Parents wish nothing but the best education for their kids, but not all families can afford it. Chicago's problematic school system in particular has caused a great divide among the city's affluent residents and lower-income families.
Affluence Bubble
In a recently-published socio-economic report on Sage Journals, The University of Southern California researcher Ann Owens found that there are more isolated rich kids living in Chicago than any other major city in the US. Furthermore, income segregation is higher in Chicago than in 70 of the country's top 100 largest cities.
Chicago Business reported that there has been an increase in the number of affluent Chicago homeowners in the last several years. This comes at the expense of lower-income families who can no longer afford to live in areas with the best school districts.
Naturally, more and more wealthy kids are enrolled in top-caliber institutions while the opposite can be said about kids from mid- to low-income families. This phenomenon creates an "affluence bubble" around wealthy kids while simultaneously widening the educational gap between the rich and poor.
Concentrated Resources
Owens, who happens to be a Chicago native, is not putting the blame on affluent families for choosing to buy properties in the best school districts. She is simply stating that "resources are becoming more concentrated in some places."
"Rising income inequality provided high-income households more resources," Owens explained. "Parents used these resources to purchase housing in particular neighborhoods, with residential decisions structured, in part, by school district boundaries."
Racial Undertone
Marisa Novara, a community worker at Chicago's Metropolitan Planning Council, said that the city's problem with income segregation has a deep racial undertone. She believes Chicago's long-standing issue with race has seeped through the city's educational landscape.
According to CNN Money, blacks and whites usually live in separate clusters in Chicago. The disparity is so evident in some areas that 72% of black or white residents are asked to transfer to another census tract just to level out the numbers.
