Stiglitz: Inequality Is Not Inevitable | janresseger

Stiglitz: Inequality Is Not Inevitable | janresseger:

Stiglitz: Inequality Is Not Inevitable

Posted on July 2, 2014 by janresseger

The NY Times just ended an eighteen month series of commentaries on its opinion pages about economic inequality,  The Great Divide, moderated by the Nobel prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz.  I urge you to read the final column in this series, in which Stiglitz declares,Inequality is Not Inevitable.

That economic inequality matters to educational outcomes in public schools has been conclusively demonstrated in research by Stanford University’s Sean Reardon, who has shown that in America we are increasingly raising our children in schools where all the children are poor or schools where all the children are rich, with fewer economically diverse communities where children from a range of incomes are educated together.  School achievement has come to track this growing residential segregation by economics, with poor children lagging farther behind as wealthy children leap ahead.  Here is a summary of Reardon’s research:

1. By 2009 the proportion of families in major metropolitan areas living in either very poor or very affluent neighborhoods had increased—to 33 percent (from 15 percent in 1970) and the proportion of families living in middle income neighborhoods had declined to 42 percent in 2009 (from 65 percent in 1970), with increased segregation at both ends of the income distribution.  Both high-and low-income families became increasingly residentially isolated in the 2000s, resulting in greater polarization of neighborhoods by income.
2. Income segregation has grown significantly over four decades for black and Hispanic families, but particularly in the years since 2000.  While income inequality among black families did not grow significantly Stiglitz: Inequality Is Not Inevitable | janresseger: