Beyond residential segregation and proximity to very poor neighborhoods, access to education is an important factor in the tendency of middle class black youth to backslide economically. Even with personal choices and wider housing discrimination that keeps middle class black families geographically near highly impoverished communities, education can help keep middle class black youth from illegal/dangerous activity and aid in upward mobility. Access to quality education and a school administration that puts students’ needs first can be invaluable for students’ success in school and beyond. In fact, a caring school environment is one of the 40 Developmental Assets for children and adolescents put for by the Search Institute and used to train tutors and mentors that work with children.

The problem, then, stems from the fact that many black students across the nation today do not have access to quality, well-rounded education. School segregation is still a reality and it was documented in a 2014 study of public schools in Tuscaloosa, Alabama by Nikole Hannah-Jones. According to Jones, “[i]n Tuscaloosa today, nearly one in three black students attends a school that looks as if Brown v. Board of Education never happened.” She explains further that while white students are no longer isolated in entirely white schools, Latino and black students are often segregated into almost entirely black and/or Latino schools. Between 1990 and 2011, 54% of black students in America were enrolled in schools with white populations of 1% or less. Integration is no longer a reality in many low-income (often Southern) school districts. Black students are cut off from youth of other backgrounds, limiting their cultural awareness and further isolating them within the black community (which includes those poor neighborhoods that they are likely to fall into). The black students interviewed by Jones in these Tuscaloosa schools understand the issue at hand, and seem uncertain that they are “learning as much as the city’s white students were” in their schools.

When cut off from access to a good education system – one that has many cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds present and is equal to the education system of white students  in the same city – black students can lose potential for upward mobility and economic progress. Even the best students in all-black schools face a shortage of resources and other roadblocks that can prevent them from continuing to higher education. This unfairness is a trend in many areas of life for black youth. I think that so often black youth are demonized for being violent, criminal, or lazy, when in fact they are systemically deprived of resources and opportunities that would allow them to avoid violence or crime and turn to other methods of financial gain and social interaction. Until we can come to this conclusion as a country and enact change in housing and educational segregation, it will be difficult for the black middle class to gain the stability and influence that the white middle class has. How might we bring wider attention to this issue in a way that can actually bring about effective social change? Is this something that the black community can attempt to remedy within itself, or must there be cooperation from multiple groups?