Watch Poverty in School Districts Escalate Before Your Very Eyes
Since the recession, more children than ever are living in impoverished school districts.
For parents with multiple kids under one roof, being poor has a compounding effect. That’s why in America, children make up 23 percent of the population but 33 percent of all people in poverty.
If that isn’t staggering enough, those children are concentrated together at school. 25 percent of the nation’s school districts contain 82 percent of children living in poverty. And the communities defined by those districts have swollen since the Great Recession. In 2006, there were 15.9 million studentsliving within school districts where the overall child poverty rate was 20 percent or higher. In 2013, there were 26.3 million—a stunning 60 percent increase over just seven years.
Now, that doesn’t meant that all 26.3 million of them are living in poverty, or even attending public school. But it does mean that about half of all U.S. children live in places where a significant number of families are just scraping by.
EdBuild, a nonprofit that advocates for public school funding, has released an interactive map (shown above, courtesy of the Huffington Post) that shows all the U.S. school districts where the student poverty rate exceeded 20 percent, 30 percent, and 40 percent, time-lapsed from 2006 to 2013. It’s based on Census SAIPE data, which measures poverty in small units, such as school districts and counties. You can zoom in and search to see how your local district or region has fared.
Southern states have seen population expanding overall, with poverty levels rising in tandem. In the Midwest, it’s more of a deepening of poverty, as high-income families flee and low-income residents are left in concentration. Florida, ground-zero of the foreclosure crisis and among the slowest states to recover from the recession, is probably the most jaw-dropping example of poverty concentrating in school districts: In 2013, 76.3 percent of Florida children lived in districts where the student poverty rate was more than 20 percent. In 2006, those districts contained only 6 percent.
If those numbers (or the maps below) are so dramatic that they’re hard to believe, note that there may be some caveats to EdBuild’s data. Kye Lippold, a research associate at the Urban Institute, points out that the Census changed their methodology for computing school district poverty levels in 2010, which might explain at least part of the jump between 2009 and 2010. So it’s hard to say whether EdBuild’s exact numbers are completely accurate; it would take a more complex analysis to figure that out.
But, Lippold adds via email, “It is very likely true that the number of students in high-poverty districts has increased… the Great Recession could be expected to have this effect.”
That seems indisputable. And it’s certainly true that when your community is poor, your school district suffers in turn. In many states and localities, per-student spending is dramatically lower in poor school districts than it is in This Map From EdBuild Shows Increasing Rates of School District Poverty Since the Recession - CityLab: