NY Times Editorial: Together We Are Responsible for Equalizing Educational Opportunity Between Cities and Suburbs
This week, the New York Times editorial board published a stunning analysis of unequal educational opportunity among the children of America’s metropolitan areas. The facts are not new, but the effects of the coronavirus have so exposed economic and racial inequality that someone at the newspaper was motivated to pen a sort of manifesto for justice in the nation’s public schools. This piece is ground breaking because it names a reality that has remained invisible to many Americans:
“Our urban areas are laced by invisible but increasingly impermeable boundaries separating enclaves of wealth and privilege from the gaptoothed blocks of aging buildings and vacant lots where jobs are scarce and where life is hard and, all too often short. Cities continue to create vast amounts of wealth, but the distribution of those gains resembles the New York skyline: A handful of super-tall buildings, and everyone else in the shade… Our cities are broken because affluent Americans have been segregating themselves from the poor, and our best hope for building a fairer, stronger nation is to break down those barriers.”
Here is the data: “Most poor whites live in mixed-income neighborhoods. In the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas, about a third of low-income whites—3.4 million people—lived in high-poverty urban neighborhoods in 2014, according to a Brookings Institution analysis. By contrast, 72 percent of low-income blacks, or 5.2 million people, lived in high-poverty urban neighborhoods, as well as 68 percent of low-income Hispanics, or 6.7 million people.”
What has caused the current level of economic and racial segregation? The newspaper’s CONTINUE READING: NY Times Editorial: Together We Are Responsible for Equalizing Educational Opportunity Between Cities and Suburbs | janresseger