ABSTRACT
Americans’ faith in education is tangibly substantiated in the fact that the American people now invest in educational institutions annually almost as much as all other nations combined. In the past two decades educational spending nationwide has increased fivefold while personal consumption merely doubled. Since World War II school enrollments have increased 88 per cent, while school expenditures (in constant dollars) increased 350 per cent. While employment in private industry increased 38 per cent, it increased 203 per cent in public education. With such an abundant outlay for education, the question naturally arises whether the benefits are equitably distributed to all segments of our population. A keystone of public education is the promise that no child should be denied the opportunity to fulfill his educational potential, regardless of his national, ethnic, or socio-economic background. When substantial inequalities in educational achievement are evident between large segments of the population nominally sharing the same educational system, serious questions are raised, and rightly so. Numerous attempts have been and are being made to find the answers to the inequities in the benefits of education. In California the chief sub-population differences in scholastic attainments involve majority-minority differences, the minorities in this case being Negroes and Mexican-Americans.
