Poorly Funded Public Schools

            Low-achieving schools in the Bay Area do differ a bit as to those mentioned in Jonathan Kozol's, Savage Inequalities, however they do share some similarities. As many of the schools discussed in Kozol's book, many Bay Area schools suffer from lack of resources due to lack of funding. In this day and age there is a substantial amount of new technology available to the world, much of which can aid learning in schools. However, not all schools can afford or even raise money to acquire such technology. For instance, an article published by Inside Bay Area reports that students attending Oakland High School can not afford new computers and are therefore stuck with computers so old that the company who made them, no longer exists. This is an substantial difference compared to students of Sequoia Middle School in Pleasant Hill who, through parent funding, were provided twenty iPads.

              It is not just technology that students in Oakland, and the Bay Area lack. Another crucial resource they lack are textbooks. As many of the schools in Savage Inequalities,students of Oakland High School are forced to borrow textbooks from a school in West Oakland due to budget cuts. It is alarming to hear that schools like Oakland High do not have such essential resources. And as expressed in Kozol's book, lack of resources leads to lack of faith in students and lack of faith in themselves. Like many of the kids in towns such as East St. Louis, students in Oakland will begin to ask themselves why they are suffering compared to kids in richer communities in nearby towns. They blame themselves and begin to believe that their fate is “determine from their birth. If they fail, it's something in themselves” (172). The students in town like Oakland and Camden see the things everybody else has and realize that for some reason their getting less than the minimum amount.

            In the State of California the lowest-income students receive $620 less per student than students in richer communities. Many schools such as Sequoia Middle School and as mentioned in the book Cherry Hill, are fortunate to live in high income communities where parents are able to donate generous amounts of money to raise funds for extra necessities for their kids. The students in these types of neighborhood have more class choices, smaller class sizes, and more resources available to them individually. For those living in lower incomes communities such as Camden or Oakland, most parents do not have any extra money to spare towards donations to the schools; nor do the schools have money themselves. The Melrose Leadership Academy in Oakland recently had to hold a fundraise to raise funds to pay for copy machines. Copy machines, which to most may seem as an easy resource to acquire, were something of a scarcity at the Leadership Academy. With having to fundraise just to get new copy machines, the students of the Academy can not even imaging trying to raise money for even further resources such as computers and textbooks. According to a Stanford study conducted in 2012 the gap between poor and rich students is 40% higher than it has been in the last fifty years.