AFTER WORKING THROUGH THIS MODULE, YOU WILL BE ABLE TO:

• Define “educational debt” and give some examples of opportunity gaps faced by youth of color and Indigenous youth in the public school system.
• Reflect on how these inequities may impact your own service community.

INTRODUCTION

The phrase “achievement gap” is one of the most commonly used expressions in the educational research and policy world. This phrase serves as shorthand for the widespread and persistent disparities in standardized test scores between Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students and their Asian and white peers. But questions about the “achievement gap” have become more prominent in recent years, with educators, researchers, parents, and students alike challenging this narrative for implying that it is students of color and their families who are failing, rather than schools and school systems failing them. In this module, we will explore racial inequities in the public school system related to resources, discipline, and academic achievement from a systemic perspective, focusing on how institutional racism is woven into the U.S. public school system in ways that limit the opportunities and choices of BIYOC.

WATCH

Kandice Sumner puts a face to the resource gap data in her TED Talk, where she shares her experiences as a public school teacher in Boston. Watch this video and/or read the transcript (linked below). As you watch, think about how the resource inequities Sumner describes might be related to the more frequently discussed “achievement gap.”

Transcript

READ

In addition to the false claim that students of color simply behave worse than white students, many other myths and misconceptions plague discussions of discipline disparities. These include the idea that discipline disparities are really more about poverty than race; that suspension and expulsion are rare and reserved only for serious offenses; that disparities are solely the result of individual teachers and principals; and that there is nothing schools can do to reduce these disparities because they are required to respond to violent behavior in specific ways. A wide body of research has addressed each of these ideas. For a summary response to each of these arguments, read the Discipline Disparities: Myths and Facts fact sheet from The Equity Project at Indiana University.

WATCH

Watch the video below from the Crash Course on Sociology series, which puts together the information we’ve explored related to school discipline, resources, and achievement to show how the U.S. school system both creates and perpetuates racial and socioeconomic inequity.