America's Segregated Schools

In the United States most district schools on average receive half of their funding through local property taxes. A system of funding that seems almost designed to ensure that the children of the poor receive a worse education than the children of the rich.

Edbuild's Dividing Lines is a choropleth map of student poverty levels in United States school districts. The map sidebar highlights a number of examples in cities across the United States where school district boundaries seem designed to enforce a kind of segregation.

The examples highlighted in the map are powerful evidence for Edbuild's central argument that tying "school finances to local property taxes incentivizes wealthy communities to wall themselves off, concentrating poverty in particular districts and creating school systems that have fewer resources to meet greater challenges".