A National Injustice

In America today, educational disparities limit the life prospects of the 13 million children growing up in poverty, impacting their earning potential, voter participation, civic engagement, and community involvement. These disparities disproportionately impact African-American, Latino/Hispanic, and Native American children, who are three times as likely to live in a low-income area¹.

By the time they're in fourth grade, children growing up in low-income communities are already three grade levels behind their peers in high-income communities2. About 50 percent of students in low-income communities will not graduate from high school by the time they're 18 years old3. Those who do graduate will perform on average at an eighth-grade level1. Of the 13 million children growing up in poverty, only 1 in 10 will graduate from college4.

The educational inequity that persists along socioeconomic and racial lines is a great injustice in our country.

Why does this problem exist?

We believe that educational inequity is the result of three interrelated factors:

• Children growing up in low-income communities face extra challenges.  While all children have the same potential to achieve, children in low-income communities often contend with inadequate health care, nutrition, and/or housing, and often lack access to high-quality pre-schools.
  
  
• Schools and school systems lack sufficient capacity to meet students’ extra needs. There aren’t enough hours in the school day to catch students up academically when they are significantly behind, and there aren’t the same academic enrichment opportunities that exist in higher-income areas. Many talented and dedicated people work in our schools and communities, but there still is not a critical mass of exceptional teachers and school leaders who deeply believe that all students in low-income communities can achieve at high levels.
  
  
• Our prevailing ideology hasn’t led to necessary policies and investments. Our education system is hampered by the widespread belief that schools can’t make a significant difference in the face of our country’s socioeconomic disparities. This belief is fueled by the misperception that students in low-income communities cannot meet high expectations. The result has been a reluctance to invest in mitigating the challenges of poverty that make it harder for students to focus at school.

It doesn't have to be this way.

While the problem of educational inequity is daunting, we see evidence every day in classrooms across the country that when students in low-income communities are given the educational opportunities they deserve, they excel on an absolute scale. Together, we can solve this problem.

Read about Teach For America's approach to solving this problem

Hear corps members and alumni talk about their personal views on this issue.

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¹ National Center for Children in Poverty "Who are America's Poor Children? The Official Story" October 2008
² U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2005, and 2007 Reading Assessments
³ "Diploma Counts," Editorial Projects in Education (Education Week), 2007

⁴Mortensen, Tom. "Family Income and Higher Education Opportunity," Postsecondary Education Opportunity, 2005 with updated data from 2006