How much of Dr. Martin Luther King’s Dream has come true? For an answer, look into the future of Shanice, a Black girl in Westchester County, NY, where I live. It’s believed that her name means “God is merciful,” although there is little or no evidence to support that contention.

Not that her parents didn’t do their best to make sure Shanice has a good life. Her mother is loving and her father is there, an active force in Shanice’s life.

But “there” foretells Shanice’s future. “There” is an African-American neighborhood in Yonkers, a city where one fourth of the Black population lives below the poverty line. Her school district spends about $23,000 on general education per pupil annually. If her parents lived across the border in Bronxville, about five minutes away, she would go to a school that would invest $29,000, or about 25% more, in her future. In Bronxville, by the way, less than 3% of the total population lives in poverty and the number of African-Americans is too small to measure.

How can Bronxville residents afford to spend so much more on their kids? Simple, they have more. The average single family home in Bronxville is worth three times one in Yonkers. And schools are funded by property taxes, so the money flowing to Bronxville schools is commensurately greater.

What difference does school spending make? In Yonkers, some 88% of high schoolers taking the NYS Regents exam test proficient in English language arts (85% of the Black kids), whereas 98% of the Bronxville high school students meet the standard. Yonkers graduates 86% of its high school students in four years. Bronxville’s four-year graduation rate is 100%.

In Shanice’s school district, 32% of grade schoolers test proficient in English language skills (only 25% of the Black kids). The elementary pupils in Bronxville score 82% proficiency. Drill down a bit more, and 91% of the Bronxville kids in the third grade (the first year tested) are judged proficient in ELA while 40% of the Yonkers third graders meet the standard.

The same pattern of unequal opportunity AND worse results for Black and White communities holds true throughout the nation. According to Bureau of Census, Labor, and Justice statistics reported by the NY Times, 36% of White community residents have completed four years of college whereas only 26% of those in Black communities got there—and incurred greater student debt to do it. These unequal educations echo through the economy, with Black families earning about $57 for every $100 White families earn.

That means they can’t afford to live in Bronxville, much less own a home there or just about anywhere else. The homeownership rate for White families is 73%; for Blacks it’s 42%. Since their house is the largest single assets owned by most families, Black families are starting in a hole. In fact, the Federal Reserve Board reports that the median family net worth in 2016 was $17,150 for Black families. White, non-Hispanic families were worth more than ten times that amount, or $171,000.

It’s generally believed that the Supreme Court did away with discrimination in education when it ruled that separate cannot be equal in Brown vs. Broad of Education in 1954. What’s forgotten is that the next year, the same court ruled that local school districts had to desegregate with “all deliberate speed,” or whenever they felt like it. Today, two-thirds of a century after Brown, more than half of all school children in America live in districts where more than 75% of the students are either White or of color. Our schools are effectively segregated, mainly due to discriminatory zoning disguised as economic differences.

All children may be created equal, but the day Shanice starts kindergarten in America is the day equality ends.

From The Journal of My Seventieth Year