‘The Great Equalizer’: What the Bronx education of the past can teach us about the Bronx education of today
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.51896/easc.v2i2.711Keywords:
Educational history, inmigration, The Bronx, American Dream, access to education, bilingual education, school integration, teacher shortage, teacher education, government policyAbstract
Education is an important tool in the pursuit of the American Dream, namely upward social and economic mobility in the United States. For over 100 years, immigrants and their families have moved to the Bronx to pursue this dream and take advantage of the free education provided by the public school system, from the influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to immigrants today coming from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa. This article seeks to use the Bronx Jewish History Project’s oral history interviews to establish the state of education in the Bronx in the mid-twentieth century in order to compare it with Bronx education today. In doing so, it draws the conclusion that public resources need to be reallocated to teacher education and enrichment education programs in order to overcome worsening segregation and provide the newest generation of immigrants with the opportunities necessary to pursue the American Dream in the twenty-first century.
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