Ladsen-Billings Article. Institutional Racism?

                As I'm sure many of my peers will point to, this article really denotatively discusses the achievement gap and the analogy made by the author that there is quite the national deficit in education as well as monetarily. For example, she points to the American Indian education system and how those who did graduate from the poorly instituted system were only allowed into the historically African American universities. She even discusses the debt in more economic means, with unequal spending per pupil in richer areas and the tendency for black males to make less than their white counterparts. The statistics, these correlations, seems to still exude in society today, although some, and I do mean some, strides have been made in these areas.

                But how can this be with efforts like affirmative action? The author discusses the topic briefly, and predominantly white women have benefited from such policies. The numerous analogies she provides about historically oppressed groups having a gap and being left to themselves to fend and improve upon themselves really strikes a chord for me [EX: "You cannot take a man who has been in chains for 300 years, remove the chains, take him to the starting line and tell him to run the race, and think you are being fair" 8]. If you've been left out of the loop for generations, how would anyone expect for that group to rebound immediately? However, except for the small exception of affirmative action and some successful legislation like the Voting Rights Act of 1965, I think we're predominantly seeing some institutional racism here when it comes to the achievement gap.

                For clarity purposes, by institutional racism, I mean covertly (although it certainly may be overt) racist procedures, attitudes, or actions taken by an organization that unfairly targets a racial minority. In my mind, the education system can qualify as such an organization that could perpetrate such acts. I think I have already laid out some examples above, particularly the expenditures for school districts per pupil (6). The schools that have these sorts of expenditures are generally highly segregated, with predominantly white students attending (9). Is this unequal funding fair? Should schools be more ethnically diverse, so as to serve a wider population? These are big questions, and perhaps I'll be able to bring up these topics in class discussion, but my gut says that something is wrong with the system as it is. We cannot continue to only serve such a homogeneous population when in reality there is such a diversity.