One of the injustices that we see in our current day social system is the school systems in inner city schools. Since the property taxes pay for local schools, the education in lower income areas is not as good as it is in richer neighborhoods. This not only makes it harder for kids to get a proper education but it affects their chances to going to a good college. There are many inequalities between kids in higher income neighborhoods compared to kids in lower income neighborhoods when it comes to the school systems. It is reflected in the rankings of students standardized tests as well as the school-level growth rate. Schools in higher income neighborhoods rank much higher in these categories showing a difference of 70th percentile math and reading ranks in the higher income areas compared to 30th percentile in the lower income neighborhoods. As for as school level growth rate the difference is smaller but still a difference of 10%. This not only makes it harder for kids to get a proper education but it affects their chances to going to a good college. The video bellow shows a lot of graphs showing these inequalities.
On top of the education, there are other factors that people in lower income neighborhoods have to deal with. One of these is nutrition, and price of lunch at the schools. The video embedded above shows examples of the differences between school lunch prices. There are also far less grocery store options in lower income areas. Not only does their economic situation affect their nutrition, but the lack of organic and better grocery options also affects the nutrition for kids growing up in these types of neighborhoods.
Social Innovation Blog: Understanding the Link Between Neighborhoods and Schools
To make things worse, these inequalities are made bigger by residential income segregation which not only causes a huge separation in incomes between neighborhoods, but also forces parents of these kids in lower income areas to have multiple jobs to make ends meet. This is mentioned in more detail in the article linked above. Not to mention that the types of jobs that their parents have are typically in times of day that have effects on the kids. I used to work teaching music at the Boys & Girls clubs of America in some lower income areas of Columbus. One thing that stuck out to me was how many parents had to work night shifts all week. This would leave a lot of kids without adult supervision at home all evening. Obviously places like the B&G Club would help with this, but there is still a lot of families who do not have anyone to take care of their kids while their parents work night shifts. This is such a different situation to what I was used to growing up in Dublin, OH. All of these examples causes a cycle that makes it harder for lower income families to get out of poverty and are the issues that need to be addressed in my opinion when dealing with systematic racism.