How to Address Slavery's Legacy

The fact is that segregation is still institutionalized, and this is a relic of slavery. I believe that reparation will not accomplish anything at this point. Instead, money should be put into making sure that schools and services in disadvantaged neighborhoods are equipped to aid the people in these neighborhoods in lifting themselves up.

The fact is that equality of educational opportunity does not exist. I mentioned in class a study we had talked about in my education for international development class. In 1966, J. Coleman performed a study on inputs in primarily black schools and primarily white schools. He expected to find unequal inputs, but discovered instead the “achievement gap.” Inputs were relatively equal, but outcomes were still significantly different. He looked further to find the cause of this disparity, and developed the output point of view.

According to the output theory, equality of educational opportunity does not exist until underachieving students cannot be identified by moral irrelevancies such as race, class, or gender. J. Coleman found that the three most important factors that determined a child’s success rate in school, in order of importance, were their parents’ socioeconomic status and education level, quality of teachers, and quality of facilities. In his words, “Public schools bring little to bear on educational achievement that is independent of the family’s socioeconomic status and the parents’ education level.” More recent studies have shown that his findings are still relevant today.

Our own public school systems in this country, then, serve to perpetuate socioeconomic inequalities and the cycle of poverty. In my opinion, the most productive response to the legacy of slavery would be to develop strategies to work specifically with students in these communities to break the cycle of poverty and make equality of educational opportunity a visible reality.