Houston has seen a slight decline in poverty rates over the last decade. Despite this, one million households in Houston’s three-county region still face challenges procuring basic necessities.
In this article, we take a deep dive into the correlation of education with poverty and race, which greatly impacts the academic pursuits of students of color, in particular.
What the numbers say
According to Understanding Houston
- Around 900,000 residents lived below the poverty line in 2021,
- Around 10% of youth from the ages 16 to 19 in Harris County were neither working nor pursuing education in 2021, and
- One in every three households experienced Asset Limited Income Constrained Employed (ALICE) in Houston in 2021.
How does race play into this?
In education today, disparities still exist in the public school system that are largely divided by income and race. Poverty and homelessness affect a child’s academic excellence. In Houston, Black and Hispanic students – nearly 84% of the student population of HISD – lag between 3 and 3.6 years behind white students. That amounts to an absence of a quarter of their K-12 schooling.
“Black students have a right to succeed, and they deserve and need the infrastructure to do so,” said Carroll G. Robinson, president of the Texas Coalition of Black Democrats, who had called for a Black Texas Students Education Success Summit with Black parents, students, teachers, legislators, and faith leaders in 2024 that will focus on the key issues affecting Black students in Texas. “The reality is that even in so-called good public schools, Black students are still struggling.”
It all started…a really long time ago
According to a data analysis of 4,000 school districts, and about 430 million test scores by the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University, the “strongest predictor of academic achievement gaps is school segregation — specifically, the racial concentration of poverty in schools.” It further states that socioeconomic inequalities lead to increased academic inequalities. Therefore, when socioeconomic inequality is higher, academic achievement gaps also tend to increase.
In schools across the country, 45% of Black students and 45% of Hispanic students attend a high-poverty school, compared to 8% of white students. Among students of color, three in four or more students live in poverty.
Within the Houston ISD, 76% of Black students and 80% of Hispanic students attend high-poverty schools, compared to 14% of white students. Urban Edge says Black and Hispanic students are more than five times more likely to attend a high-poverty school than white students, which results in different educational experiences for these students.
The study predicts the socioeconomic gap in 2009 of 3.09 to double in 2036 if the gap keeps increasing at the current rate.
“I did all of my schooling in Houston. My schools were majority Black and POC. We were extremely underfunded and most students, including myself, worked a side job to support our families,” a social media user wrote on X [formerly Twitter]. “If there’s no correlation between race and poverty, that’s a hell of a coincidence.”
The conditions in high-poverty schools were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, with challenges that range from teacher retention, fewer advanced courses, more disciplinary action for students, and students learning English taking longer to become proficient. Moreover, it takes more money to educate a student experiencing poverty in a high-poverty school than a student experiencing poverty in a low-poverty school.
The disparity also stems from the economic and racial segregation in neighborhoods that result in segregated schools.
“The educational inequalities that I observe as an education researcher are not the result of racist individuals but rather racist systems that were put in place by our predecessors,” wrote Ruth N. López Turley in the 2017 Urban Edge study titled After Harvey, An Opportunity to Learn from the Past in the Classroom. “What happened in Houston in the 1920s set in motion a powerful system of separation that continues to this day, and the resulting educational inequalities are devastating.”
What can schools do to address this
- A systemic approach to educational inequalities: Discriminatory housing policies in Houston impact Black families. The isolation of predominantly Black neighborhoods created areas that were removed from high-quality schools and other basic necessities of life. The historical roots of educational inequities in the region, which date back to a racially motivated zoning system established in 1924, must be acknowledged and learned from.
- Understanding historical context and overcoming it: Historian Karen Benjamin documented that the 1924 HISD school board collaborated with the city’s planning commission to develop a racialized zoning system during a major school expansion, impacting the locations of 50 new school buildings. Previously, already segregated Black and white schools were located in the same neighborhoods, with one Black school in each of Houston’s six wards. The planning selected schools to segregate neighborhoods, contributing to the current educational disparities, and the schools that did not fit the racialized zoning plan were shuttered, ignored, or relocated. This was deemed unconstitutional by a Texas Appellate Court in 1929, but the damage was done, creating a powerful system that has endured for almost a century, emphasizing the need to understand the historical context when addressing present-day challenges.
- Coordination across levels of government: Encouraging integration through efforts at the federal level, such as the Strength in Diversity Act and changes in Title I funding, which ESSA divides into five parts – improving basic programs operated by Local Education Agencies, state assessment grants, education of migrant children, prevention and intervention programs for children and youth who are neglected, delinquent, or at-risk, and flexibility for equitable per-pupil funding – and the aim to promote school integration.
- Group work: Collaboration among housing and education leaders, along with community stakeholders from diverse racial groups, to find solutions by involving those individuals with lived experiences.
- Resource centers: Inspired by HISD’s new Sunrise Centers, which are designed to provide students and their families experiencing poverty and homelessness with access to vital resources like food, clothing, and health care through partnerships, more families can access the resources available to them through awareness programs from schools.
- Counseling services: Schools should prioritize mental health of students who have to cope with the emotional toll of poverty and homelessness, where counselors can guide them toward support systems and community resources.
- Alternative scheduling: Schools can implement flexible scheduling options that include evening classes, weekend programs, or online classes to accommodate students with jobs and those whose academic pursuits are impacted by poverty.
- Collaboration with nonprofits: Schools can partner with local nonprofits and community organizations that specialize in addressing these issues and can provide resources and mentorship to help students achieve academic excellence.
- Initiatives with parents: Parents can be encouraged through workshops, support groups, and programs to establish a collaborative relationship between them and their children’s educators.
- Evidence-based policy implementation: A Nation Academics of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report says programs like increasing K-12 spending for underfunded districts, expanding occupational training programs, increasing access to the Medicaid program, and expanding the earned income tax credit can reduce the intergenerational poverty in the U.S. and the chances that children living in poverty will experience poverty as adults.
