This is a useful summary by the National Education Policy Center that demonstrates the connections among poverty, race, and college preparatory courses.
It shows the proportion of students from different racial and ethnic groups enrolled in high-poverty and low-poverty schools, and how the poverty of the students is related to college-prep course offerings.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The greatest finding of this report confirms what I strongly support, the power of integration. Most low poverty schools are majority white schools that offer many more comprehensive math and science college preparatory courses. High poverty schools tend to be black majority schools, and the poorer a school is the less likely the school will offer the array of college bound courses to students. Opportunities to pursue a college after high school are, therefore, more limited in black majority schools. Integration provides more opportunity to poor, minority students.
I had a long career in a diverse white majority school district where I worked as an ESL teacher. My poor language and ethnic minority students had tremendous opportunities in this school district. Many of my poor ELLs in elementary school qualified for advanced classes by the time they got to the high school. The district also offered summer programs in middle school that helped prepare minority students for more rigorous high school course work. As a result, many of these students were able to complete college and move from poverty to the middle class in a single generation.
Retired Teacher,
I always read your comments. Thank you.
JIM CROW is well and alive in America’s schools … Common Gore and testing, charters, and now vouchers.
Tracking compounds the already malign effects of de facto segregation and economic disparity. There is simply no other way to overcome the myriad of problems caused by physical separation than full integration. Division of students by ability is, well, divisive. Integration is the only solution.
To any who are afraid of having their children in the same classes as “others” I say remember the fact that your children’s social and economic success depends on the success of those others. You’re on the same team. Share the field and share the ball with your teammates and I guarantee more victories.
Exactly. Well said.
Also remember that those “others” have just as much to contribute to your kid as your kid does to them. Too many people get caught up in the idea that the “strivers” (high test scorers) are somehow better than others. Even the kid that disrupts the class or the kid that sleeps in the back row has something to contribute.
I am reminded of the recent “Miseducation” report from Politico in which schools with high rates of poverty and racial segregation were found to offer relatively few or no advanced placement courses. The main data base for the Miseducation report came from the 2015–16 Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC).
At least the GAO report asserts what the Miseducation report does not:
“The GAO report analyzes what it calls “high-poverty schools”—those where at least three quarters of the students live in poverty. This is itself the core problem. Any serious effort to close opportunity gaps must begin by addressing this concentrated poverty, as well as the associated racial segregation.”
Correct.
I am not alone in finding it ridiculous for schools to be blamed for the high rates of poverty among children who are enrolled in them and shamed if these schools are in racially segregated communities and ultimately under resourced even with federal, state, and local funds. Schools are in legacy environments and these are largely the result of policies and practices in finance, real estate, and the ideology of corporate fundamentalism (markets and individual initiative take care of everything).
Here are some additional “gaps” mapped (literally) from another data collection in the “Miseducation” Report. https://cepa.stanford.edu/content/gender-achievement-gaps-us-school-districts
Here’s a good look at the realities teachers face in high poverty schools. The particulars may vary, but this is what the work is. And this teacher is my hero for putting the needs of his kids before their “achievement”.
“ ‘My job as a teacher is to be a first responder to poverty,’ said Cruey, a 58-year-old middle school social studies teacher at Southside K-8 school. ‘If my students learn other stuff, too, that’s great.’ ”
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/teachers-opioid-epidemic-drugs-children_us_5bd9c9c4e4b01abe6a1a4206?ncid=engmodushpmg00000003
The whole idea of curing poverty over multiple generations through education was never genuine. Poverty should not exist to the extent it does, and its remedy should have been immediate and direct long ago.
Poverty is a function of federal tax policy.