Volume 4,Issue 2
Social Stratification and Educational Opportunity in Urban School Systems
Based on the empirical and theoretical studies from 2020 to 2025 at home and abroad, this article will examine how social stratification affects educational opportunities in urban schools. Racial economic segregation, that is, the spatial agglomeration of racial and ethnic minority students in high-poverty schools, has become the main way for structural inequality to be converted into unfair education. The analysis is carried out in four aspects of the spatial and institutional mechanism of school segregation, the impact of socioeconomic status and family background on academic performance, the effect of school resource allocation and funding fairness, and the stratification effect of market-oriented education policy. According to evidence from quasi-experimental and longitudinal studies, access-oriented reforms of the traditional model are powerless to alleviate the long-standing problem of educational inequality, so it is necessary to introduce structural interventions targeting segregation, funding disparities, and institutional tracking practices to advance educational opportunities in cities. The final section of this paper summarizes the deficiencies in previous research and points out the directions for policy-making in current urban school reforms.
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