The nation’s most economically segregated school districts are highlighted in a report released last week by EdBuild, a nonprofit organization that studies school funding issues.
The study looks at student-poverty rates between adjacent districts. Researchers examined more than 33,500 district boundaries to see where the biggest income disparities were between neighboring districts in the United States.
The 50 most-segregating borders were found in just 14 states, many of them in the Rust Belt. Ohio has the most, with nine in all, while Alabama has six such district lines, according to the report.
But the most economically segregating district boundary was between Grosse Pointe and Detroit schools in Michigan, according to EdBuild’s analysis. The poverty rate in Grosse Point is 6.5 percent compared with 49.2 percent in Detroit. And the median household income in Grosse Point is $90,542 a year versus $26,087 for Detroit.
Birmingham, Ala., school boundaries with two neighboring districts was next on the report’s list.
The report follows on the heels of significant attention to school segregation by income as well as race this year. The share of high-poverty and racially isolated schools has grown in recent years, according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office report released in May.
