Chapter 4: The Potential of Economic Integration to Raise Academic Achievement for Low-Income Students

As Erika Frankenberg describes in this book, an increasing share of lowincome and non-White families in the United States live in suburbs and attend suburban public schools. This trend does not uniformly apply to each suburb, but it means that a growing number now confront what has been historically deemed an urban phenomena. Suburban demographic shifts have a profound impact on schools’ performance, since the gap in academic achievement between children from low-income and higher income families is large and growing larger. Over the past 55 years, the test score gap between the students from the highest and lowest income families has doubled in size, whereas by contrast the much discussed gap in test scores between Black and White children narrowed by half (Reardon, 2011, in Ladd, 2012).