Affirmative Action out the Window for Colleges: What will this mean for Children coming from Urban Education where disparities have already long existed?

 As an urban educator, I still do not think that there has been enough conversations happening when it comes to the Supreme Courts decision to ban affirmative action in colleges. I'm sure there are parents who may not see this as a threat, especially if their child or children is still in grade school, but please believe me when I say that this decision is very detrimental to urban youth. In this blog today, I will be speaking on the disparities happening in urban education today, and how this decision from the Supreme Court has just made it worse.

As an educator, it has been very clear to me that urban education has been failing Black and Hispanic students for a very long time, but throughout my years teaching, I have come to the conclusion that there is more than one reason as to why. There are numerous reasons just to name a few: lack of qualified teachers, lack of parent support, poverty, lack of resources/ funding (etc). This is not just the schools administration fault. This is also about an unseen battle with urban culture, and systems that have been put in place to keep certain schools that comes from certain zip-codes down. I have talked numerous times in other blogs that the No Child Left Behind Act was one of the major reasons why urban education has and continues to fail today. Though it was presented as a way to hold schools accountable for academic success, we now know that all it has done is continued to keep disparities in urban education. When Bush came out with this act, it was supposed to be a way to initiate reform in education as a whole, but this can simply not be done when urban students are not receiving the same education as their suburban counterparts. This act has created a great divide on top of all the other reasons I mentioned above, which has created a recipe for disaster. This means less funding for urban schools that desperately need it, and more funding for suburban schools that already have more of an advantage through school funding from taxes. In reality, this just further causes the disparities and academic gap. Due to the stigma of urban education, and teaching being more difficult due to the trauma that Black and Hispanic students are facing at very young ages, it causes highly qualified teachers to run to the suburbs, and urban schools to have to pick from the least qualified staff most times. This is especially true after the pandemic, when there is very large numbers of teachers leaving the field. With all of these issues, it is not looking good for education as a whole, but especially urban education. 

Now that I have given a brief synopsis on urban education, I want to tie this into how the Supreme Courts decision makes all of this a lot more worse. Affirmative action was created to create more inclusion among under-represented minority groups that were not being given the same opportunities as their White counterparts. This obviously did not make it an even playing field for Blacks and Hispanics, but it was definitely progress in the right direction. Now that this has been banned by the Supreme Court this past summer, this now means that colleges no longer have to take race into consideration when it comes to admissions. This not only makes it a race-blind selection, but it also forces colleges to only look at the persons qualifications and nothing more. In a perfect world this would be fine, but we are all well aware that if urban schools are not able to provide their students with a stellar education, then the odds of them doing well on the standardized test for college admissions, or even having the skillset to succeed in college is very rare. This has been a huge set back for colleges who looked to this to diversify their campus, and now gives colleges no motivation to have diversity, as their is no more funding being given towards it. This is a mighty issue that just has not been talked about enough. This one decision may be the one barrier that will keep urban students out of college, and left to be susceptible to falling into the troubles in the streets, and then jail. Education was always supposed to be the great equalizer, and the one thing that gave children hope that they can beat their current circumstances, but unfortunately this is not the case. The answer to fixing urban education is not an easy one, because decades latter we are still seeing the same issues, but this is definitely an issue that must be fixed with the governments decisions first, and then the cities and community next.

“Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.” ~Malcolm X.