Public schools should be educational institutions where every student can dream their biggest dreams. However, public schools in America deliberately fail to treat students of different backgrounds equitably and adequately by failing to acknowledge and address various racial, socio-economic, and political oppressions entrenched in our society, thus contributing to increasing educational disparities between students of different backgrounds. In Ladson-Billing’s “Lack of Achievement or Loss of Opportunity?” she addresses the failure of public schooling in America by analyzing the educational debt accrued for children in marginalized communities over time; thereby unfolding the inherent existence of achievement gap as a result. In “The Price of Human Capital: The Illusion of Equal Educational Opportunity” Kantor and Lowe argue about how the federal government failed to equitably and adequately school marginalized students by launching several initiatives, such as the Smith Hughes Act, the NDEA, Title I of ESEA and NCLB that was formulated to show an illusion of “equal opportunity” when in fact it increased educational disparities between the privileged and non-privileged (people of color, working class, immigrant students).

Ladson-Billings describes the achievement gap as “disparities between White students and their Black and Latino counterparts show up on the National Assessment of Educational Progress and on state and local tests, as well as in rates of graduation, dropping out, suspension, expulsion, and assignment to special education.” However, she notes that without the opportunity gap, this achievement gap would not be existing. She reveals the concept of educational debt that black and brown students hold, stemming from historical, political, economic, and moral decisions that society built up over time. (pg. 13) Historically, the United States was focused on pushing for an “educated citizenry capable of governing itself.” This did not apply to African Americans, because it was illegal to educate enslaved people, only after emancipation, northern missionaries established schools to teach basic literacy skills; black children attended segregated schools receiving “cast-off, outdated, school books and materials from the White system.” (pg. 14) This is also a reflection of the education/ curriculum that is apparent in the majority of black and brown schools today. Billing continues to mention, that after the 1954 US Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, segregation still permeated society through de facto segregation, as white people created “private academies,” funded by taxes, refusing to send their kids to desegregated schools. The passage of the Interstate Highway Act during Eisenhower’s administration allowed for middle-class white families to move away to the suburbs, disintegrating from areas of residence occupied by Black brown, and poor white people.” Through housing and highway policies, this legalized “intensely concentrated and racially segregated landscapes” (pg 14) This long history of oppressions are what set the foundation for inequitable, segregated, and inadequate schooling today. Many Black and Latino public school students attend schools composed of their major demographic, and schools that serve them are sub-part to adequate standards. Billing then addresses the economic sector to education debt. She mentions that “Schools are funded largely by property taxes, communities with more highly valued property receive more tax revenue and can spend more money” (pg 14) This is an intrinsic testament to the vast funding inequities existing in schools that serve privileged students versus schools marginalized students. Billing continues to make a crucial point that even when “urban schools lobbied for and received more money from state and federal governments and philanthropists, they were so far behind their suburban counterparts that the increased funding has failed to make up for the longtime disparity.” (pg 15) Immigrant students and low-income children are in need of “extra resources to overcome disadvantages due to socioeconomic status of lack of English language proficiency” but they do not receive the additional support required for their achievement. Instead of spending money and resources to places are in need of it, “schools spend an inordinate amount of money on test preparation, purchase, scoring, and security.” Allocating money in this manner does not alleviate the economic barriers that marginalized students face. It does not provide more quality education or support the students in how they actually need assistance. Thirdly, the “lack of political power has been an ongoing pattern for Black, Latino, and poor communities” that contributes to education debt. African Americans were not allowed to vote until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965; states found a way to suppress voting by prohibiting “people with a felony conviction from voting, which depresses the voting strength of African Americans. Lastly, Billing delves into the “moral debt” aspect of educational debt. She describes it as not measurable because there is something fundamentally wrong “about not allowing entire groups of people to participate equitably in an educational system that allegedly provides an opportunity for social and economic advancement.”The United States was built off the very backs of black slaves, and the labor of brown people, yet these are the very people that the nation has severely discriminated against, hindered their progress, and made it difficult for them to survive, The United States, is known as “the Land of the Free” seemed to “justify its failure to redress the legacy of centuries of exclusion and discrimination.” President John F Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson instituted affirmative action because Johnson felt “it was unfair to keep people shackled for centuries, unshackle them, and then expect them to compete against those who have never known such restrictions.” Affirmative action came about due to politics and economics: African Americans were voting in masses and represented a major segment of the Democratic Party, plus the nation is preoccupied with advancing the “scientific and technical knowledge and skills of its citizens in order to compete globally.” However, boiling it down to the core, Billing explains that we as a nation are indebted to people that historically have been excluded and discriminated against. She accurately captures the irony of the achievement gap, “no nation can enslave a race of people for hundreds of years, set them free bedraggled and penniless, pit them, without assistance in a hostile environment, against privileged victimizers, and then reasonably expect the gap between the heirs of the two groups to narrow.”

