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Unequality In Education: Oakland High School

From a structural aspect, Ronald F. Ferguson defends that the inequalities in education between blacks and whites come from the expectations and types of perceptions teachers have on them. These perceptions are extremely biased and Ferguson argues that these expectations lead to the large gap of test scores between black and white students Teachers' expectations and attitude have an influence with the students' own attitude and work habits towards school that perpetuates the large gap of test scores between blacks and whites. (Ferguson 1998: 274) There are three conditions for measuring teacher bias: unbiased teachers who expect blacks and whites to perform at the same level, unbiased teachers who expect students with the same test scores to perform the same regardless of their color, and the last way to measure teacher bias is that they do not judge on past performance but rather look at the untapped potential of students. (Ferguson 1998: 275) According to the criteria for these measures and past studies, Ferguson comes to the conclusion that teachers are biased towards black students because they hold stereotypes and have lower expectations of them. This unfair teacher attitude directly causes them to interact with blacks students differently from white students. According to a study done prior to Ferguson's in a middle class white school, "student inattention was taken as an indication of teacher need to arouse student interest, but the same behavior in a lower class black school was rationalized as boredom due to their limited attention span." (Ferguson 1998: 281) Since these black kids always encounter these bias teachers they begin to fulfill the roles that their teachers expect them to play perpetuating the stereotypes of blacks. (Ferguson 1998: 274) This process is known as a self-fulfilling prophecy and has very negative impacts on black students. Contrary to this belief, black students would be more successful if their teachers held higher expectations of...

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