• Among students of color, 39 percent attend high-poverty schools nationwide, a rate 12 percent higher than the average for all students.
• Three-quarters of students in Nevada attend high-poverty schools, the highest of all states. Students of color in Nevada are disproportionately impacted. Eighty-seven percent of Black students in the state attend high-poverty schools compared to 58 percent of white students.
• More than half of students of color in five states — Nevada, New Mexico, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Texas — attend high-poverty schools.
• Across all school types, Black students were the most likely to attend high-poverty schools of all racial/ethnic groups.

Despite the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that banned racial segregation — Brown v Board of Education of Topeka — students of color remain far more likely to attend high-poverty schools than white students. Racial segregation in the United States was forged through historical practices, such as racially exclusive housing covenants and zoning laws, as well as ongoing ones, such as discriminatory hiring and mortgage lending. These practices dispossessed communities of color and excluded them from economic prosperity while white communities have been able to accumulate wealth. Since the desegregation of schools and residential neighborhoods in the Civil Rights Era, white suburban flight and private school attendance sustained and amplified these geographic concentrations of wealth and poverty. As a result, students of color attend high-poverty schools at much higher rates than white students.

• Require or incentivize the inclusion of affordable housing within new developments using inclusionary zoning, community benefits agreements, density bonuses, or other tools.
• Expand access to high-quality public education, create cradle-to-career pipelines for vulnerable youth, increase access to affordable childcare, and invest in universal pre-K.
• Implement equitable growth policies that reduce poverty and increase the economic security of low-income families with children by connecting people with employment in good jobs.
• Implement local and inter-district measures to increase school integration and reduce racial isolation.
• Advance local participatory budgeting processes that include residents in decision-making around the allocation of public funds.
• At the federal level, institute a federal jobs guarantee, enact a $15/hour minimum wage for all workers, set aside a share of public contracts for businesses owned by people of color to mirror area demographics, and continue the push to reform the Community Reinvestment Act to expand access to fair financial products and services for entrepreneurs of color.

• Reports: Building Community Schools Systems: Removing Barriers to Success in U.S. Public Schools; Schools are still segregated, and black children are paying a price; Why Does Segregation Between School Districts Matter for Educational Equity?; The Lingering Legacy of Redlining on School Funding, Diversity, and Performance; Public education funding in the U.S. needs an overhaul; The pandemic has exacerbated a long-standing national shortage of teachers; 2024 Race for Results: Building a Pathway to Opportunity for All Children
• Data: Diversity Data Kids; KIDS COUNT Data Center; The Opportunity Atlas; Explore Your School’s Changing Demographics