Wealth and race have long been sources of inequality in the United States. In 2018, the median lower income family made roughly $28,700, while the middle income family median income was just over 3 times that amount, at $86,600. This affects education because these wealthy families generally live in the same area and send their children to the same schools, which in turn creates some schools that excel academically and other schools where your student’s chances of graduating are just slightly better than winning a coin toss. This is why I wanted to research different zoning codes in Californian cities to see if local zoning laws had any effect on the level of educational disparities.
Housing Segregation and Inequality
To conduct the study, I started by separating the schools within a city into two groups, wealthy and less-wealthy, based on their enrolled students’ free and reduced lunch rates. Immediately, the effect of wealth on education was made apparent as the average graduation rate for the wealthier schools in a city was higher in 90% of the cities I observed. In the graph you can see how much higher graduation rates were for the wealthier group, with Hayward City’s wealthy group graduating approximately 26% more students than its counterpart.
I also collected demographic differences for the two school groups, as well as other important factors such as the difference in student teacher ratios and the city poverty rate before comparing these to the rate of people renting in a city. The idea behind this was that cities that had more rental housing would have less room for economic segregation since there wouldn’t be large blocks of wealthy, single-family housing.
Poverty Concentration and Race
Unfortunately, I did not find any compelling evidence that a city’s rental housing rate had any effect on the size of the graduation gaps between wealthy and less wealthy schools. This doesn’t mean that poverty concentration isn’t real though. What’s more likely is that I didn’t look deep enough into the type of housing that students who attended each school lived in. By focusing on rental rates, I didn’t get to see if the rentals in a city were in one area, or many, and therefore couldn’t tell if the rental rate mattered for concentrating poverty in schools.
I did reinforce common knowledge about the state of education and wealth for minorities though. There was interesting, and expected significance in the demographic details of students and the gaps between the two groups graduation rates. Before any analysis was done, it was clear that white students tended to be wealthier as all but 2 of the wealthy school groups had higher white student enrollment. The opposite was true for Hispanic students, as there was not a single wealthy group that had more Hispanic students than its less wealthy counterpart. This translated to graduation rate gaps between the wealthy and less wealthy school groups as well. When the wealthy school group increased its white student enrollment by about 10%, the wealthy groups average graduation rate also increased by about 2.7%. However, when a wealthy school increased its Hispanic population by about 10%, the average graduation rate actually dropped about 3%.
The Need For Access
This shows the racial disparities present in our education system, that go beyond Hispanic students just being less wealthy on average. Minority students have been shown to do worse in school by multiple studies and this is a problem that should be addressed by local, state, and federal governments to ensure all students have access to a good education. This is true for students who have grown up in poverty as well, as they also are proven to perform worse in schools. Education has long been known to help improve a person’s life. It teaches them to think critically, gives them the tools they need to get better jobs later in life, and the confidence to believe they can be something. So, while changing the zoning structures of a city may not be the best way to address this issue, it is something that needs to be addressed to help provide equitable education for all.
Elijah Kray-Mawhorr is a senior at Indiana University.
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