Institutional Discrimination

At the onset of this practicum one of the things I noticed was there was a surprising discrepancy of African Americans in the day program. The day program is set up to assist kids who has been expelled from school to help enable them to transition back in to the school system. So, with this approach, it was surprising to see that there was a discrepancy in the amount of African Americans. This led me to wonder why. One thought I had was the possibility of a problem with the institution of school. So I decided to look at institutional discrimination and how it related to the school system. I found a couple of articles from other people which I would like to share.

Joe Freeman says this of Institutional discrimination: "Institutional discrimination is built into the structure itself. Thus it is more covert and more tenacious. It can occur regardless of the desires or intentions of the people perpetuating it" (2008).

Understanding institutional discrimination in this context leads me to two ways in which I had gained a better understanding of institutional discrimination in the school systems. The largest area of discrimination within the school system is through academic tracking.

Academic tracking is when school administrators put students on tracks for academic goals. Some tracks consist of accelerated/gifted programs, vocational training, Core 40, or even special education. Rebecca L. Case states that studies reveals that African American and Hispanic youth have the highest representation in lower academic tracks. She states that youth are placed in academic tracts early in their academic careers, which then would make it difficult for youth to transition in to a different track. Thurs, if a child is placed in a lower track, it would then be difficult for them to move to a higher track, such as an Honors track, causing them to underachieve throughout their academic career and the likelihood of them attending college would be very low. Thirdly, she says that often time, the students who are discriminated against within the institution do not have parents who can advocate for their children because they do not understand the different tacks. She says, "The parents are unlikely to intervene on behalf of their child and push for a higher track placement" (University of Dayton, 2003).

There many other ways discrimination can happen within the school system, such as the lack of minority authors represented in the library and lack of minority teachers in the school system to better represent minority leadership, just to name a few ways. These are all things that happen within the institution of school that is overt and is hard to see it as discrimination. This is something that will continue to affect minority students unless white America is able to release the grips of ethnocentrism of the school system.

References:
Case, R. (2003). Not seperate but not equal: Education in the United States. Retrieved March 30, 2008 from the University of Dayton Website: http://academic.udayton.edu/race/04needs/education02.htm

Freeman, J. (2008). Institutional discrimination. Retrieved March 30, 2008, from Joe Freeman website: http://www.jofreeman.com/womensociety/institidiscrim.htm