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Read & annotate this article before sharing findings with your classmates. By annotating, take at least 3 quotes from this article about the effects of

Read & annotate this article before sharing findings with your classmates. By annotating, take at least 3 quotes from this article about the effects of redlining on education. Cite the quotes using MLA documentation style

Social and economic disadvantage not only poverty, but a host of associated conditions depresses student performance. Concentrating students with these disadvantages in racially and economically homogenous schools depresses it further. Schools that the most disadvantaged black children attend are segregated because they are located in segregated high-poverty neighborhoods, far distant from truly middle-class neighborhoods. Living in such high-poverty neighborhoods for multiple generations adds an additional barrier to achievement, and multigenerational segregated poverty characterizes many African American children today. Education policy is constrained by housing policy: it is not possible to desegregate schools without desegregating both low-income and affluent neighborhoods. However, the policy motivation to desegregate neighborhoods is hobbled by a growing ignorance of the nations racial history. It has become conventional for policymakers to assert that the residential isolation of low-income black children is now de facto, the accident of economic circumstance, demographic trends, personal preference, and private discrimination. But the historical record demonstrates that residential segregation is de jure, resulting from racially-motivated and explicit public policy whose effects endure to the present. Without awareness of the history of state-sponsored residential segregation, policymakers are unlikely to take meaningful steps to understand or fulfill the constitutional mandate to remedy the racial isolation of neighborhoods, or the school segregation that flows from it.

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We cannot substantially improve the performance of the poorest African American students the truly disadvantaged, in William Julius Wilsons phrase by school reform alone. It must be addressed primarily by improving the social and economic conditions that bring too many children to school unprepared to take advantage of what even the best schools have to offer.

There are two aspects to this conclusion:

  • First, social and economic disadvantage not poverty itself, but a host of associated conditions depresses student performance, and
  • Second, concentrating students with these disadvantages in racially and economically homogenous schools depresses it further.

The individual predictors of low achievement are well documented:

  • With less access to routine and preventive health care, disadvantaged children have greater absenteeism (Aysola, Orav, & Ayanian, 2011; Starfield, 1997), and they cant benefit from good schools if they are not present.
  • With less literate parents, they are read to less frequently when young, and are exposed to less complex language at home (Ayoub et al., 2009; Brooks-Gunn & Markman, 2005).
  • With less adequate housing, they rarely have quiet places to study and may move more frequently, changing schools and teachers (Mehana & Reynolds, 2004; Raudenbush, Jean, & Art, 2011).
  • With fewer opportunities for enriching after-school and summer activities, their background knowledge and organizational skills are less developed (Entwisle, Alexander, & Olson, 2000; Neuman & Celano, 2001).
  • With fewer family resources, their college ambitions are constrained (Johnson, In Progress).

As these and many other disadvantages accumulate, lower social class children inevitably have lower average achievement than middle class children, even with the highest quality instruction.

When a schools proportion of students at risk of failure grows, the consequences of disadvantage are exacerbated.

In schools with high proportions of disadvantaged children,

  • Remediation becomes the norm, and teachers have little time to challenge those exceptional students who can overcome personal, family, and community hardships that typically interfere with learning.
  • In schools with high rates of student mobility, teachers spend more time repeating lessons for newcomers, and have fewer opportunities to adapt instruction to students individual strengths and weaknesses.
  • When classrooms fill with students who come to school less ready to learn, teachers must focus more on discipline and less on learning.
  • Children in impoverished neighborhoods are surrounded by more crime and violence and suffer from greater stress that interferes with learning (Buka, Stichick, Birdthistle, & Earls, 2001; Burdick-Will et al., 2010; Farah et al., 2006).
  • Children with less exposure to mainstream society are less familiar with the standard English thats necessary for their future success (Sampson, Sharkey, & Raudenbush, 2008).
  • When few parents have strong educations themselves, schools cannot benefit from parental pressure for higher quality curriculum, children have few college-educated role models to emulate and have few classroom peers whose own families set higher academic standards.

Nationwide, low-income black childrens isolation has increased. Its a problem not only of poverty but of race.

  • The share of black students attending schools that are more than 90 percent minority has grown from 34 percent to 39 percent from 1991 to 2011 (Orfield & Frankenberg, 2014, Table 8; Orfield & Lee, 2006, Table 3). In 1991, black students typically attended schools where 35 percent of their fellow students were white; by 2011, it had fallen to 28 percent (Orfield & Frankenberg, 2014, Table 4; Orfield, Kucsera, & Siegel-Hawley, 2012, Table 5).
  • In 1988, black students typically attended schools in which 43 percent of their fellow students were low-income; by 2006 it had risen to 59 percent (Orfield, 2009).
  • In cities with the most struggling students, the isolation is even more extreme. The most recent data show, for example, that in Detroit, the typical black student attends a school where 3 percent of students are white, and 84 percent are low income (Detroit Public Schools, 2009, Enrollment Demographics as of 11/19/2009).

