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A journal from Prevention and Intervention in the Community (2014) titled "Development of Cities Mentor Project: An Intervention to Improve Academic Outcomes for Low-Income Urban Youth Through Instruction in Effective Coping Supported by Mentoring Relationships and Protective Settings"

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A journal from Prevention and Intervention in the Community (2014) titled "Development of Cities Mentor Project: An Intervention to Improve Academic Outcomes for Low-Income Urban Youth Through Instruction in Effective Coping Supported by Mentoring Relationships and Protective Settings"

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A 2016 journal article from the Australian Journal of Education titled "Increasing Urban Indigenous Students' Attendance: Mitigating the Influence of Poverty through Community Partnership"

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A 2016 journal article from the Australian Journal of Education titled "Increasing Urban Indigenous Students' Attendance: Mitigating the Influence of Poverty through Community Partnership"

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A 2013 journal article from Kappa Delta Pi Records titled "Poverty in School Communities" 

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A 2013 journal article from Kappa Delta Pi Records titled "Poverty in School Communities" 

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An NPR article titled "How the Education Department cuts could hurt low-income and rural schools" (2025)

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An NPR article titled "How the Education Department cuts could hurt low-income and rural schools" (2025)

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How the Education Department cuts could hurt low-income and rural schools

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With cuts to nearly all the staff at the Department of Education’s primary data agency, low-income and rural schools may not get the federal funds they rely on in coming years.

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A report from The Hechinger Report titled "A decade of research on the rich-poor divide in education" (2020)

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A report from The Hechinger Report titled "A decade of research on the rich-poor divide in education" (2020)

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Americans like to believe that education can be a great equalizer, allowing even the poorest child who studies hard to enter the middle class. But when I looked at what academic researchers and federal data reports have said about the great educational divide between the rich and poor in our country, that belief turns out to be a myth. Basic education, from kindergarten through high school, only expands the disparities.

In 2015, during the Obama administration, the federal education department issued a report that showed how the funding gap between rich and poor schools grew 44 percent over a decade between 2001-2 and 2011-12. That meant that the richest 25 percent of school districts spent $1,500 more per student, on average, than the poorest 25 percent of school districts.

I wish I could have continued to track this data between rich and poor schools to see if school spending had grown more fair. But the Trump administration crunched the numbers differently. When it issued a report in 2018, covering the 2014-15 school year, it found that the wealthiest 25 percent of districts spent $450 more per student than the poorest 25 percent.

That didn't mean there was a giant 70 percent improvement from $1,500. The Trump administration added together all sources of funds, including federal funding, which amounts to 8 percent of total school spending, while the Obama administration excluded federal funds, counting only state and local dollars, which make up more than 90 percent of education funds. The Obama administration argued at the time that federal funds for poor students were intended to supplement local funds because it takes more resources to overcome childhood poverty, not to create a level playing field.

Rather than marking an improvement, there were signs in the Trump administration data that the funding gap between rich and poor had worsened during the Great Recession if you had compared the figures apples to apples, either including or excluding federal funds. In a follow-up report issued in 2019, the Trump administration documented that the funding gap between rich and poor schools had increased slightly to $473 per student between the 2014-15 and 2015-16 school years.

It's not just a divide between rich and poor but also between the ultra rich and everyone else. In 2020, a Pennsylvania State University researcher documented how the wealthiest school districts in America - the top 1 percent - fund their schools at much higher levels than everyone else and are increasing their school spending at a faster rate. The school funding gap between a top 1 percent district (mostly white suburbs) and an average-spending school district at the 50th percentile widened by 32 percent between 2000 and 2015, the study calculated. Nassau County, just outside New York City on Long Island, has the highest concentration of students who attend the best funded public schools among all counties in the country. Almost 17 percent of all the top 1 percent students in the nation live in this one county.

