Death by a Thousand Cuts

 Brown v Board of Education and Brown v Board of Education II put an end to segregation in schools, right? So why is it that in 2021, a report was released about the lasting effects of redlining on education? 

Redlining was a government policy that came from the New Deal era of the 1930s. The program was intended to help homeowners during the Great Depression as a form of federal aid. As the program evolved, the government set out guidelines of homeowners who would qualify. They used color-coded maps to outline the areas that they deemed were worth of these loans, ranking areas based on if they think that the property would go up or down in value. They used a scale of A - D and the D ranking meant that those were areas that were not worth enough to be included in this program. These D areas were often where Black residents lived.

This effects education because schools in redline areas face start discrepancies in their funding. The differences in home values impact school funding because public schools are funded through property taxes. So, a school in the area with a high property tax will be better funded and have more resources such as computers, wifi, and new textbooks, just to name a few. These disparities have continued to widen since the 1930s. 

These disparities have become so large that redlining and school funding has even shown up in a popular show "Abbott Elementary," which follows teachers who work in an inner city school in Philadelphia trying to make do with a building that is falling a part and the school is just generally underfunded. The teachers cannot even get things such as paint, pencils, or a rug for their classroom, which is full of
Black children. 

What this means is that students are not receiving an equitable and comparable education, which is furthering educational gaps between different racial groups. Redline was seriously felt during the COVID-19 pandemic when most schools turned online. This was a great solution to social distancing, but the issue is that students didn't have wifi or computers at home to be able to do their school work. As technology becomes more integrated into society and there are more expectations for the use of technology in everyday life, we need to make sure that we have schools that are equip for this. Some schools now do not even have internet access. And again, these are the schools that are serving non-white students. 

In New York on the Upper East Side, the average household income is over $150,000. It is also 80% white. The schools in this area have a math proficiency score of 84%, which the average math proficiency score for New York is 54%. Comparing this to a neighborhood in Manhattan, the average house hold income is $26,000. The population here identifies as Latinx and Black. These schools have a math proficiency score of 24% below the statewide average. 

These schools are struggling to teach students the basics with the resources that they have available to them. There is no way that these students are able to access technology and have the ability to learn how to use it because there is no way these schools can afford to have technology.

 

We have failed these students and we need to do better for them. We have a responsibility to these students to create an equitable learning opportunity for them. We need to critically look at how old policies are continuing to impact students education today. We need to disrupt systems in place that have allowed for these inequities to persist. We need to increase Title I funding for these schools if we want to have any sort of impact on ethics, equity, and responsibility of technology.