Kantor and Lowe candidly express throughout their analysis of several federal policies that the government essentially protects “educational advantages of the nation’s most affluent and privileged” (pg. 76) students, alluding to (white and wealthy, elite youth while failing to accommodate marginalized students, This is evidently depicted over time, through the inception of vocational schools, the NDEA, title I of ESEA, and NCLB. As Horace Mann persuaded the Board of Education to view schools as a means to expand upon human capital, which led to the development of the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917. This focused on incorporating vocational training in schools, being trade and industrial education, as people believed that it was “an antidote to poverty, youth unemployment, and the threat of national economic decline.” This policy was primarily viewed as a “‘dumping ground’ for working-class and immigrant youth who had been pushed out of the labor market and pulled into school by tougher enforcement of child labor and compulsory education laws but whom educators did not think were capable of doing more advanced academic work.” People barely found jobs in the subjects they were trained in and they “provided a small number of immigrant and working-class boys with access to the more privileged sectors of the blue-collar workforce…vocational educators typically excluded African American and Latino youth. They were channeled into courses in the “trowel trades” and domestic work or, as they began to attend high school in greater numbers, placed in the general education track that prepared them for neither work nor college.” The Smith Hughes Act was a testament to the failure of this policy providing “elite population to preserve access to college and subsequently to managerial and professional positions while leaving impoverished families access to vocational education that rarely provides occupations at the job market. This in turn laid out precedents for future federal government initiatives such as the National Defense Education Act in 1958 which came about during the Cold War, to bolster the “development of high-level technical skills to counter the threat of Soviet technical superiority.” This act was known for “its investment in support for mathematics, science, and foreign language instruction, but it barely created “intellectual experience for the vast majority of high school students,” since their goal was “to identify and educate more of the talent” through a process of testing, as a means to locate those particular students and encourage them to take challenging courses and a college career. (pg.76) The NDEA was evidently designed as an initiative to give rise to already wealthy, affluent, privileged students coming from these backgrounds a platform to emerge as influential and talented while pushing everyone else behind the curtains, even when many of these students are denied from reaching their best potential. Following the NDEA came Title I of the ESEA, inspired by the Civil Rights Movement came about attempting to address “poverty” in schools through “funding to schools with concentrations of the poor in order to “contribute to meeting the special needs of educationally deprived children.” The mission was that impoverished students would have access to resources/ human capital in order to help them hold occupations in the labor market, thus “reducing” poverty. Although, this policy was not applied as it was “intended.” The initial budget of over 1 billion dollars wasn’t distributed equitably and fairly as 9 out of 10 schools took ahold of the money. This made it “impossible to concentrate significant resources in the schools and districts with the largest number of poor students,” which in effect, resulted in students’ performances declining. Secondly, the practice of Title I was based on racialized and classist measures, where ”typical practice emphasized pullout programs that focused on low-level skills to make up for what students presumably lacked- and this required them to miss regular classroom instruction.” This in fact heeded and stalled the ability of impoverished black and brown students to have successful academic performances, essentially punishing them for things they had absolutely no control over. Title I, then placed responsibility on children, being “deficient rather than that schools were organized to hinder their capacity.” The passage of NCLB in 2001 was aimed to target schools instead of placing blame on impoverished and marginalized families, which actually made schools more difficult to maneuver for marginalized kids. The NCLB set “uniform standards for all students and holding local schools accountable for meeting them, it sought instead to discipline teachers and administrators to raise achievement levels regardless of the often great disparities of resources available in different schools.” The NCLB wasn’t effective because by setting rigid academic standards, educators in low-income schools were forced to meet them, even in the special education sector, so they “focused narrowly on preparation for the tests in reading and mathematics at the expense of other subjects.” Thir privileged elite counterparts were able to engage in a diverse and enriching curriculum because these students had the ability to succeed in the exams comfortably. This reaped adverse effects and actually produced poor academic achievement for the nation’s most vulnerable populations. The NCLB failed to acknowledge the oppressions that marginalized students faced, thus contributing towards widening the achievement gap between the rich and poor students. Overall, these federal initiatives gave off an illusion of increasing “equal opportunity” but merely failed to do so by not tackling the actual issues present, such as the opportunity gap and educational debt, thus segregating and deterring students of color from reaching their best potential.

Both authors agree on the grounds of meritocracy poisoning the schooling of students from all different backgrounds. According to the ideologies of privileged white figures, meritocracy is a means to “rake some diamonds from the rubbish, enabling some outstanding students from disadvantaged backgrounds to get superior educations.” This is ignorant of understanding the complexities that students face within the schooling system, as the lack of access to resources and inability to help cater to students’ needs would not magically build a diamond in a really, oppressive, rough environment. Both authors believed that, socio-economic and political differences between students of different backgrounds affect their learning, accessibility, and achievement rates. They both believed, federal initiatives such as NCLB and NDEA “had anything to say about how socioeconomic differences produced test-score inequalities that were then reproduced by placement in the different tracks of the comprehensive high school.” Ladson Billings, Kantor, and Lowe both acknowledge meritocracy being quite punitive towards marginalized (impoverished) people of color, as these test scores were not representative of inequalities and oppressions that low-class black and brown students face which cause their academic performances to be lower than their elite white counterparts. Both these initiatives used testing as a measure to categorize certain students as intelligent, and certain students as deficient, enabling blame and shame on students that are deficient.

All in all, public schools in the United States are constructed in a fashion that does not operate to serve and accommodate school students of different backgrounds equitably and adequately. This is because they are unable to recognize various oppressions that various students of different backgrounds face, thus widening educational discrepancies between privileged and non-privileged students. Ladson-Billing reinforces this idea by educating her audience about the severity of educational debt causing inequalities in education for marginalized students. At the same time, Kantor and Lowe broadcast several federal government initiatives that used the facade of “equal opportunity” to push for these programs that heeded/ hindered the progression of educationally disadvantaged students. We as a nation must acknowledge and address systems of oppression set in place that hinders the progress of disadvantaged communities, uplift their voices, grant them agency and work towards liberation collectively so that everyone can exercise their well-deserved rights and freedoms.