When I was in middle school, I signed up to be an academic tutor at a local trailer park for elementary school students. Book and pencil in hand, I showed up once a week, ready to volunteer my time helping these students with their assignments. As I was walking out of the park one day, a lonely mother standing in the corner with her son caught my eye. I noticed several of my classmates were talking to the parents of the children, so I figured I should make some small talk myself. I walked over there, and we started talking about the tutoring program. I asked her about her son, and how he's doing in school. Soon, we gradually started talking about college.

"Do you plan for your son to go to college in-state?" I asked her. She looked at me blankly.

"Oh, he's not going to college." She replied. I stared at her, confused. He was only in elementary school. How could she be so sure of this? I pressed further. I just couldn't grapple at this situation.

"We can't afford it." She said, point-blank. I stopped and stared off into the distance. Her young son wasn't going to attend college because they couldn't afford it? I knew there must be some other options.

"What about financial aid? Scholarships? Loans?" I had to find an answer. Her son couldn't just lose this opportunity because they couldn't afford it. Right?

"Those are a hit or miss. Even if my son had the merit to get a scholarship, it most likely won't be enough to cover everything."

I went home that afternoon, thinking.

In my (then) thirteen years of lifetime, I realized that I had lived in a cocoon of happiness- failing to see the struggling individuals hidden among the average community members. My own privilege blinded me, and I was shocked to see the economic disparities and inequalities that people, who lived a mere five minutes down the street from me, faced.

It wasn't just this one boy and his family. Millions of people around the world go through this struggle- losing access to vital, life-changing resources because of their economic status. This situation intrigued me: why wasn't anyone talking about this? How come I'm just now hearing about 'education inequity?' I delved myself into more research, and I was startled at what I found.

Children in low-income households do less well than their better-off peers on many outcomes in life, such as education or health, simply because they are poorer. Increases in family income substantially reduce differences in schooling outcomes and improve wider aspects of a child's well-being.

Lowest income students' learning level is up to four years behind the highest income students. LAGGING BEHIND Standardized tests in recent decades indicate that the academic achievement of the poorest U.S. students is several years behind that of their wealthier peers.

This brings us to the issue of education inequity: Children from low socioeconomic backgrounds have less access to quality learning materials and resources such as books and tutors needed for a positive literacy environment, and consequently enter high school with average literacy skills five years behind children coming from high socioeconomic backgrounds. Lack of resources and misinformation put children from low socioeconomic backgrounds at a great disadvantage. According to the Funding Gaps report of 2018 by the Education Trust, students studying in the highest poverty districts receive 1000 USD less per child than students studying in the lowest poverty districts. In several countries, schools ask for a "student fee" and payment for pursuing certain activities and classes. Along with that, expenditure on mandatory school uniforms, stationery items, etc, put the already disadvantaged students even more behind than their wealthier counterparts.

Today, education remains an inaccessible right for millions of children around the world. More than 72 million children of primary education age are not in school and 759 million adults are illiterate and do not have the awareness necessary to improve both their living conditions and those of their children. In many countries throughout Africa, "informal fees" and payment for "compulsory items" exists and often, in countries having mainly private schools, families have to choose between their daily bread and their child's education. Various researches conducted all over the world such as research in Lagelu local government in Nigeria or research by the International Journal of Indian Psychology all point to the same conclusion- socioeconomic status is a significant factor in the academic achievement of students.

Then, I started learning more about racial inequity and unconscious bias.

A learned set of beliefs about a specific race of people that either causes you to preface that race or to be discriminatory or not preference that race. It's something that we learn over time through society and we have lots of racialized experience throughout our lifetime. We know that kids as young as five from the test from Kenneth and Mamie Clark, the famous doll test where they gave five-year-olds a set of dolls, one white doll and one black doll. Regardless of the race of the child whether it was a black child or a white child, they universally chose the white doll, because the white doll looked pretty and good, and the black doll looked bad and dirty.

And so, we are primed from a very, very young age, often unconsciously primed from a young age all throughout our day to form these biases for one racial group and against another racial group. That's what we talk about unconscious bias. It's absorbed. It's learned over time. It's something that's more automatic. Unless we pay attention, we can enact racial biases towards another group without even consciously paying attention that we're doing it.

