The New York Times published a piece highlighting new research on how students’ standardized test scores rise with their parents’ incomes and how this education gap starts years before students sit for standardized testing. It also confirms the pivotal role neighborhoods play in this disparity.

Looking at the data results, Sean Reardon, the professor of poverty and inequality in education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education said, “Kids in disadvantaged neighborhoods end up behind the starting line even when they get to kindergarten.”

Because of severe income segregation and inequality based on neighborhoods, rich and poor children receive starkly different educations, inside AND outside the classroom. Describing this gap, journalist Claire Cain Miller said, “The goals and experiences of the people in their neighborhood rub off on children, too. Friendships that cut across class have a bigger effect on children’s outcomes than school quality, previous research by Professor Chetty and colleagues found. [Economically] segregated neighborhoods make these [cross-class] friendships harder to find.”

For years, economists following neighborhood inequality have published on this problem without offering many solutions. However, in this most recent paper, researchers are affirming solutions like the work of Dr. Bartley Danielsen, suggesting communities must not try to address the education problem solely from inside the schools. Rather, communities need to start by reducing residential income segregation to change the fate of of a child.

BREAKING INCOME SEGREGATION WITH SCHOOL CHOICE:

It may seem obvious, people want to live near the best schools, but have you ever thought about the problems created when families flee weak school districts? It creates exactly the kind of residential income segregation that the New York Times article describes.

How It Works:

• Politicians draw school boundary lines.

• Families, who can afford to, choose to live on the side of the line with better schools (known as ‘voting with their feet’).

• Then, the quality of life — schools, family income levels, poverty rates, crime rates — on either side of the line become drastically different (meaning neighborhoods economically segregate). 

One side of the line becomes economically healthier and the other side more economically depressed. Those who can’t afford to live “on the good side of the line” are left behind geographically, but also economically, educationally and socially. This destructive process of economic segregation also moves job opportunities away from poor areas and to where wealthier families cluster.

So, how can cities combat this pattern to address the education gap? Instead of letting school assignments dictate who lives where, cities should adopt education systems that allow families to ignore lines.

Historically, housing policies have worked to stop economic segregation by moving poorer families into wealthy neighborhoods, and while many saw positive outcomes in these cases, these policies are expensive and difficult to replicate on a larger scale. Instead, research shows location-based school choice programs can have a similar effect. When a school choice policy is connected to a poor neighborhood, it can reverse the segregation created by assigned schools over time, drawing a variety of income levels back to a community. 

Today, however, most voucher and scholarship programs only allow poor families in poor neighborhoods to participate. Because non-poor families are not eligible, they must either pay for a private school or send their children to the neighborhood’s assigned low-quality public school. As a result, they usually choose to move away, creating economic segregation. Community leaders interested in improving low-income children’s education and improving long-term economic growth for low-income neighborhoods should consider school choice policies that draw diverse income levels to a community rather than supporting programs that discriminate on the basis of income. These policies will reduce residential income segregation and change the fate of low income children and their families.

Want to know more about what that might look like? Take a look at the research: https://www.effective-ed.org/in-the-media