Separate and Still Unequal
In 95 of the largest 100 U.S. metros, students of color attend school with mostly poor or low-income peers
Zak Bickel / The Atlantic
In a modern-day tale of two cities, in virtually every major U.S. metropolitan area students of color are much more likely than whites to attend public schools shaped by high concentrations of poverty, an analysis of federal data has found.
In all but five of the 95 largest cities by population for which data is available, more minority than white students attend public schools where most of their classmates qualify as poor or low-income, according to the analysis of data from the National Equity Atlas. In a full three-fourths of cities, the share of minority students attending mostly poor or low-income schools is at least 20 percentage points greater than the share of white students. In 29 of the cities, the gap is at least 40 percentage points.
Across a wide range of cities, the numbers point to a massive racial imbalance in exposure to concentrated poverty. In St. Louis, 92 percent of black, but only 27 percent of white, students attend schools where most of their classmates qualify as poor or low-income. In Dallas, 38 percent of white, compared to 95 percent of black and 97 percent of Latino students, attend mostly low-income schools. In Los Angeles, the numbers are 49 percent for whites, 85 percent for African Americans, and 96 percent for Latinos.
Even in the cities experiencing the fastest economic growth since the recession, students of color predominantly remain trapped in low-income schools. Austin, Texas, is one of the fastest-growing economically vibrant communities in America, but 75 percent of black and 77 percent of Latino students there attend majority-poor schools, compared to just 12 percent of whites. And in Seattle, where the tech sector is driving the economic boom, only 15 percent of white students, and about two-thirds of black (69 percent) and Latinos (66 percent), attend a majority-poor school. In Denver, 41 percent of whites attend a majority-poverty school, though those numbers more than double for the share of black (83 percent) and Latino students (93 percent).
“Here we are, 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education and our schools are woefully separate and unequal, and in many cases we're actually going backward from where we were,” said Brad Lander, a member of the New York City Council. “I think we've been painfully blind to the problem.” The contrast between the levels of economic segregation facing white and minority students—a well-established problem—re-emerges from the analysis of data provided by the National Equity Atlas, a joint project of PolicyLink and the University of Southern Where Schools Are Separate and Still Unequal - The Atlantic:
