KQED News, August 30, 2016: Two Moms Choose Between Separate and Unequal Schools in Oakland

“According to data compiled by the UCLA Civil Rights Project, the average white student in Oakland goes to school with 37 percent low-income classmates. In contrast, African-American students in Oakland attend schools where 72 percent of fellow students are low income; for Latinos, it’s 84 percent. When you concentrate poverty and wealth like that, it creates separate and unequal schools, like Sankofa and Peralta. In fact, the larger the difference in the poverty rate at schools for kids of different races, the larger the racial achievement gap, according to some researchers. ‘Segregation, as you can see by these Oakland statistics, is double segregation by race and poverty, which is really crippling for a school,’ said Orfield.”