Reducing inequality: Neighborhood and school interventions

Neighborhood residential segregation by income has been increasing in the United States since 1970 at a higher rate than can be explained by rising income inequality alone. Nearly nine million Americans live in neighborhoods of extreme poverty, defined as those in which at least 40 percent of residents are poor. As income segregation has increased, minority children from low-income families who live in increasingly economically isolated high-poverty neighborhoods appear to be particularly disadvantaged. For example, Figure 1 shows a strong positive correlation between mean residential neighborhood income and the academic performance of eighth-grade students in New York City during 2009 to 2010. Note that this correlation Lawrence F. Katz