We think the framing of unconscious racial bias is more palatable to white people than racism. Because when we talk about racism, often white educators get defensive and shut down. We talked a lot about, well, is this coddling white educators for us to frame this as unconscious racial bias rather than racism? Then we thought we actually urgently want to reach educators who right now are not engaging in these conversations, and if using a tactical strategy like framing this as unconscious racial bias will help teachers understand that we're not accusing them of not caring about their students of color, we're not accusing them of harboring bad intentions, that we're actually trying to help them grow in awareness of everything, of all the learned biases that they've absorbed over time, that that will allow them to engage in this conversation long enough to actually investigate their behaviors and change the impact that they have on students of color.

There's research that shows that most white people have majority white friend groups, like majority by an extreme number, in the 90 percentile, and that most white people go through most of their days without interacting with any people of color, mostly people who look like them. All sorts of reasons why white people are not used to thinking about themselves as having a racial identity. And so for a lot of white teachers, for the reasons you've said also, they may associate talking about race with people who are racist. Some of the white people in our society who speak the loudest about race are white supremacists, and so sometimes there can be this association that if you talk about race, you're one of those bad white people. Or people have been taught that if you care about equity, then you don't see race, which of course is a fallacy because we all can see race very easily.

As much as teachers are influenced by societal beliefs about gender, racial bias in education is arguably an even greater problem in the average American classroom. A 2014 report showed that black children make up only 18% of preschoolers but make up 48% of children suspended more than once.

I was taken aback by this mass amount of information that seemed to have slipped by me in all my years of life. Why aren't we doing anything to prevent racial and socioeconomic injustices plague our educational system?

In light of the coronavirus pandemic and the Black Lives Matter Movement, many different inequalities plaguing our world have been exposed. It's really important for all of us to educate ourselves on how we can break past the negative stereotypes and unconscious biases, in order to make our world more equal.

We all bleed the same blood, shed the same tears, feel the same emotions, deserve the same rights- so why are we treated differently because of our skin color?

When I was in middle school, I signed up to be an academic tutor at a local trailer park for elementary school students. Book and pencil in hand, I showed up once a week, ready to volunteer my time helping these students with their assignments. As I was walking out of the park one day, a lonely mother standing in the corner with her son caught my eye. I noticed several of my classmates were talking to the parents of the children, so I figured I should make some small talk myself. I walked over there, and we started talking about the tutoring program. I asked her about her son, and how he's doing in school. Soon, we gradually started talking about college.

"Do you plan for your son to go to college in-state?" I asked her. She looked at me blankly.

"Oh, he's not going to college." She replied. I stared at her, confused. He was only in elementary school. How could she be so sure of this? I pressed further. I just couldn't grapple at this situation.

"We can't afford it." She said, point-blank. I stopped and stared off into the distance. Her young son wasn't going to attend college because they couldn't afford it? I knew there must be some other options.

"What about financial aid? Scholarships? Loans?" I had to find an answer. Her son couldn't just lose this opportunity because they couldn't afford it. Right?

"Those are a hit or miss. Even if my son had the merit to get a scholarship, it most likely won't be enough to cover everything."

I went home that afternoon, thinking.

In my (then) thirteen years of lifetime, I realized that I had lived in a cocoon of happiness- failing to see the struggling individuals hidden among the average community members. My own privilege blinded me, and I was shocked to see the economic disparities and inequalities that people, who lived a mere five minutes down the street from me, faced.

It wasn't just this one boy and his family. Millions of people around the world go through this struggle- losing access to vital, life-changing resources because of their economic status. This situation intrigued me: why wasn't anyone talking about this? How come I'm just now hearing about 'education inequity?' I delved myself into more research, and I was startled at what I found.

Children in low-income households do less well than their better-off peers on many outcomes in life, such as education or health, simply because they are poorer. Increases in family income substantially reduce differences in schooling outcomes and improve wider aspects of a child's well-being.

Lowest income students' learning level is up to four years behind the highest income students. LAGGING BEHIND Standardized tests in recent decades indicate that the academic achievement of the poorest U.S. students is several years behind that of their wealthier peers.

