Institute for Social Science Research

This paper focuses on educational mobility, particularly racial or ethnic minority group access to institutions of higher learning in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. In America education determines opportunities for jobs and income, and therefore is the principal avenue through which the tremendous inequalities among groups in the population can be reconciled. If all people have equal access to education, then the present racial or ethnic group based inequalities will not persist. To the extent that inequalities would continue to exist, they would not be based on race or ethnicity but increasingly on actual differences in merit. If, on the other hand, the opposite were true, that is, there was no equal opportunity for schooling and discrimination persisted even when non-Whites dedicated themselves to education, then the idea of equal opportunity would give way to questions about the legitimacy of the entire system. Instead of offering a genuine chance, the educational process would be a part of a self-perpetuating cycle of inequality, all the more damaging because it encouraged people within it to believe that they were being prepared for an equal chance,leaving them to blame themselves when they failed.

Our research in large American metropolitan areas, including Los Angeles,suggests that equal educational opportunity does not exist across racial lines and that most Black and Hispanic students are educated in ways that are much closer to self-perpetuating cycles of inequality than to genuine preparation for mainstream opportunities for college or jobs. If this is true, the full potential of most of the young people in metropolitan Los Angeles is not being developed and the long-term potential for social and political conflict from the groups that are excluded is very severe.