Chapter IV
Incarceration, Poverty and the Educational Achievement of Male Black Students (cont.)
As we have seen, by and large, economically impoverished and middle class Black students attend the same schools. In a classic article, Russell Rumberger stated that: “not only are black and Hispanic children more likely to be poor, they are also more likely to attend schools with other poor children. In 2000, the average black or Hispanic student attended a school in which over 44% of students were poor, whereas the average white student attended a school in which 19% of the students were poor.” The lack of sufficient educational attainment by male Black children living in poverty might be attributed to family effects, including that of poverty itself, but what is the explanation for the almost as severe lack of educational attainment for many higher income male Black children? Part of the answer is that as the Black community is impoverished by the incarceration of large numbers of its young adult males, due to the segregated housing patterns of cities such as New York and Chicago, increasing percentages of the children in the Black community live in neighborhoods of, and attend schools with, concentrated poverty, without regard to their own family incomes. More than 60% of Black students attend schools where more than half of the school population is identified as living in poverty, compared to 18% of White, non-Hispanic, students. Recent studies of the “resegregation” of America indicate that many higher income Black families must live in these neighborhoods of concentrated poverty and their children to attend the same schools as those attended by the children of impoverished families. For example, while a third of the Black households in Brooklyn have incomes at or below the poverty level for a family of four, thirteen percent of the Black households in the borough have incomes at or above $100,000 per year, their children likely attending the same schools as those attended by the children of their impoverished neighbors.
A study by the Poverty & Race Research Action Council of characteristics of schools nearest to the homes of families at various income levels is suggestive in this regard. While the median rank of the nearest school attended by children from all White households is 65% (and the percentage of children in those schools eligible for Free or Reduced Price Lunch is 31.9%), schools attended by children from poor White households are at a median proficiency percentile rank of 40 and a poverty rate of 51.6%. For all Black children the median percentile rank of the nearest school is 20, with a poverty rate of 76.5%, while for children from poor Black households, the median rank of the nearest school is 17, with a poverty rate of 83.3%. In other words, there is a 25 point difference in school quality rank for White children between that for all White children and that for poor White children, with a 20% difference in poverty levels, while for Black children the spread is just 3 points in quality and 7% in poverty.
It might not much matter that Black students, poor or not—although most are poor—attend schools where most of the other students are members of low-income families, if the quality of education provided by schools were not linked to average family income. But as we have seen, those schools, with exceptions of course, are under present conditions most likely to be less-well resourced than other schools, offering fewer opportunities to learn. The key indicator NAEP grade 8 Reading score illustrates this: it declines steeply as the percentage of students in a school who are from impoverished families increases. As the percentage of students in the school from low-income families increases, the percentages of students, from both low-income and higher income families, scoring at or above Proficient declines. At 76% to 99% low-income, the percentage of those from higher income families scoring at or above Proficient is lower than that for students from low-income families in schools less than 10% poor. And, similarly, the percentage of students from low-income families attending schools in which just 5% or fewer of the students are also from low-income families scoring at or above Proficient is nearly three times that of similar students attending schools at the opposite end of the income scale, where 90% or more of the students are poor. Black students at grade 8 in schools that have low percentages of students from low-income families, and are themselves students from middle class families, are twice as likely to score at Proficient as are similar students in schools with high percentages of students from low-income families (36% v. 14%), reaching levels close to the national averages for all students from higher income families (38% Proficient and Advanced v. 44%). Black students from low-income families also benefit (19% v. 9% Proficient). Thus, the determining economic factor for student achievement appears to be not the economic status of the student’s family alone, but also that of the school—that is, the average economic status of the school’s students.
In a word, schools serving high percentages of students from relatively impoverished families are not as good as schools serving low percentages of such students.
Why is that?
A study by Jonathan Rothwell for the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program has demonstrated a strong connection among “Housing Costs, Zoning, and Access to High-Scoring Schools.” Rothwell concludes that: “Nationwide, the average low-income student attends a school that scores at the 42nd percentile on state exams, while the average middle/high-income student attends a school that scores at the 61st percentile on state exams. This school test-score gap is even wider between black and Hispanic students and white students.” According to Rothwell’s research, the average Asian or White and middle/high income student attends a school with a percentile ranking of 60 or better on state examinations, while the average Black student attends a school with a percentile ranking of 37, below that of the average student from a poor (below low-income) family.
Why are schools the students of which are predominately low-income inadequate to their purpose? There are complex reasons and subtle arguments that can be deployed to answer this question. However, there is one cause for the condition of these schools that is obvious and readily apparent: American schools, virtually alone in the developed world, are funded by local property taxes. It is as if the motto of our public schools were “from each according to their wealth and to each according to their wealth (or lack thereof).” The consequences of this undemocratic distribution of resources are evident in nearly every aspect of American education.