Funding inequities are happening in a context of increased poverty in our schools. In 2013, I documented how the number of high poverty schools had increased by about 60 percent to one out of every five schools in 2011 from one out of every eight schools in 2000. To win this unwelcome designation, 75 percent or more of an elementary, middle or high school's students lived in families poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. It's since gotten worse. In the most recent federal report, covering the 2016-17 school year, one out of every four schools in America was classified as high poverty.

It's not just that poverty is becoming more concentrated in certain schools; more students in the school system are poor. In 2014, I documented a 40 percent jump in the number of school-aged children living in poverty between 2000 and 2012 from one out of every seven children to one out of every five students. In the most recent report, for the 2016-17 school year, the poverty rate declined from 21 percent in 2010 to 18 percent in 2017. About 13 million children under the age of 18 were in families living in poverty.

When you break the data down by race, there are other striking patterns. One third of all Black children under 18 were living in poverty in 2016-17, compared with a quarter of Hispanic children. White and Asian children have a similar poverty rate of 11 percent and 10 percent, respectively.

Sociologists like Sean Reardon at Stanford University and Ann Owens at the University of Southern California have built a body of evidence that school segregation by income is what's really getting worse in America, not school segregation by race. But it's a complicated argument because Black and Latino students are more likely to be poor and less likely to be rich. So the two things - race and poverty - are intertwined.

In 2019, Reardon studied achievement gaps in every school in America and found that the difference in poverty rates between predominantly Black and predominantly white schools explains the achievement gaps we see and why white schools tend to show higher test scores than Black schools. When white and Black schools have the same poverty rates, Reardon didn't see a difference in academic achievement. The problem is that Black students are more often poor and attending schools with more poor students. And other than a handful of high-performing charter schools in a few cities, he couldn't find examples of academic excellence among schools with a high-poverty student body.

"It doesn't seem that we have any knowledge about how to create high-quality schools at scale under conditions of concentrated poverty," said Reardon. "And if we can't do that, then we have to do something about segregation. Otherwise we're consigning Black and Hispanic and low-income students to schools that we don't know how to make as good as other schools. The implication is that you have got to address segregation."

Previous Proof Points columns cited in this column:
The number of high-poverty schools increases by about 60 percent Poverty among school-age children increases by 40 percent since 2000 The gap between rich and poor schools grew 44 percent over a decade Data show segregation by income (not race) is what's getting worse in schools In 6 states, school districts with the neediest students get less money than the wealthiest An analysis of achievement gaps in every school in America shows that poverty is the biggest hurdle Rich schools get richer: School spending analysis finds widening gap between top 1% and the rest of us
This story about education inequality in America written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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A decade of research on education inequality in America

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A decade of academic researchers and federal data reports show large and growing education inequality in America between the rich and poor.

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A web article from the Penn Foster For Organizations titled "How Education Inequality Impacts Student Success (2024)" 

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A web article from the Penn Foster For Organizations titled "How Education Inequality Impacts Student Success (2024)" 

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How Education Inequality Impacts Student Success | Penn Foster

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Explore the impact of education inequality on student success and discover actionable solutions to make education more accessible and equitable for all.

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A report from the Hechinger Report titled "An analysis of achievement gaps in every school in America shows that poverty is the biggest hurdle" (2019)

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A report from the Hechinger Report titled "An analysis of achievement gaps in every school in America shows that poverty is the biggest hurdle" (2019)

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Get important education news and analysis delivered straight to your inbox
Here's a tale of three cities: Atlanta, New York and Detroit.

In all three cities, there is a high degree of racial segregation in the schools. White students go to schools with relatively few black and Hispanic students. Black and Hispanic students attend schools that don't have many white students. When Sean Reardon, a sociologist at Stanford University, measures the racial isolation in a quantitative way, he finds that the schools in the three cities are "equally racially segregated."

