Achieving Escape Velocity: Neighborhood and School Interventions to Reduce Persistent Inequality

Nearly 50 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, racial inequality in America remains a persistent empirical regularity. Despite much progress in the 1960s and 1970s, large adverse black-white gaps persist in earnings, employment, family income, health, life expectancy, incarceration, teen pregnancy, educational attainment, and academic achievement. Hispanic-white gaps in economic and educational outcomes also remain substantial (Fryer 2011). Minority children from low-income families residing in high-poverty (and increasingly economically isolated) neighborhoods appear to be particularly disadvantaged. For example, Figure 1 shows a strong positive correlation between mean residential neighborhood (zip code) income and the academic performance of eighth-grade students in New York City for 2009–2010. This correlation could reflect the causal effects of direct neighborhood characteristics, school quality differences by neighborhood, or family background factors. A key policy question is whether highquality schools alone can weaken the cycle of intergenerational poverty for those growing up in high-poverty areas or whether broader neighborhood-based interventions are Achieving Escape Velocity: Neighborhood and School Interventions to Reduce Persistent Inequality †