Schools attended for the most part by students whose families are not in need of the National Lunch Program are usually in prosperous neighborhoods with relatively (or absolutely) expensive housing and relatively high property tax revenues. These schools—or rather their students—on average do well on the standardized tests used to rate schools and sell houses. One could imagine a world in which a family’s financial poverty did not impoverish the educational opportunities of its children, but that imaginary world is nothing like the reality in this country today. American neighborhoods are increasingly segregated by income. Families living in poverty must in most places, send their children to underfinanced and therefore educationally impoverished schools. According to a recent U. S. Department of Education study by Ruth Heuer and Stephanie Stullich of Title I schools (i.e., those serving high percentages of students from impoverished families): “42 percent to 46 percent of Title I schools (depending on school grade level) had per-pupil personnel expenditure levels that were below their district’s average for non–Title I schools at the same grade level, and from 19 percent to 24 percent were more than 10 percent below the non–Title I school average.” In other words, nearly half the schools serving students from impoverished households received less funding from their district than those serving students from more prosperous households and nearly a quarter of those had per-student-expenditures significantly lower. “Similar patterns were found when comparing higher-poverty and lower-poverty schools within districts . . .
Other expenditure categories examined in this study showed an increase in the percentage of Title I schools with below-average expenditure levels, compared with total non-personnel expenditures. At the elementary level, for example, the percentage of Title I schools that had per-pupil expenditures below their district’s average for non–Title I schools at the same grade level was 46 percent for total personnel expenditures, 49 percent for instructional staff expenditures, 50 percent for teacher salary expenditures, and 54 percent for non-personnel expenditures.
Heuer and Stullich conclude with the observation that “It is worth noting that in some districts, a higher level of state and local resources were directed to Title I and higher-poverty schools relative to more advantaged schools in those districts. The example of these districts suggests that directing a higher level of state and local resources to high-need schools is an achievable goal.” Or to put it another way, the decision to relatively underfund schools serving students living in poverty is discretionary: district administrations and boards of education choose to do so.
The Center for American Progress has recently published a paper by Ary Spatig-Amerikaner (Unequal Education: Federal Loophole Enables Lower Spending on Students of Color), in which Spatig-Amerikaner has used the newly available database of actual state and local spending on school-level personnel and non-personnel resources analyzed by federal researchers Heuer and Stullich to show that “schools with 90 percent or more students of color spend a full $733 less per student per year than schools with 90 percent or more white students … On average, the high-minority schools … would see an annual increase of $443,000 in state and local spending if [they] were brought up to the same per-pupil spending level as those schools with very few nonwhite students. This is enough to pay the average salary for 12 additional first-year teachers or nine veteran teachers.” Spatig-Amerikaner attributes these differentials in per pupil instructional spending to “maldistribution of resources at the district level … Districts have teacher assignment practices that place the least-experienced teachers in high-minority, high-poverty schools. Because novice teachers earn so much less in salary, the total spending at these high-needs schools is likely to be lower than spending at schools in wealthier neighborhoods that employ veteran teachers” (p. 14).
Heuer and Stullich found that there is a relationship (inverse) between the percentage of Title I eligible schools and funding. Spatig-Amerikaner shows that there is a direct relationship between the racial composition of schools and instructional expenditures. This holds both between districts and within districts. The relationship, unsurprisingly, is that as Black student enrollment rises, instructional expenditures decline. As did the Schott Foundation's study of New York City schools (A Rotting Apple: Education Redlining in New York City), Spatig-Amerikaner derives the decline in expenditures from an analysis of the experience and educations of teachers. Using Spatig-Amerikaner's national data we can chart average per-student-expenditure against the percentage of Black students in schools. As the percentage of Black students rises, the per-student expenditure decreases, as does the percentage of Black students scoring at or above Proficient on the NAEP grade 8 Reading test. The level of per-student-expenditures is a direct measure of the opportunity to learn from more highly experienced, better-educated teachers.
The findings of Heuer and Stullich, Spatig-Amerikaner, the Schott Foundation and others demonstrate that, by and large, school funding in the United States is radically unfair: higher for the children of higher income, especially White, non-Hispanic, families and lower for the children of lower income, especially Black, families. The households of most African-American children are poor. Because they are poor they are likely to live in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty. High poverty neighborhood schools are likely to be disproportionately staffed by inexperienced, less-well-educated and younger, less-well-paid teachers. Student educational achievement in such schools is less that that of students in low-poverty schools, without regard to the income level of any given student’s family. It is against this background that New Jersey’s Education Law Center has established a set of core “fairness principles” for school funding. These include:
• Varying levels of funding are required to provide equal educational opportunities to children with different needs.
• The level of funding should increase relative to the level of concentrated student poverty. That is, state finance systems should provide more funding to districts serving larger shares of students in poverty …
• Student poverty — especially concentrated student poverty — is the most critical variable affecting funding levels… State finance systems should deliver greater levels of funding to higher-poverty versus lower-poverty settings, while controlling for differences in other cost factors.
They rarely do.
The circuit of Black poverty passes through the mass incarceration of young adult Black men based on decisions of police, district attorneys, judges and legislators; the consequent impoverishment of Black families; the resegregation of metropolitan areas and therefore of schools; the underfunding of segregated schools resulting in a lack of educational opportunity for Black students; lower educational attainment for young Black adults, leading to poverty and incarceration. None of this is necessary; little of it is entirely within the power of the Black community to stop. But it can be ended any day by those who have made, who continue to make, the decisions that cause Black poverty: members of boards of education, chief state school officers, school district superintendents, legislators, police department administrators, district attorneys, judges.