But the poverty rates in the schools are very different. In Atlanta, blacks students go to schools with very high poverty rates. The students in these schools tend to come from families whose income is low enough that the children qualify for free or reduced priced lunches, a federal measure of poverty. The white students in Atlanta tend to go to schools with very low poverty rates. In New York City, Reardon finds the same pattern but not to the same extreme. Meanwhile, in Detroit, this pattern isn't true at all. White and black students attend different schools, but the poverty levels are high in both white and black schools.

It turns out, according to Reardon's calculations, that the differences in poverty rates between the black and white schools are very predictive of the achievement gaps between black and white students. "The achievement gap is very small, virtually zero in Detroit," said Reardon, in an interview. "It's quite big, but not enormous in New York City. And it's among one of the two or three biggest in the country in Atlanta."

This example arises from a new study of achievement gaps and racial segregation in nearly every school in the United States. In the study, Reardon finds that racial segregation is a very strong predictor of the gaps in academic achievement between white and black or Hispanic students, but it's school poverty - not the student's race - that accounts for these big gaps. When the difference in poverty rates between black and white schools is larger, the achievement gaps between black and white students are larger. When the difference in poverty rates between black and white schools is smaller, the achievement gaps are smaller. The two phenomena - racial segregation and economic inequality - are intertwined because students of color are concentrated in high-poverty schools.

"There's a common argument these days that maybe we should stop worrying about segregation and just create high-quality schools everywhere," said Reardon. "This study shows that it doesn't seem to be possible."

Reardon said he couldn't find a single school district in the country where black and Hispanic students were learning apart from white students and performing well with test scores that weren't lagging behind those of white students. In the cases where achievement gaps were small, such as Detroit, achievement was low for both black and whites students. They're not models to copy.
Related: A study of Latino students reveals two sides of the segregation debate
"It doesn't seem that we have any knowledge about how to create high-quality schools at scale under conditions of concentrated poverty," said Reardon. "And if we can't do that, then we have to do something about segregation. Otherwise we're consigning black and Hispanic and low-income students to schools that we don't know how to make as good as other schools. The implication is that you have got to address segregation."

The study, " Is Separate still Unequal? New Evidence on School Segregation and Racial Academic Achievement Gaps," is a draft paper, meaning that it hasn't yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal and may still be revised. Reardon, along with four current and former colleagues at Stanford, analyzed 350 million test scores from 2009 to 2016, representing about 50 million students as they attended public schools from third to eighth grades. To compare apples to apples, scores from different state tests were converted to a single national yardstick.

Achievement gaps between white students and students of color are large. On average across the country, white students are scoring nearly two grade levels higher than black students - the difference between fifth and third grade achievement, for example. But it varies a lot by school district. In some districts the black-white gap was as small as one-third of a grade level. In other districts, the achievement gaps are three grade levels apart. The white-Hispanic achievement gap across the nation is smaller, between one and one and half grade levels.

It's well known that high-income students perform better on tests than low-income students. Higher income students tend to have better educated parents who not only may read and talk to their kids more but also convey the importance of an education and set high academic expectations for their kids. What's interesting in this study is that not only does the level of school segregation predict the size of the achievement gap between white and black students, it also predicts the rate at which the achievement gap grows as students progress from third to eighth grade.
Related: A scholar revives the argument for racial integration in schools
In conjunction with this study, Stanford Education Data Archive released its vast data trove on an interactive website, the " Opportunity Explorer," where anyone can see the test scores for every public school in the United States. It allows you to compare test scores within a district or between schools in two different states. Parents and policymakers can compare schools in Wichita, Kansas, with those in Bangor, Maine, for example. In a separate "learning rates" tab, it also shows test score patterns over time so that you can see how students improve as they progress from third to eighth grade, a measure of how much kids are learning during their school years. In a third trends tab, it shows how schools are performing over time, measuring student test scores in the same grade from year to year.

Reardon advises visitors to the website to avoid equating test scores with school quality. "The average test scores that kids have in schools or school districts are the results of all the opportunities these kids have had to learn their whole lives, at home, in the neighborhood, in preschool and in the school year," Reardon said, "so it's misleading to attribute average test scores solely to the school where they take the test."

