Between 1970 and 1990, concentrated poverty spread like a cancer through America's cities, writes Myron Orfield, a lawyer and Minnesota state legislator, in his book Metropolitics . The number of people living in neighborhoods of dense poverty swelled from 4.1 million to 8 million, nearly one-third of them children, he found. The nation's worst cities in terms of child poverty. Half the children who live in extremely impoverished neighborhoods are in the 75 cities examined by Quality Counts . It is perhaps not a coincidence that this list includes states that have some of the largest achievement gaps between urban and nonurban districts.
Many people suggest that schools are the victims of poor neighborhoods.
When middle-class families and pundits say that cities have bad schools, what they often mean is that cities have schools full of poor children. In New Orleans, almost half the children live in extremely poor neighborhoods, such as the Desire housing projects. In these neighborhoods, the deck is stacked against children from the moment they are born. Odds are higher that they will be born with a low birth weight, grow up with a single parent, fall prey to crime, and eventually drop out of school.