WHY POVERTY AND SEGREGATION MERGE AT PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Chicago, like most of the country, braces for the impact of concentrated poverty and increasing racial separation.

Ronald Brownstein Editorial Director The National Journal | http://bit.ly/1WQRUtn

Nov 12, 2015  ::  CHICA­GO—In 2014, Amer­ica’s edu­ca­tion sys­tem marked an im­port­ant mile­stone. For the first time ever, chil­dren of col­or be­came a ma­jor­ity among K-12 pub­lic school stu­dents na­tion­wide.

Today schools are cross­ing a second, more troub­ling, bar­ri­er. The latest fig­ures show that 51 per­cent of pub­lic school stu­dents at­tend schools where a ma­jor­ity of their class­mates qual­i­fy as poor or low-in­come un­der fed­er­al guidelines. This deep­en­ing con­cen­tra­tion of eco­nom­ic need com­plic­ates the in­ter­twined chal­lenges of equip­ping Amer­ica’s in­creas­ingly di­verse young people with the edu­ca­tion they need to reach the middle-class and de­vel­op­ing the skilled work­ers the U.S. needs to main­tain its in­ter­na­tion­al com­pet­it­ive­ness. Without pro­gress in ad­dress­ing the harden­ing isol­a­tion of low-in­come fam­il­ies, school re­form alone is un­likely to pro­duce the edu­ca­tion­al res­ults Amer­ica needs.

Two con­ver­ging trends are driv­ing the growth of low-in­come schools. One is the over­all tra­ject­ory of poverty. When Bill Clin­ton left of­fice after 2000, the poverty rate for chil­dren un­der 18 stood just over 16 per­cent. That rose to 19 per­cent un­der George W. Bush and peaked at 22 per­cent un­der Pres­id­ent Obama in 2010. The num­ber has since de­clined only slightly to 21 per­cent; it re­mains about one-third for both Afric­an-Amer­ic­ans and Lati­nos.

The second trend is the grow­ing isol­a­tion of poor people. In an im­port­ant pa­per this fall, Cen­tury Found­a­tion schol­ar Richard Kah­len­berg noted that both rich and poor fam­il­ies are more sep­ar­ated from fam­il­ies in oth­er in­come brack­ets today than in 1970. Fig­ures com­piled by the An­nie E. Ca­sey Found­a­tion’s Kids Count pro­ject show that over the past dec­ade, the share of kids liv­ing in neigh­bor­hoods of con­cen­trated poverty (defined as places where at least 30 per­cent of the res­id­ents are poor) has in­creased in most ma­jor cit­ies—for ex­ample, from 25 to 34 per­cent in Los Angeles, 29 to 36 per­cent in Chica­go, and 28 to 38 per­cent in Hou­s­ton.

Be­cause most stu­dents at­tend neigh­bor­hood schools, these in­ter­sect­ing trends have swelled the por­tion of kids in schools that also ex­per­i­ence con­cen­trated eco­nom­ic need. In 1999, only 28 per­cent of pub­lic school stu­dents at­ten­ded schools where most of their class­mates qual­i­fied as poor or low-in­come, mean­ing their fam­il­ies earned less than 185 per­cent of the fed­er­al poverty level, or about $45,000 for a fam­ily of four. (Schools track these fig­ures to de­term­ine which stu­dents are eli­gible for free or re­duced-price school lunches.) The share of stu­dents at­tend­ing ma­jor­ity low-in­come schools has rock­eted to al­most 51 per­cent, roughly 25 mil­lion kids in all, in the most re­cent fed­er­al fig­ures, which cov­ers the 2012-13 school year.

For stu­dents of col­or, the fig­ures are even high­er. Na­tion­wide, about three-fourths of both Afric­an-Amer­ic­an and Latino stu­dents at­tend ma­jor­ity-low in­come schools. By con­trast, only about one-third of whites at­tend such eco­nom­ic­ally strained schools.

In Chica­go, in a school sys­tem where 85 per­cent of stu­dents are either black or Latino, the con­cen­tra­tion of eco­nom­ic need is over­whelm­ing. In 77 of the city’s roughly 680 pub­lic schools, at least 99 per­cent of the stu­dents qual­i­fy as poor or low-in­come. The share tops 90 per­cent in an­oth­er 388 schools. In only 50 schools do less than half of stu­dents qual­i­fy as low-in­come.

“You’re a fourth-grade teach­er and com­ing in­to that door is 30 stu­dents from poverty, broken homes, crime and you are sup­posed to just, on your own, turn that around,” Chica­go May­or Rahm Emanuel told me at a Next Amer­ica for­um I mod­er­ated here this week. “That’s im­possible.”

In­nov­at­ive and ten­a­cious edu­cat­ors can make pro­gress des­pite these trends. Chica­go has de­veloped a cre­at­ive pro­gram of early in­ter­ven­tion that has dra­mat­ic­ally in­creased high school gradu­ation rates from around 55 per­cent in 2009 to 70 per­cent now, with both Afric­an-Amer­ic­an and Latino stu­dents demon­strat­ing sig­ni­fic­ant gains. Since 2003, the share of the city’s 4th graders who score as “pro­fi­cient” on Na­tion­al As­sess­ment of Edu­ca­tion­al Pro­gress (NAEP) tests has tripled in math and more than doubled in read­ing (though in each case to only around 30 per­cent). At the for­um Gregory Jones, prin­cip­al of Chica­go’s Ken­wood Academy High School, a school where two-thirds of stu­dents are low-in­come, noted that just over half of their gradu­ates now fin­ish with some col­lege cred­it.

Like­wise, across all large cit­ies, Afric­an-Amer­ic­an, His­pan­ic, and low-in­come stu­dents have pos­ted gains in read­ing and math since 2003. But the lar­ger trend is the dur­ab­il­ity of in­come and ra­cial dis­par­it­ies. The latest NAEP res­ults for large cit­ies found that only about one-fifth of stu­dents who qual­i­fied as low-in­come reached the (highest) pro­fi­cient level in 4th grade read­ing or math, com­pared to just over half of more af­flu­ent class­mates in read­ing and nearly three-fifths in math.

It’s fair to de­mand that schools re­think and re­form to en­sure that the in­terests of chil­dren take pre­ced­ence over the pri­or­it­ies of the adults who run the sys­tem. But it’s un­real­ist­ic to ask schools to equal­ize op­por­tun­ity alone, without more ag­gress­ive ef­forts to re­vital­ize poor neigh­bor­hoods and to help more fam­il­ies re­lo­cate to more stable com­munit­ies. Des­pite hero­ic ex­cep­tions, any na­tion­al strategy that hopes to im­prove schools without im­prov­ing neigh­bor­hoods simply won’t add up.