It is inconceivable that significant gains can be made in the achievement of black children who are so severely isolated.

This school segregation mostly reflects neighborhood segregation. In urban areas, low-income white students are more likely to be integrated into middle-class neighborhoods and less likely to attend school predominantly with other disadvantaged students. Although immigrant low-income Hispanic students are also concentrated in schools, by the third generation their families are more likely to settle in more middle-class neighborhoods. Illustrative is that Latino immigrants who had resided in California for at least 30 years had a 65 percent homeownership rate prior to the burst of the housing bubble (Myers, 2008).1 Its undoubtedly lower after the bubble burst, but still extraordinary.

The racial segregation of schools has been intensifying because the segregation of neighborhoods has been intensifying. Analyzing Census data, Rutgers University Professor Paul Jargowsky has found that in 2011, 7 percent of poor whites lived in high poverty neighborhoods, where more than 40 percent of the residents are poor, up from 4 percent in 2000; 15 percent of poor Hispanics lived in such high poverty neighborhoods in 2011, up from 14 percent in 2000; and a breathtaking 23 percent of poor blacks lived in high poverty neighborhoods in 2011, up from 19 percent in 2000 (Jargowsky, 2013).

In his 2013 book, Stuck in Place (2013), the New York University sociologist Patrick Sharkey defines a poor neighborhood as one where 20 percent of the residents are poor, not 40 percent as in Paul Jargowskys work. A 20-percent-poor neighborhood is still severely disadvantaged. In such a neighborhood, many, if not most other residents are likely to have very low incomes, although not so low as to be below the official poverty line.

Sharkey finds that young African Americans (from 13 to 28 years old) are now ten times as likely to live in poor neighborhoods, defined in this way, as young whites66 percent of African Americans, compared to 6 percent of whites (Sharkey, 2013, p. 27, Fig. 2.1). Whats more, for black families, mobility out of such neighborhoods is much more limited than for whites. Sharkey shows that 67 percent of African American families hailing from the poorest quarter of neighborhoods a generation ago continue to live in such neighborhoods today. But only 40 percent of white families who lived in the poorest quarter of neighborhoods a generation ago still do so (Sharkey, 2013, p. 38, Fig. 2.6).

Considering all black families, 48 percent have lived in poor neighborhoods over at least two generations, compared to 7 percent of white families (Sharkey, 2013, p. 39). If a child grows up in a poor neighborhood, moving up and out to a middle-class area is typical for whites but an aberration for blacks. Black neighborhood poverty is thus more multigenerational while white neighborhood poverty is more episodic; black children in low-income neighborhoods are more likely than others to have parents who also grew up in such neighborhoods.

The implications for childrens chances of success are dramatic: For academic performance, Sharkey uses a scale like the familiar IQ measure, where 100 is the mean and roughly 70 percent of children score about average, between 85 and 115. Using a survey that traces individuals and their offspring since 1968, Sharkey shows that children who come from middle-class (non-poor) neighborhoods and whose mothers also grew up in middle-class neighborhoods score an average of 104 on problem-solving tests. Children from poor neighborhoods whose mothers also grew up in poor neighborhoods score lower, an average of 96.

Sharkeys truly startling finding, however, is this: Children in poor neighborhoods whose mothers grew up in middle-class neighborhoods score an average of 102, slightly above the mean and only slightly below the average scores of children whose families lived in middle-class neighborhoods for two generations. But children who live in middle-class neighborhoodsyet whose mothers grew up in poor neighborhoodsscore an average of only 98 (Sharkey 2013, p. 130, Fig. 5.5.).

Sharkey concludes that the parents environment during [her own] childhood may be more important than the childs own environment. He calculates that living in poor neighborhoods over two consecutive generations reduces childrens cognitive skills by roughly eight or nine points roughly equivalent to missing two to four years of schooling (Sharkey 2013, pp. 129-131).

Integrating disadvantaged black students into schools where more privileged students predominate can narrow the black-white achievement gap. Evidence is especially impressive for long term outcomes for adolescents and young adults who have attended integrated schools (e.g., Guryan, 2001; Johnson, 2011). But the conventional wisdom of contemporary education policy notwithstanding, there is no evidence that segregated schools with poorly performing students can be turned around while remaining racially isolated. Claims that some schools, charter schools in particular, beat the odds founder upon close examination. Such schools are structurally selective on non-observables, at least, and frequently have high attrition rates (Rothstein, 2004, pp. 61-84). In some small districts, or in areas of larger districts where ghetto and middle class neighborhoods adjoin, school integration can be accomplished by devices such as magnet schools, controlled choice, and attendance zone manipulations. But for African American students living in the ghettos of large cities, far distant from middle class suburbs, the racial isolation of their schools cannot be remedied without undoing the racial isolation of the neighborhoods in which they are located.

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