When a parent bids farewell to their child in the morning, they assume that the fruit of their loins is on his/her way to a quality education. Seldom are parents cognizant of every microscopic event that occurs throughout their child’s day in school. Parents have the belief that their child is receiving a first-rate education regardless of the environment that surrounds them. Children go to school to be educated, one would anticipate, but parents generally do not pay attention to the plethora of variables that accompany their child’s education, such as the type of school in which their child is enrolled. Alas, the type of school in which their child enrolls into is actually of utter importance. The difference between going to an urban school and going to a private school could essentially end up being a million-dollar difference. The reason being that urban school students are at a drastic disadvantage in every sense of the word when compared to private school students. That involves the quality of facilities, the quality of teaching conditions, the quality of teachers themselves, and the quality of student enthusiasm. All of the aforementioned facets of the educational process revolve around one primary topic: the allocation of funds. When it comes to funds, urban schools have been receiving the short end of the proverbial stick for decades. The abysmal allocation of funds appropriated to urban schools threatens to compromise the potential opportunities that are germane to urban students by sacrificing their quality of education through a vast disparity in funding apportionment.
Urban schools have distinctive characteristics that set them apart from other types of schools. Those characteristics put the schools at risk of being susceptible to funding inequalities. One might ask, “What are those particular characteristics and how are individual schools classified as urban schools?” It goes without saying that urban schools are located in urban areas rather than in rural, small town, or suburban areas. An urban area is one that relates to the city, and usually that city is a metropolis with an enormous population. However, urban schools are also classified through their relatively high rates of poverty, through their relatively high proportions of colored students, through their relatively high proportions of students with a limited proficiency in English, and in many cases, through their distinctive designations as “High Need” schools by their state education departments. Those characteristics lead outsiders to believe that the downtrodden students with no future potential are the only occupants of urban schools.
Pursuing this further, the connection between location and funding becomes much more discernible. As a result of the census, the government knows where certain types of people live. They know where both the wealthy families and the impecunious families are located. They know that the majority of the wealthy families do not want to intertwine with the impecunious families; it’s just the way this nation has been for centuries. But, the Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education ruled that, “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." However, in spite of that ruling, by manipulating a loophole in the case, school officials discovered a method to draw an invisible red line throughout their respective city’s borders in an effort to set boundaries as to who may attend what school. That ingenious solution further exacerbated the problem that many fervent young children and their families are just now beginning to realize: It doesn’t matter how badly you want to learn, because if you live in an area that’s not beneficial to the school’s administration, oh well! Sucks to be you! You could be as precocious of a child as there is across the nation, but nowadays it just seems that a place creates the face; in other words, where you live tells the school officials everything that they need to know about you. When did location become so important? Well, it all goes back to that primary topic: the allocation of funds.
Money makes this world go round and round and education is at the center of that world. The education system faces many inequalities and no place suffers more than the urban schools. Taking into account how our society classifies what an urban school truly is, people need to understand the needs of the students and the cost of educational resources. States cannot simply allocate what they think is “sufficient enough” to urban schools when that is barely enough to provide even the most basic of educations. Funding is what the urban schools need to get the most out of their students. The students need funding to have the opportunity to get the most out of themselves. The money that is acquired is not necessarily an atrocity, but the money has to be used scrupulously and equally. Give each and every student at the very least an equal opportunity to be educated and to potentially succeed. That would be doing your particular job. What the students do with that opportunity is their own prerogative, but they at the very least deserve the chance. If the current educational system isn’t fixed in the immediate future, then a farewell to educational parity will be all but inevitable. America will be bidding farewell to potential geniuses all because of a dis proportioned allocation of funds. Urban schools do still have an extraordinarily long road ahead of them, but sweeping reform is possible and will unequivocally make significant improvements in educational equality by not sacrificing the future potential of any single student. I would know. I was one of them!
