Nairobi Jones
Pronouns: she/her
Research Mentor(s): Natalie Colabianchi
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Applied Exercise Science / Kinesiology
Program: UROPF
Session: Session 2 (10:00am – 10:50am)
Authors: Nairobi Jones, Ian Lang, Cathy Antonakos, Stephanie Miller, Natalie Colabianchi
Abstract
Although Plessy v. Ferguson’s Supreme Court decision of 1896 ruled that segregation is legal if it is “separate but equal,” most facilities for black people were not equal in quality, especially in the southern states. The differences in the separate facilities are accentuated when comparing the instruction expenditures of public educational institutes that served white students and the institutes that taught black students. Instruction expenditure includes teacher salaries, textbooks and supply purchases, and extracurricular activities. A bigger instruction expenditure is correlated with a better quality of education. As a result of the history of inequality in segregated schools, I hypothesized that schools that taught white students in the United States will have a bigger instruction expenditure and therefore a better quality of education compared to schools that taught black students. By using a North Carolina educational quality report from 1940-1941 to compare the difference between the instruction expenditures in white and black elementary schools in five different counties and their respective cities, this project determines whether this hypothesis is true for racially segregated elementary schools in North Carolina. In all counties and cities, the means for the instruction expenditure in white schools were higher than the means from the instruction expenditure in black schools. By taking the means of the expenditures in white schools (M = $28.4 per student) and black schools (M = $19.6 per student), we conducted a paired t-test and found that there was a significant difference between the instruction expenditures of white and black schools (p = 0.0124). Recent education quality reports and research has shown that segregation still exists in public schools that are predominantly white and schools that are predominantly black despite the Supreme Court’s verdict in the Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka in 1954 that ruled racial segregation as unconstitutional. For future research, researchers can compare the means of the financial expenditure today with the means found in this study to see if schools that are predominantly white and schools that are predominantly black have become more equal in terms of instruction expenditures from 1954 to today.
