The Opportunity Gap: Racism in Education

By Julie Landsman

Instead of looking at the difference in test scores between white students and African-American and Latino students as part of an achievement gap, how about thinking about it as a reflection of an opportunity gap. It seems to me that all students are entitled to an opportunity to have an education that reflects their lives and cultures, their literature and history. Everyone has a story. Everyone has their own rituals, their own world-view. If students do not feel visible, if they are not reflected in the curriculum, on the walls, in the media centers, in the visitors who come to speak to them, then they are not receiving the same opportunity to learn as white students, who still find their lives visible in the texts and lessons taught by an overwhelmingly white teaching force.

Combining the unwelcoming, and discouraging effect of a classroom that excludes them, with the lack of resources many students of color possess given our history of racism and its connection to present day poverty, there must be no question that many students of color today are working without the same opportunities as many white students. To compare test scores of a young man with a family computer at home, a college education provided for by his parents, a school with a full science lab and many AP courses, a building that is clean and safe and with teachers who look like him, to those of a young man who goes to school in a building with no computer lab, few books in the media center, (if there is a media center) and class sizes of over 40 students per hour, is a false comparison. Combining racism and poverty, it seems self-evident, that the problem is not in the child, but rather in the system that perpetuates the lack of opportunity many urban students of color experience.

I believe every student must have the opportunity to attend a school where she sees herself everywhere in the building and in the readings and in the high expectations of demanding classes and firm teachers. In order to close the gap white teachers need to begin by thinking of each of these children as their own child, not as someone else’s child, and thus seeing each of their students as someone who has the same brilliant potential to achieve as their own.

In order to close the real gap, gifted programs. AP and IB classes must reflect the population of each school system and not continue to be white enclaves. Such a move would go long way to eliminating the re-segregation of students once they are enter the school room door. Each student, white, black, poor, rich, middle class, must have the opportunity for small class sizes, resources, textbooks, science equipment, in order to provide comparable opportunities for all students. When we can put the onus of the problem on the system that continues to disenfranchise students of color through institutional racism and economic disparity instead of on the low test scores of the children, then we will be one step closer to closing the real gap in education—the opportunity gap.

Julie Landsman is a retired public school teacher and consultant on multicultural education and building inclusive classrooms and is the author Growing Up White: A Veteran Teacher Reflects on Racism.