Saturday marks the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court's landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision yet inequality in education still exits for poor students, says Dan Cardinali, president of the advocacy group
Communities In Schools.
"Young people who are going to school are facing a set of challenges often posed by poverty," Cardinali told J.D. Hayworth and John Bachman on "America's Forum" on Newsmax TV. "They're hungry, they’re in need of food and shelter, they have a set of challenges as simple as needing eye glasses that can be really fundamental barriers to learning."
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Cardinali explained that these problems exist even though "we have made progress in terms of graduation rates... poverty is still a relatively important factor in predicting student outcomes."
"In terms of this inequality, [of] school systems that are predominantly brown and black, Latino and African-American kids are just proportionately poor," he said. "So we see real challenges there in those school systems."
The challenge for many of these poor students is having parents who are trying to stay afloat while working "two and sometimes three jobs" and who aren't able to give their children the help they need to be successful in school, Cardinali explained.
"I've never met a parent in all my years of working across the country that isn't deeply committed to their children," he said. "What I do find is that parents who are in economically distressed situations have an enormous set of barriers that they themselves are wrestling against."
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