Date of Award

12-5-2020

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts (BA)

Department

Sociology

First Advisor

Andrew Lindner

Abstract

With time continuing, American education has progressively improved. Though there still remains much-needed improvement and some of that stands in the way of equality within the education system. Special education and special needs students experience inequality with accessibility, funding, and educational quality, on top of daily barriers due to personal limitations. Data from the 2006 General Social Survey (N=652), asked individuals to identify whether they had a mental/emotional disability. They were asked to assess federal spending on education. This study focuses on the factors encouraging individuals to support or not support increased spending on the education system. Mental/emotional ability, affiliated political party, and race are all potential factors taken into consideration. Other aspects that are taken into consideration involved how the current reality may or may not have an impact on support. Increased spending consequently tightens the unequal gap between special education and mainstream education. Analysis indicates differently-abled individuals are actually NOT more likely to favor increased spending than fully-abled individuals. The most significant finding shows conservative respondents are less likely to support spending toward education. Results were mainly not statistically significant, though advanced general understanding regarding some key problems within education today. Improving the education system with increased spending requires more support from the public. Currently, there’s a lot of support for increased spending, though the federal government accounts for a small fraction of the money spent on education. Expressing more support to conservative officials could progress the situation in the right direction.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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