local property taxes. Inequalities in housing values translate to inequalities in schools in the area (Golash-Boza 220). Another reason for the lack of funding had to do with the No Child Left Behind law. The standardized test scores lowered caused an dramatic impact on the amount of funding Lincoln Elementary school received. The school itself today has a ranking of just 2 out of 10.

Most of my classes were composed of majority Hispanic and African American students, while other classes were composed of Asian and white students. The enrollment of the school today is over 80% Hispanic and about 15% Black. These percentages were different compared to while I was in elementary school. We were separated and the schools’ reasoning was because our classes were not as advanced or fast pace as the other classes were. The Hispanic children were placed in what is called ELD or English Language Development. Most of the Hispanic children came from Spanish speaking homes, so they were placed in these classes in order for them to learn the English language at an easier level. Like most Hispanics at my school, I was placed in ELD classes all throughout elementary school. I do not remember learning much English from school. 

Most, if not all, the students who attended that school came from a low-income family. Because of the low socioeconomic background, the students had to deal with a lot more problems than getting higher test scores. The personal problems students faced had a huge impact on their participation in school, which led to low test scores and caused the school to receive less funding. Standardized testing could be considered a form of institutional racism because it is believed to be biased toward particular socioeconomic backgrounds. In the situation with my school, our socioeconomic background is low, which causes the standardized testing scores to be low in this school. The institutionalized racism, even though not necessarily seen by the naked eye, is alive in present in varies public schools in neighborhoods with low socioeconomic status. There is no law that states this is illegal, but the No Child Left Behind law leaves all these students who do not have the privilege to attend schools in better neighborhoods are left behind.