The Shifting Geography of Urban Education

Poverty in the United States is migrating far beyond the urban core and transforming the suburbs into places increasingly stratified by income, wealth, opportunity, and education. Census data from the 2005 American Community Survey reveal new patterns of income inequality, residential mobility, and spatial segregation that make the suburbs less of a place apart and more like the rest of the United States. For the first time, a larger number of America's poor are living in the suburbs than in the cities. This article describes the shifting geography of poverty in the metropolitan Atlanta area and how this trend relates to schools. Atlanta is a good location in which to observe the changing residential patterns of poor and working-poor families because the challenges facing suburban school systems in this Sunbelt city of more than 5 million can be read as a bellwether of major political, economic, and educational policy choices to come and the social context within which these choices will be decided.