Schools
The schools in the lower income districts are characterized by overcrowding and lack of resources. This is because the funding of American public schools comes mostly from their district’s property taxes. Residential Segregation occurs when people segregate themselves based on class and race. This leaves schools in the low income school districts with little because those who are capable of paying higher property taxes move to districts where there are higher taxes and schools are receiving more. For example, in New York, where efforts are being made to level the playing field, students in the wealthiest school districts are given almost twice as much as students in the poorest district, an annual amount of $13,974 compared to $7,457. When schools lack funding, programs such as special education classes and extracurricular activities are cut back. This causes some working class children to not get the attention and help they require. When schools and teachers are not receiving the goods required to fulfill their duty, students cannot be expected to display the motivation to learn in a flawed system.
Read more about this topic: Working Class Education
Famous quotes containing the word schools:
“In America the taint of sectarianism lies broad upon the land. Not content with acknowledging the supremacy as the Diety, and with erecting temples in his honor, where all can bow down with reverence, the pride and vanity of human reason enter into and pollute our worship, and the houses that should be of God and for God, alone, where he is to be honored with submissive faith, are too often merely schools of metaphysical and useless distinctions. The nation is sectarian, rather than Christian.”
—James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851)
“To be a Negro is to participate in a culture of poverty and fear that goes far deeper than any law for or against discrimination.... After the racist statutes are all struck down, after legal equality has been achieved in the schools and in the courts, there remains the profound institutionalized and abiding wrong that white America has worked on the Negro for so long.”
—Michael Harrington (1928–1989)