"If you want to know how good the schools are," Reardon said, "a better but not perfect measure would be the learning rates because those are measuring how fast are kids learning while they're in school, regardless of where they started."

This story about racial segregation was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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An analysis of achievement gaps in every school in America shows that being poor is the biggest hurdle

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Get important education news and analysis delivered straight to your inbox Here's a tale of three cities: Atlanta, New York and Detroit. In all three cities, there is a high degree of racial segregation in the schools. White students go to schools with relatively few black and Hispanic students.

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An article published by NASSP titled "Poverty and Its Impact on Students' Education" (2022)

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An article published by NASSP titled "Poverty and Its Impact on Students' Education" (2022)

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The purpose of this position statement is to highlight the impact poverty has on students and their ability to succeed in the classroom as well as offer policy recommendations on how to best support the academic, social, emotional, and physical success of these students.
Each day countless students come to school, each with their own set of unique gifts, abilities, and challenges. Recent data has found that students living in poverty often face far more challenges than their peers. According to the National Center of Education Statistics, 19 percent of individuals under 18 lived in poverty during the 2015-16 school year. Furthermore, 24.4 percent of students attended high-poverty schools during that same year. The data also show that higher percentages of Hispanic, African-American, American Indian/Alaska Native, and Pacific Islander students attended high-poverty schools than white students, underscoring that poverty is also an issue of equity that must be addressed.

These data show the reality of what our public education system is facing today. Nearly one-fifth of students nationwide are either living in poverty, attending a high-poverty school, or both. Poverty negatively impacts students in a variety of ways within K-12 education and beyond. This can be through a variety of different factors that are often symptoms of poverty, like health issues stemming from a nonnutritional diet, homelessness, lack of food, or the inability to receive medical treatment for illnesses. These factors often place more stress on a student, which can negatively impact the student's ability to succeed in a school.

Students living in poverty often have fewer resources at home to complete homework, study, or engage in activities that helps equip them for success during the school day. Many impoverished families lack access to computers, high-speed internet (three-fourths of households currently have access to high-speed broadband), and other materials that can aid a student outside of school. Parents of these families often work longer hours or multiple jobs, meaning they may not be available to assist their children with their schoolwork.

Furthermore, in many high-poverty school districts, resources are sorely lacking in schools. Nearly every state has its own division of funding for school districts and education based on property taxes. Unfortunately, this system unfairly affects individuals living in poverty and the students attending school in those areas. Because property taxes are often much lower in high-poverty areas, schools in those areas receive much less than their more affluently-located counterparts. Recent data from the U.S. Department of Education state that 40 percent of high-poverty schools are not getting a fair share of state and local funds. This often leaves schools with limited budgets to address a multitude of issues, including hiring educators, updating resources for students, preparing students for postsecondary education or the workforce, dealing with unsafe infrastructure, and much more. There are often instructional gaps for those attending high-poverty schools as well. Data from the 2015-16 National Teacher and Principal Survey show that students from low-income families "are consistently, albeit modestly, more likely to be taught by lower-credentialed and novice teachers" (Garcia and Weiss). Research has also shown that many teachers in high-poverty schools are inexperienced and often less effective than their more experienced peers who are often targeted for hire by higher-income schools and districts. The lack of high-quality instruction serves to only further separate academic achievement levels for students in high-poverty schools from peers in high-income schools or districts.

All students, regardless of income level or background, are capable of and should receive the support and resources necessary for success.

Students from low-income families often face additional barriers that can impede academic success compared to their peers from higher-income households.

Principals provide leadership for instilling a culture of success and support within their school and should strive to provide each student with the supports necessary to achieve this success. Principals should strive to achieve this through all available avenues, including through strategic partnerships.

The 2015 Professional Standards for Educational Leaders state that effective educational leaders strive for equity of educational opportunity and culturally responsive practices to promote each student's academic success and well-being.

