In previous studies of mobility,economists have found that a smallerpercentage of people escape childhoodpoverty in the United States than inseveral other rich countries, includingCanada, Australia, France, Germany andJapan. The latest study is consistent withthose findings.

areas with high levels of income mobility were also those thatestablished high school earliest and have long had strong school systems.

Especially intriguing is the fact that children who moved at a young age from a low-mobility area to a high-mobility area did almost as well as those who spent theirentire childhoods in a higher-mobility area. But children who moved as teenagers didless well.

Lampra Jones, a recent graduate of a chiropractic program who has struggled to findwork, called herself “a loner” and said she wished she knew more people to help withher job search. “If you don’t know the right people,” said Ms. Jones, 28, “you’re notgoing to get anywhere.”

Geography mattered much less for well-off children than for middle-class and poorchildren, according to the results. In an economic echo of Tolstoy’s line about happyfamilies being alike, the chances that affluent children grow up to be affluent arebroadly similar across metropolitan areas.

“It’s a science you just have to perfect over time,” saidMs. Calvin, 37

That is the difference in prestige. Even before the 2008 subprime meltdown, both spaces had facedchallenges funding their local government, but Orange County bounced back so quickly from its 1990sbankruptcy that that bankruptcy is hardly visible here and largely not part of public memory. The wealthyare more permitted to fail

to be “Mexican Day” at municipal swimming pools, the day when Latinos and African Americans wereallowed to swim just before the pools were cleaned. In the early 1960s, as civil rights groups successfullyprotested for the right to use public swimming pools on any day of the week, Orange County’s real- estatedevelopers created the privatized swimming pool known as an HOA, which served to segregate swimmersby class instead of race. America’s current HOA boom began in 1963 in Huntington Beach, when developershad to lobby the federal government for homeowners insurance to cover this new model

Between 1950 and 1970, 60% of Saint Louis’s whites left the city, generally relocating to the westernsuburbs, while whites also fled from suburbs in the city’s northeast and northern neighborhoods, so that thesuburbs like Ferguson, north of the city but south of Lindbergh Boulevard (Highway 67) came to beconsidered “ghetto spillover.” Ferguson and its neighboring suburbs of Berkeley, Jennings, and Hazelwoodare all majority-black suburbs, sometimes referred to as “ inner-ring” suburbs, but they do not actually makea ring around Saint Louis. Instead they stretch northwards in a wedge around traditionally industrial, working-class, and African-American neighborhoods. The patterns set a century ago linger as inequality becomesconcrete in our buildings.

They established racially restrictive covenants in the 1930s and alsoencouraged racist neighborhood “protective” “improvement” associations. These private initiatives werereinforced by public policy, especially after the New Deal’s Home Owner Loan Corporation created mapspredicting residential property values, maps that we now know as redlining, maps that were self-fulfillingprophecies whose effects have lingered for generations. Colin Gordon reproduces many of these maps in hiswonderful digital-history of Saint Louis http://mappingdecline.lib.uiowa.edu/map/.

The best economic outcomes, however, again occurred in highly segregated whiteneighborhoods. Average income is substantially higher in those neighborhoods, not justfor white children, but for Black and Latino children as well. Black children raised inhighly segregated white neighborhoods earned nearly $4,000 more as adults than Blackchildren raised in highly segregated communities of color. Similarly, Latino childrenraised in highly segregated white neighborhoods earned about $5,000 more per year asadults than Latino children raised in segregated communities of color.

Table 2: Top 10 Metros with Greatest Decrease in Segregation (1990-2019, Minimum200,000 people)RankMetro% Black (change)% Latino (change)% White (change)1Savannah, GA33% (-4%)6% (+414%)56% (-13%)2San Antonio-New Braunfels, TX6% (+4%)55% (+18%)34% (-26%)3Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach, FL20% (+24%)45% (+62%)30% (-44%)4Lubbock, TX7% (-11%)36% (+52%)53% (-21%)5Mobile, AL36% (+15%)3% (+248%)57% (-15%)6Port St. Lucie, FL15% (+22%)17% (+303%)64% (-22%)7Flint, MI20% (+1%)3% (+67%)72% (-6%)8Chicago-Joliet-Naperville, IL-IN-WI16% (-13%)22% (+102%)53% (-21%)9Corpus Christi, TX3% (-11%)61% (+21%)33% (-27%)10Jackson, MS49% (+15%)2% (+358%)47% (-17%)

