A recent study links growing segregation between low-income Latino families and middle-class white families to a widening achievement gap. The study investigates whether the rising number of Latino students in the U.S. reduces or exacerbates racial and economic segregation over time. The study finds that Latino children were less likely to attend elementary schools with white students in 2015 than they were in 2000 (in part because of growing Latino enrollment) and that only 13% of the nation’s school districts enroll enough Latino and white children to advance integration in schools.
“This is not a school issue or necessarily an educational issue,” said Ana Ponce of Los Angeles advocacy group Great Public Schools Now in a recent article published in the Los Angeles Times. “This is an economic issue. This is a systemic issue around living wages, around affordable housing, around access and opportunity for families to be able to live where they would like to live as opposed to where they have to live because of the economic constraints.”
Segregation in schools bears significantly on housing access. According to Gary Orfield, a UCLA professor quoted in the same article, public housing and subsidized housing are “overwhelmingly concentrated in segregated school locations. People are living where they’re living because there was a decision made about where to enable the rental of subsidized housing to happen.”
Read the study here.
Read the Los Angeles Times article here.