NASSP has previously adopted position statements on the achievement gap and preparing all students for postsecondary success that offer policy recommendations to promote equitable support for all students and adequate preparation to enter the workforce or a postsecondary institution following high school.

NASSP developed the Building Ranks™ framework to reflect the principal's responsibility for building culture and leading learning to foster lifelong success for each child in a rapidly changing world.

Recommendations for Federal Policymakers

Advance policies that incentivize and support well-trained teachers, principals, and other educators to work and remain in high-poverty schools.

Provide additional federal funds and resources for programs, such as Title I and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, aimed at supporting students from low-income families.

Ensure federal funds are divided equitably so that high-poverty districts are guaranteed a fairer share of federal dollars.

Invest in school leadership required to hire and retain well-trained school leaders, recognizing the critical role principals play in establishing a culture and learning environment that students need to be successful in a global society.

Prioritize school improvement strategies-such as community schools-that include resources and supports to address the barriers poverty creates to student success.

Provide additional resources and invest in programs for students from low-income families to enter postsecondary education or the workforce.

Enact legislation aimed at improving school infrastructure, with a particular focus on buildings in high-poverty districts that pose potential health threats to students, educators, and other faculty in the school.

Expand the maximum allowance of Pell Grants, and share information with states, local education agencies, and universities on application eligibility and processes.

Fully fund federal programs that increase connectivity for all students, like the E-Rate Program which provides discounted telecommunications services to schools.

Recommendations for State Policymakers

Ensure state funding formulas are properly balanced so all districts receive an equitable and sufficient share of funds based on student poverty levels, property tax revenue per district, or other evidence-based indicators of poverty.

Reevaluate state investments in education to ensure school districts are receiving the funds necessary to promote student success.

Prioritize school improvement strategies-such as community schools-that include resources and supports to address the barriers to student success that poverty creates.

Invest in curriculum that prepares students for 21st-century employment and participation in a democracy. This will prepare students for life beyond secondary education and better enable them to be successful in the workforce and financially secure.

Prioritize and invest in state financial aid for school districts based on need instead of merit, which disproportionately helps high-income and white students.

Make investments over a long-term basis rather than short term, as long-term investments have a proven track record of improving high-poverty school districts.

Recommendations for District Leaders

Make sure that your district and school funding systems ensure equal access to core educational services for each student in K-12 education.

Ensure that school funding systems provide additional resources for low-income students to ensure they have a more level playing field for achieving success.

Use per-pupil expenditure (PPE) data to evaluate district funding decisions and make changes based on this data when inequities are presented.

Support ongoing learning for school leaders, recognizing that their role is changing and that the demands of a high-poverty schools are expanding, requiring continual development.

Advance policies that ensure highly-qualified educators are working in high-poverty schools.

Urge state policymakers to reevaluate unfair funding practices that negatively impact high-poverty districts.

Recommendations for School Leaders

Instill a culture of growth and success in your school that effectively educates all students about the opportunities available to them following secondary education.

Provide benefits and resources within schools to all students so those living in poverty have the necessary supports to succeed, with the assistance of outside partners such as internet providers, food suppliers, or healthcare organizations. Examples include: free breakfast, extended library or lab hours after school, allowing students to take home wifi hotspots, etc.

Provide professional development for teachers and staff to assist them in working effectively with students in poverty and address the impact of associated trauma and chronic stress.

Provide students with access to college admissions, scholarships, financial aid information, and personnel to help students with these discussions so students are properly educated on postsecondary education opportunities.

Ensure that budget discussions and requests are conducted in a transparent process that allows for input from a variets of groups and stakeholders in the school community.

Amerikaner, A., & Morgan, I. (2018, February 27). Funding gaps 2018: An analysis of school funding equity across the U.S. and within each state. Retrieved from https://edtrust.org/resource/funding-gaps-2018/.

