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Educational Opportunities/Access

For most of coeducational schooling's history, the public school was thought to be gender-, class-, and race-blind or neutral. It is often assumed that students are given equal access to educational materials and a similar quality of teachers and have identical opportunities to succeed in comparable facilities. However, during the past few decades, numerous researchers concur that characteristics such as socioeconomic class, race, and gender significantly influence educational opportunities and access. A person's level of access and achievement differs not only according to their gender, age, and wealth but also in their ability to convert resources into valued outcomes.

Socioeconomic Status

Socioeconomic status or class is an important concern when examining educational access and achievement. Chances are that if a student lives in an economically depressed area, he or she will also attend inferior schooling resulting from a school finance arrangement that creates an educational caste system. School boards with sufficient funding have ensuing control over level of teacher pay, classroom size, and whether libraries are stocked with encyclopedias and computers.

However, when school boards do not have sufficient funding, they have only what Jonathon Kozol referred to as “negative control,” or choices over which of the children's needs go unfulfilled. In fact, poor children in high-poverty schools perform worse than similarly poor children who attend schools without a high poverty rate. Likewise, children who are not poor perform less well in schools of concentrated poverty.

In addition to facing inequalities when they go through their local schools, poor children enter classrooms with appreciably lower cognitive skills than their peers with more advantages. In addition to a poor diet, families living in racially and economically isolated areas also suffer from the effects of severe pollution and other health complexities. Lack of healthcare facilities, affordable housing, and grocery stores, accompanied by a lack of private and public transportation avenues, magnify poor families’ attempts to ameliorate their situation. In addition, families who differ from the white, middle-class norm of most public school personnel face additional difficulties negotiating relationships and policies in schools.

Race

Race, which is closely tied with socioeconomic status, is another chief consideration when probing educational access and achievement. Poverty is a direct cause of social segregation, but it is nearly impossible to separate poverty from race, especially when one considers the consequences of racial discrimination in housing. The neighborhoods in which racial minorities settle have important consequences. Racial segregation results in lack of contact with middle-class white Americans, which in turn affects students’ exposure to mainstream English usage and valuable networks that lead to desirable jobs and high-quality schooling. Concentrated poverty and racial isolation have devastating effects on all students, but the increased likelihood of teenage pregnancy especially affects girls, who consequently drop out of school.

In addition to importunate racism in the housing market, schools have historically segregated students according to race, mostly by using separate educational tracks. It is well known that black and Hispanic students are disproportionately underrepresented in gifted and advanced placement programs, while conversely being disproportionately overrepresented in special education programs. Blacks and Hispanics are also disciplined more often and more harshly and drop out of school at disproportionately higher rates than white or Asian students. Some researchers have found that race, socioeconomic status, and gender are closely tied. For example, most poor, female, minorities performed higher than their male counterparts, but when both boys and girls of poor, racial minority status were placed in college-bound tracks, there was a leveling effect, or an erasure of gender differences in achievement. In addition, when it comes to learning computer science, studies indicate that in addition to gender, race is a factor in access and achievement.

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