The Concentration of Poverty in American Schools

An exclusive analysis uncovers that students of color in the largest 100 cities in the United States are much more likely to attend schools where most of their peers are poor or low-income.

By Janie Boschma and Ronald Brownstein, The Atlantic

In almost all major American cities, most African American and Hispanic students attend public schools where a majority of their classmates qualify as poor or low-income, a new analysis of federal data shows.

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Documentary Focuses on Entry Barriers to Elite New York City Schools

By Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, NBC News

About 30,000 New York City eighth graders last Saturday took the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT), the only way to gain admission into one of New York City's eight elite public high schools, especially Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech.

For many students, this exam is their ticket to a better education and a path out of poverty. However, this testing process has come under fire because although African Americans and Hispanic Americans make up 70 percent of New York City's school-aged population, they represent less than 5 percent at the city's most elite public high schools, while Asian Americans make up as much as 73 percent.

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Racial Disparities in Higher Education: an Overview

By Beckie Supiano, The Chronicle of Higher Education

Racism on American campuses is a matter of national concern again this week following protests at the University of Missouri at Columbia that led on Monday to the resignations of both the campus’s chancellor and the system’s president.

Read the story here.

Related content:

• Mizzou and the Future of Black Student-Athletes’ Protests (Diverse Issues in Higher Education)
• University of Kansas Chancellor Hosts Session on Race for Students (Inside Higher Ed)
• At University of Missouri, Black Students See a Campus Riven by Race (The New York Times)
• Racial Discrimination Protests Ignite at Colleges Across the U.S. (The New York Times)
• Fabio Rojas: Beyond Yale and Mizzou (Inside Higher Ed)
• A familiar protest: Missouri racism demonstrations are rooted in history (CNN)
• Protest shows colleges are once again becoming civil rights battlegrounds (The Washington Post)
• After Missouri’s Leadership Exodus, Hard Questions Loom on Race, Power, and Culture (The Chronicle of Higher Education)

Education Secretary Bluntly Addresses Racial Disparities

By Autumn A. Arnett, Diverse Issues in Higher Education

WASHINGTON — Education Secretary Arne Duncan, in a speech before an audience Wednesday at the National Press Club, announced a new policy to reallocate state correctional funding dollars to raises for teachers in the nation’s most underprivileged districts.

In what were perhaps his most intentional comments to date on race, Duncan addressed the disparities in educational access and correctional patterns within a decidedly racial framework.

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Why Do Black Graduates Make Less Money?

Can higher-ed policy help close the racial wealth gap? Not on its current path.

Ted Scheinman, Pacific Standard

On June 29th, their last day before summer vacation, the nine Supreme Court Justices declared they would hear arguments in case number 14-981, Fisher v. University of Texas, this fall, with a decision to follow in early 2016. Abigail Fisher, the plaintiff, filed her suit in 2008 after the University of Texas–Austin denied her admission. Fisher, a white woman who had failed to make the GPA cutoff for automatic admission, decided that race must have been the decisive factor. Fisher has since graduated in good standing from Louisiana State University. Nonetheless, she presses her case, which could outlaw affirmative action altogether and further homogenize the already dispiriting socioeconomic conformity of most campuses.

Read the story here.

Unemployment unequal among races, sexes and ages

istockanalyst.com
Wednesday, March 10, 2010 7:13 AM
Source: Connecticut Post)By Rob Varnon, Connecticut Post, Bridgeport
Mar. 10--This story originally appeared in the Sunday, March 7 print edition of the Connecticut Post.

A young couple walked down Elizabeth Street in Derby carrying yellow bags from the food bank in this city where the unemployment rate tops 10 percent. Just across the river, people are searching for jobs on library computers in Shelton, where unemployment is 7.3 percent.
Disparities in jobless rates are not limited to geographic boundaries in Connecticut. The gaps fall across age, race and skill sets, leaving an unsettling picture of hardship unevenly spread throughout the region.
And a new trend is beginnning to emerge from the regional data, said John Toomey, head of the state Labor Department's research division. While the distribution of unemployment has largely tracked trends from the past, the size of a long-term unemployed class has expanded, he said.

Full Story: http://www.istockanalyst.com/article/viewiStockNews/articleid/3934812#