ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 deals with educational access, opportunity, and results by race and ethnicity from the nation’s beginning to the present. During the colonial period and throughout the nineteenth century, before and after the end of slavery, education developed more rapidly in the North than in the South, with slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and racial animus driving the regional differences. Public primary schools rose early in the North, while the South generally depended on private academies until after the Civil War. When public schools did come to the South segregation reigned and rural schools and Black schools received about half the per pupil funding of urban and White schools. While segregation was at least partially dismantled during the middle decades of the twentieth century and funding gaps were narrowed, segregation and funding discrimination have grown again. Similar gaps are evident at the college and university levels. Today, as we will see in some detail, minority educational opportunity and attainment from elementary school through college continue to lag White opportunity and attainment.