This brings us to the issue of education inequity: Children from low socioeconomic backgrounds have less access to quality learning materials and resources such as books and tutors needed for a positive literacy environment, and consequently enter high school with average literacy skills five years behind children coming from high socioeconomic backgrounds. Lack of resources and misinformation put children from low socioeconomic backgrounds at a great disadvantage. According to the Funding Gaps report of 2018 by the Education Trust, students studying in the highest poverty districts receive 1000 USD less per child than students studying in the lowest poverty districts. In several countries, schools ask for a "student fee" and payment for pursuing certain activities and classes. Along with that, expenditure on mandatory school uniforms, stationery items, etc, put the already disadvantaged students even more behind than their wealthier counterparts.

Today, education remains an inaccessible right for millions of children around the world. More than 72 million children of primary education age are not in school and 759 million adults are illiterate and do not have the awareness necessary to improve both their living conditions and those of their children. In many countries throughout Africa, "informal fees" and payment for "compulsory items" exists and often, in countries having mainly private schools, families have to choose between their daily bread and their child's education. Various researches conducted all over the world such as research in Lagelu local government in Nigeria or research by the International Journal of Indian Psychology all point to the same conclusion- socioeconomic status is a significant factor in the academic achievement of students.

Then, I started learning more about racial inequity and unconscious bias.

A learned set of beliefs about a specific race of people that either causes you to preface that race or to be discriminatory or not preference that race. It's something that we learn over time through society and we have lots of racialized experience throughout our lifetime. We know that kids as young as five from the test from Kenneth and Mamie Clark, the famous doll test where they gave five-year-olds a set of dolls, one white doll and one black doll. Regardless of the race of the child whether it was a black child or a white child, they universally chose the white doll, because the white doll looked pretty and good, and the black doll looked bad and dirty.

And so, we are primed from a very, very young age, often unconsciously primed from a young age all throughout our day to form these biases for one racial group and against another racial group. That's what we talk about unconscious bias. It's absorbed. It's learned over time. It's something that's more automatic. Unless we pay attention, we can enact racial biases towards another group without even consciously paying attention that we're doing it.

We think the framing of unconscious racial bias is more palatable to white people than racism. Because when we talk about racism, often white educators get defensive and shut down. We talked a lot about, well, is this coddling white educators for us to frame this as unconscious racial bias rather than racism? Then we thought we actually urgently want to reach educators who right now are not engaging in these conversations, and if using a tactical strategy like framing this as unconscious racial bias will help teachers understand that we're not accusing them of not caring about their students of color, we're not accusing them of harboring bad intentions, that we're actually trying to help them grow in awareness of everything, of all the learned biases that they've absorbed over time, that that will allow them to engage in this conversation long enough to actually investigate their behaviors and change the impact that they have on students of color.

There's research that shows that most white people have majority white friend groups, like majority by an extreme number, in the 90 percentile, and that most white people go through most of their days without interacting with any people of color, mostly people who look like them. All sorts of reasons why white people are not used to thinking about themselves as having a racial identity. And so for a lot of white teachers, for the reasons you've said also, they may associate talking about race with people who are racist. Some of the white people in our society who speak the loudest about race are white supremacists, and so sometimes there can be this association that if you talk about race, you're one of those bad white people. Or people have been taught that if you care about equity, then you don't see race, which of course is a fallacy because we all can see race very easily.

As much as teachers are influenced by societal beliefs about gender, racial bias in education is arguably an even greater problem in the average American classroom. A 2014 report showed that black children make up only 18% of preschoolers but make up 48% of children suspended more than once.

I was taken aback by this mass amount of information that seemed to have slipped by me in all my years of life. Why aren't we doing anything to prevent racial and socioeconomic injustices plague our educational system?

In light of the coronavirus pandemic and the Black Lives Matter Movement, many different inequalities plaguing our world have been exposed. It's really important for all of us to educate ourselves on how we can break past the negative stereotypes and unconscious biases, in order to make our world more equal.

We all bleed the same blood, shed the same tears, feel the same emotions, deserve the same rights- so why are we treated differently because of our skin color?