In an article by The Nation entitled How Unequal School Funding Punishes Poor Kids the author very broadly discussed the inequality of schools in more wealthy districts have these better resources and better teaching conditions, while students in poor regions are left to just fend for themselves in a way and rely on older textbooks and less technologically advanced classroom. Very specifically the article talked about these poorer districts and the class sizes that teachers are expected to handle, and the classes aren’t large because there are too many students in the school, but rather because the school did not have enough funding to hire the number of teachers needed to instruct these students effectively. The article also discusses equality vs equity because many educators argue that poor students need more resources inside of the classroom because they have less access to these resources at home, so the funding of schools should have more equality to it, but the equity and need of students should also be taken into account when funding is discussed. The author also discusses racial issues in terms of this funding discrepancy as a direct cause of this, because it is so disproportionally based around the district the students are located in, so the students who live in the neighborhoods that are lower class tend to be people of color who have been negatively affected by the racist rhetoric of America’s economic history.
This article relates very well to the video we watched in class about the two teenagers who came from similar economic backgrounds but ended up going to different schools and having different chances in life because of the different resources offered by these schools. Specifically, the documentary talked about the availability of a school counselor to students at each school and at the under-funded school there was only one guidance counselor and for the student to get an appointment he had to wait for a ridiculous amount of time. This specific part of the documentary fits very well with what the article was saying when talking about the class sizes and the ability of teachers to properly help all students in the way that they need. The article specifically said that in poor schools the ratio of students to teachers was 25% lower in poor schools per 100 students, meaning that these lower class schools have about 25 students extra to distribute teachers in classes which increases class sizes and negatively effects students performances because they aren’t able to get the specified and individualized help from their teachers that they need.
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Brenna Sociology 107 