Urban schools are different because they are more likely than nonurban ones to have a high percentage of low-income students. Concentrated school poverty is consistently related to lower performance on every educational outcome measured. Black children are far more likely to live in concentrated poverty . On the other hand, poor students who attend middle-class schools performed significantly better. The small but important number of successful schools in poor neighborhoods proves that children in concentrated poverty can excel.
Urban students are more than twice as likely to attend high-poverty schools.
Any restructuring effort that does not aggressively respond to the impact of poverty is naive. Within cities, poverty is often concentrated in certain neighborhoods . 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.