Carey, K., & Harris, E. (2016). It turns out spending more probably does improve education. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/12/nyregion/it-turns-out-spending-more-probably-does-improve-education.html?_r=0.

Carr, S. (2013, February 26). The real reasons many low-income students don't go to college. Retrieved from https://hechingerreport.org/the-real-reasons-many-low-income-students-dont-go-to-college/.

College for America. (2017, June 7). Addressing the college completion gap among low-income students. Retrieved from https://collegeforamerica.org/college-completion-low-income-students/.

Dynarski, M. (2017, March 1). It's not nothing: The role of money in improving education. Retrieved from https://www.brookings.edu/research/its-not-nothing-the-role-of-money-in-improving-education/.

Garcia, E., & Weiss, E. (2019, March 26). The teacher shortage is real, large and growing, and worse than we thought: The first report in 'The Perfect Storm in the Teacher Labor Market' series. Retrieved from https://www.epi.org/publication/the-teacher-shortage-is-real-large-and-growing-and-worse-than-we-thought-the-first-report-in-the-perfect-storm-in-the-teacher-labor-market-series/.

Jensen, E. (2013, May). How poverty affects classroom engagement. ASCD. Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/may13/vol70/num08/How-Poverty-Affects-Classroom-Engagement.aspx.

Johnston, K. (2019, June 20). 7 ways poverty affects education. Retrieved from https://moneywise.com/a/ways-poverty-affects-education.

Jackson, K., Johnson, R., & Persico, C. (2016). The effects of school spending on education and economic outcomes: Evidence from school finance reforms. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 131(1), pp. 157-218.

LaFortune, J., Rothstein, J., & Schanzenbach, D.W. (2016). School Finance Reform and the Distribution of Student Achievement. National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 22011, February 2016.

Martin, C., Boser, U., Benner, M., & Baffour, P. (2018, November 13). A quality approach to school funding. Center for American Progress. Retrieved from https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education-k-12/reports/2018/11/13/460397/quality-approach-school-funding/

McFarland, J., Hussar, B., Wang, X., Zhang, J., Wang, K., Rathbun, A., Barmer, A., Forrest Cataldi, E., and Bullock Mann, F. (2018). The Condition of Education 2018 (NCES 2018-144). U.S. Department of Education. Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics. Retrieved from https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2018/2018144.pdf.

National Association of Secondary School Principals. (2019, March 19). Using PPE data to advocate for your school. School of Thought blog. Retrieved from http://blog.nassp.org/2019/03/22/using-ppe-data-to-advocate-for-your-school/.

Parrett, W., & Budge, K. (2016, January 13). How does poverty influence learning? Retrieved from https://www.edutopia.org/blog/how-does-poverty-influence-learning-william-parrett-kathleen-budge.

Pascoe, M.C., Hetrick, S.E. & Parker., A.G. (2019). The impact of stress on students in secondary school and higher education. International Journal of Adolescence and Youth, DOI: 10.1080/02673843.2019.1596823.

Taylor, K. (2019, July 25). Poverty's long-lasting effects on students' education and success. Retrieved from https://www.insightintodiversity.com/povertys-long-lasting-effects-on-students-education-and-success/.

Turner, C., Khrais, R., Lloyd, T., Olgin, A., Isensee, L., Vevea, B., & Carsen, D. (2016, April 18). Why America's schools have a money problem. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/2016/04/18/474256366/why-americas-schools-have-a-money-problem.

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Poverty and Its Impact on Students' Education

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The purpose of this position statement is to highlight the impact poverty has on students and their ability to succeed in the classroom as well as offer policy recommendations on how to best suppor...

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A scholarly publish entitled "Pathways to Community Engagement in Education" (2023)

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A scholarly publish entitled "Pathways to Community Engagement in Education" (2023)

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A web article titled "Recent Funding Approaches and Sources for Community Schools" (2022) 

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A web article titled "Recent Funding Approaches and Sources for Community Schools" (2022) 