Equal Protection & Public Education Essay

Equal Protection & Public Education Essay

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Equal Protection & Public Education Essay

The American government has made efforts to ensure that they integrate public schools to ensure that there is racial balance. The federal court assigned supervision to about 500 schools because the cases of segregation were on the rise in the 1990s. It, therefore, passed a ruling that defined the requirements that public schools needed to meet for them to maintain equal protection. The equal protection clause which is in the fourteenth amendment states that schools from elementary to high schools need to put an end to discrimination for their students based on race (Calabresi, 2013). Integration efforts have been put in place to ensure that there is diversity in classrooms and public schools. The public schools in Florida have implemented the K through 12 which is supposed to implement across all public schools in the state. The court also rules that students at a certain age need to attend public school except for those in private, religious, or home schools.

The standards include standardized testing, having math that is simplified for all students as well as including civics in the curriculum. These changes however are expected to begin in 2021. ACT and SAT are expected to be free for students in eleventh grade and it also eliminated having a specific score for the students to have the chance to sit for these exams. These assessments, however, will be included in the overall grade. Section 504, title II has information about the legal obligations that public schools need to adhere to. Compliance reviews as well as data quality reviews provide information that helps schools have the appropriate interventions in addition to the support they need to help students with disabilities. The court also decided that through the disabilities education act, all students will disabilities could enroll in public schools for free and also have appropriate education It forbid school management to expel or even suspend these students for more than ten days if the offense was due to their disability (Wasserman, 2010).

With diversity in public schools, it is common that most of the students know English as a second language. This poses a challenge when they are having their tests because of their learning skills, psychological barriers, ease of grasping information among other factors. These students need to be exposed to the language and have access to different literature material. Besides, they need a curriculum that is easy to understand, and that meets the expectation of the grading level in their public schools. The school management has the legal obligation to ensure students whose English is their second language or those that have disabilities have a curriculum that adds value and is customized to ensure that they attain the expected grades. The K-12 students are selected depending on their location in the neighborhood and the diversity of the public school around them (Hrabowski, 2015).

The decision by the supreme court to ensure diversity in public schools was challenged by those who supported voluntary integration plans (Daniel, 2010). Public schools are naturally unique and this contradicts the assignment plans from K-12 context. To achieve racial proportions, management needs to look into other aspects such as achieving critical mass in a region that has a racial disadvantage. There is a need for research to identify the racial distribution of different schools in different regions for the right strategy to be identified to ensure that there is value-added and competency attained especially during an assessment.

In conclusion, the fourteenth amendment equal protection clause is made available to ensure that there is diversity in public schools and eliminate racial discrimination. The schools that fail to adhere to the Supreme Court’s regulation could face potential consequences. Some individuals differ with this clause and believe that racial diversity is not the main issue but the curriculum should be formulated in a way that attains critical mass. Equality should be achieved despite the students’ competence or language skills.

References

Calabresi, S. G., & Salander, A. (2013). Religion and the Equal Protection Clause: Why the Constitution Requires School Vouchers. Fla. L. Rev., 65, 909.

Daniel, P. T., & Gooden, M. A. (2010). Conflict on the United States Supreme Court: Judicial confusion and race-conscious school assignments. BYU Educ. & LJ, 81.

Hrabowski, F. A., & Sanders, M. G. (2015). Increasing racial diversity in the teacher workforce: One university’s approach.

Wasserman, L. M. (2010). Corporal punishment in K-12 public school settings: Reconsideration of its constitutional dimensions thirty years after Ingraham v. Wright. Touro L. Rev., 26, 1029.