The new educational divide

This fall, American children have returned to schools that are increasingly segregated by economic status. That central reality – that poor children and middle-class children increasingly attend separate schools – is at the heart of America's education problem. Poverty concentrations have a way of defeating even the best education programs. Neither political party, however, has a strong plan of action to address this educational disaster.

Conservatives, energized by the Supreme Court decision permitting vouchers for private religious schools, are pursuing a strategy that will further divide American children by race, class, and religion at a time when the unifying power of public schools is more important than ever. Liberals are pushing well- intentioned efforts to increase spending on low-income schools (to reduce class size, hire better teachers, and the like), which will help on the margins, but run into the stubborn reality that separate schools for rich and poor, even when well funded, are inherently unequal.

The compromise position, embodied in the federal No Child Left Behind Act, couples more spending with "accountability," and lays out some laudable goals for raising student achievement and closing the gap between low-income and middle-class children. But the act does little to address the fountainhead of inequality: the assignment of students to schools based on economically segregated neighborhoods. New provisions in the law to allow a small number of children to transfer from failing schools have proven inadequate.

Why does economic school segregation matter? Studies find that a child growing up in a poor family has reduced life chances, but attending a school with large numbers of low-income classmates poses a second, independent strike against him or her. All students – middle class and poor – perform worse in high-poverty schools. According to Department of Education statistics, low-income children attending middle-class schools perform better, on average, than middle-class children attending high-poverty schools. Schools with a strong core of middle-class families are marked by higher expectations, better teachers, more motivated students, more financial resources, and greater parental involvement. In short, virtually all of the essential features that educators identify as markers of good schools are much more likely to be found in middle-class than in high-poverty schools.

The 19th-century educator Horace Mann understood this. He envisioned public schools as "the great equalizer," but in order to perform that function, he said, they had to be "common schools," schools which educate rich and poor under a single roof. Today, in a nation where two-thirds of students are middle class (not eligible for subsidized school lunches) every child, in theory, could have the chance to attend a solidly middle-class school.

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