It is important to emphasize at the outset, however, that racial segregation, like racialviolence or discrimination, is generally not established, justified, or propounded on thebasis of hatred, animus or invidiousness. Rather, it is usually advanced on the basis ofpeace, security, social harmony, and order, and sometimes on the basis of purity,religious or otherwise. Thus, the US War Department placed Japanese Americans intointernment camps on the ground that they were a security threat to the United Statesduring World War II; the California Department of Corrections segregated inmates onthe basis of race ostensibly to tamp down inter-group violence within prisons as recentlyas 2005; and, ancient European kingdoms isolated Jewish people into “ghettos”ostensibly to protect Christian religious purity.

Aggressive “” policing practicestarget racially and economically isolated Black and Brown neighborhoods, while jobsand the tax dollars flow to white communities, leaving crumbling infrastructure,poisonous water, predatory financial institutions, and food deserts behind

by sorting people into particular neighborhoods or communitieson the basis of race, that connects (or fails to connect) residents to good schools,

First, the Court confessed great reluctance to interfere with legislative deci-sions about raising and spending revenues. No system of taxation is perfect, the Court reasoned, and the questions raised by how much to tax and which ser-vices to provide are remarkably complex and intertwined. "In such a complex arena in which no perfect alternatives exist;' Justice Powell wrote for the Court, it is best "not to impose too rigorous a standard of scrutiny lest all local fiscal schemes become subjects of criticism under the Equal Protection Clause."54 Second, the Court discussed the uncertain connection between funding and achievement.

But fiscal neutrality could also be satisfied by ensuring equal access to resources and allowing localities in effect to decide for themselves how much to spend.

at least for some children.

_.This news often comes as a surprise given the increasingly important and intrusive role of the federal government in public education, illustrated most dramatically by the No Child Left Behind Act

which was grossly unequal in most states

Suburban residents expressed particular alarm over the prospect of equal-izing funding by capping local spending.

Poor minority students and their fam-ilies are not especially powerful politically, and representatives of urban areas rarely hold the balance of power in state legislatures.

would have to come out of the budget by eliminating other items . . . as there[was] no new money available for the purpose.

The Berets received “extensive and disproportionatecoverage devoted to them in the mass media,”40and by the late 1960s,Chicano youth were dominating public discussion with militant rhetoric.41This strategy, however, though it succeeded in gaining attention and somedegree of political influence, also propagated the image of Latino students asangry, disengaged, and uncontrollable.

Students of color were widely perceived, even by their teachers, as truantand low-achieving.

Gitelson, for his decision, received death threats and was not re-elected—clear signs that the public, at least the public that voted, was listening.

-12 Enrollment by Race LAUSD 1966-1980SOURCES: 1. Sam Hamerman et al., Report of the Los Angeles City Schools Planning Team.Los Angeles, CA: Los Angeles Unified School District, 1967, pp. 51, 56. 2. Annual EthnicSurvey, Los Angeles Unified School District.

n 1966, 396,654 whites were enrolled in LAUSD schools;10by 1980,only 127,281 would be enrolled. It was precisely during this period that LosAngeles public schools were engaged in a very public struggle over schooldesegregation. Although Los Angeles schools would remain highly segre-gated until the 1980s, the desegregation struggle began two decades earlierand stirred up enough fear and resentment among working- and middle-classwhites that many enrolled their children in private schools or reassessed thevalue of living in Los Angeles.11

Working- and middle-class whites in Los Angeles were also highly protec-tive of their property.

The traditional story of white flight centers around post-WWII federalhousing and highway programs, deteriorating urban housing stocks, theapplication of mass manufacturing techniques to home construction, and thein-migration of populations of color to urban areas. These factors collec-tively made suburbanization attractive to and possible for white middle-classfamilies, who consequently left cities and urban public schools.