The wealth gap: How the education world fails to fully measure students’ economic disadvantage

Chalkbeat reports that the education world often ignores wealth, though, focusing instead on family income, where racial disparities are smaller. It’s ingrained in how we study efforts to help students at an economic disadvantage and talk about them, too: How are low-income students faring compared to their more affluent peers? America’s racial wealth gap is massive. The median Black household with children has a net worth of $300, compared to $47,250 for the median white family. Those Black families have 1%, and Hispanic families have 8%, of the average white family’s wealth. A recent study found that the median Black household with children took in about 50% the income of white families but held just 1% of the wealth. High-income and highly educated Black Americans still have much less wealth than their white peers — a reflection of policies that have excluded Black families from building housing wealth and passing it down to future generations. #education #racialequity