ABSTRACT
Despite the mythology of meritocracy in American education, in practice there are few areas of American life in which inequality has been more keenly felt than in education. This inequality is not a recent occurrence; it has been a structural feature of the United States since the colonial era when women were systematically excluded from equal access to higher levels of education right up until the mid-20th century. In addition to women, Native Americans, Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians/Pacific Islanders have been similarly excluded for much of American history from fair and equal access to educational opportunities. Consequently, even with the more recent policy attempts in the past 50 years to redress the generations of educational inequalities, entrenched structural inequalities continue to hamper the closing of the education achievement gap between poor, Native American, Black, and Hispanic children and their middle- or upper-class White and Asian counterparts.
