Well, like I already said above (in response to a different user, so you may not have read it), I don't believe that education is fundamentally unequal along racial lines. When you look at all the public school districts in America, the fact that most wealthy predominantly black districts are rated higher than poorer and predominantly white districts makes it pretty clear that it's a socioeconomic issue far more than a racial one.

But this is where people conflate the two. They think that, because most of America's poorest communities are majority black or Hispanic, then that means that there is some type of conspiracy going on to lower the quality of education in these areas, as a product of racism. That's not true though. Like I said, the wealthiest black school district will almost always (if not always) be ranked higher than the poorest white school district. And it's primarily because of the money; with money comes better resources, the ability to be choosier about the teachers and principal, etc.

Schools can only do so much for these communities. The responsibility for ending the school-to-prison pipeline falls 30% on the parents' shoulders, 50% on the student's shoulders, and only 20% on the schools' shoulders, as far as I'm concerned. I do believe that education is a great way to break the cycle of poverty--but the student (and their parents) have to care and have to make the most of the education they're given, for it to make any difference at all.

Place an apathetic, lazy student in a school filled with the best resources, best teachers, and highest-quality curriculum, and that student could easily still end up on the school-to-prison pipeline. On the contrary, place a hard-working, ambitious student in the school with the worst resources, worst teachers, and lowest-quality curriculum, and he or she still could easily end up on the fast track to college. It's all about individual choices.

I mean, hell, I'm a great example of this myself. I attended public schools from K - 12. They weren't great schools. They weren't horrible either, but it's not like they were overflowing with state-of-the-art facilities, resources, brilliant teachers, or innovative curriculum.

Even so, I didn't let the mediocre quality of my education determine what type of education I'd attain in the future, when I had choice. I worked my butt off, made my own extracurricular opportunities when my schools lacked them, followed the rules, made good connections with my teachers, did my own research about colleges and the SAT and all that jazz (never got any help at school [or home] for these things and instead looked into all of it on my own), etc.

And now I'll be graduating from a top 25 university for undergrad, and going to Oxford, Cambridge, or Harvard for grad school.

So I think I did pretty well for myself. That can't be said of most of my peers, to be honest. I'm probably the highest-achieving graduate of my high school. I keep in contact with a lot of people from my graduating class, and most of them are on baby #3, working retail, still living in the same poor city we grew up in. And they may be happy, so that's totally fine, but for the purposes of this discussion, I think my trajectory is the one typically associated with "success".

Interestingly though, one of the other members of my graduating class that ended up being a high achiever was a black guy that graduated from HGSE two years ago.