How residential racial segregation screws up America

Since the 1930s, civils rights litigation and legislation has gone a long way to providing equal opportunity in voting, business, schools, transportation, and employment. But there's a place they missed: our neighborhoods. Richard Rothstein, author of The Color of Law, explains in Reason magazine.

Despite these civil rights victories America has left untouched the biggest segregation of all: Progress in the desegregation of neighborhoods has been minimal.

In low-income, racially segregated communities, children are in poorer health, are under greater stress from parents' economic insecurity, and have less access to high-qualilty early childhood, after-school, and summer programs. When children with these and other challenges are concentrated in a single school, their problems can overwhelm teachres and educational outcomes suffer. The "black-white achievement gap," focus of education reformers, is substantially attributable to residential segregation."

Read the whole thing here.

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Photo taken by Bob White.