The Continuing Racial and Ethnic Income Gap in New York and the Nation

Race has been a defining aspect of American society since Europeans came to this continent. Although racial identification reflects where people’s ancestors lived, not biological differences between people, it gained a connotation of superiority or inferiority as a justification for actions by dominant settlers of European descent to subjugate non-Europeans for economic benefit. One consequence […]

Poverty in Upstate Metropolitan Areas: Myths and Realities

We live in an era in which long-held attitudes about race have been heightened by political campaigns that attempt to mobilize fears among white voters about minority group members and immigrants.  These appeals have ranged from claims that President Obama is a Muslim who was born in Kenya and claims that criminal undocumented immigrants endanger […]

Left Behind: Missing from the Labor Market in New York State

A reader of this blog recently wrote, “We know that labor force participation rates across the country have declined noticeably for a number of years, and many economists have warned of the troubling implications of this.  Such rates across Upstate NY have declined as well, and in most cases are significantly below the national average – not an encouraging sign.  […]

School Segregation is Increasing in New York’s Cities and Suburbs

Recent articles in the New York Times and The Nation have focused on efforts to resegregate schools in the South, by carving new predominantly white school districts out of larger county-wide school districts that are predominantly black and Hispanic.  The articles examined a recent federal court decision that permitted the creation of the Gardendale School District […]

More Regional Diversity but a Larger Racial/Ethnic Divide in New York Schools

This post examines changes in the ethnic and racial compositions of kindergarten through twelfth grade schools in New York State metropolitan areas over the past 25 years.  During that period, the student population, like the general population has become more diverse, with the percentage of students identified as white decreasing, while minority group members, particularly […]

The Shrinking Middle Class in New York State – Cities and Suburbs

Pew Research has been releasing a series of studies showing that the percentage of Americans who have middle class incomes has been declining.  The most recent of these is  America’s Shrinking Middle Class:  A Close Look at Changes Within Metropolitan Areas.  The report received extensive coverage in many newspapers, including the New York Times.  It concluded that […]

More on Race, Income and Student Achievement

A few months ago, I wrote about the link between economic disadvantage and poor student performance.  I looked at the performance of students on the State’s annual student assessment for grades 3 to 8, and found that the percentage of economically disadvantaged students in schools and school districts accounted for about three quarters of the […]

Racial Divisions in Upstate Metropolitan Neighborhoods

In my last posting I described income differences in 800 upstate metropolitan neighborhoods in Albany, Erie, Monroe, Oneida, Onondaga, Rensselaer and Schenectady Counties.  The data comes from the United States Census Bureau which divides the nation into census tracts, the most detailed level publically tabulated. Overall, there are 73,000 census tracts nationally, averaging 4,200 residents each. […]

Income Inequality and Minority Group Status in Upstate Metropolitan Areas

In an earlier post, I pointed out that residents of upstate metropolitan areas actually have incomes that are somewhat higher than the average for other cities in the so called “rust belt” – cities located in the old manufacturing regions of the Northeast and Midwest. But, the largest upstate cities – Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse […]