The color of a child’s skin shouldn’t affect the quality of her education.

Most kids attend schools near where they live, and America’s neighborhoods are highly segregated by race and income. This means that kids of color are far more likely to attend high-poverty schools, where at least 75% of students live in families that are struggling to get by.

Students living in areas with concentrated poverty are more likely to face challenges like hunger, unstable housing or violence in their neighborhoods. This means high-poverty schools are tasked with educating students who often need more supports and resources than their peers from more affluent families.

“When they first come in my door in the morning, the first thing I do is an inventory of immediate needs: Did you eat? Are you clean?… These kids aren’t thinking, ‘Am I going to take a test today?’ They’re thinking, ‘Am I going to be okay?’” -Sonya Romero-Smith, elementary teacher in Albuquerque, NM

Although positive supports can add up to outweigh these barriers, the data show us that education is not the equalizer we expect it to be. An undeniable link exists between a school district’s low-income student population and its academic performance.

National efforts to improve public education haven’t managed to overcome the effects of our long history of structural barriers to opportunity, especially for students of color. In general, states with the highest populations of students of color are more likely to have the most students attending high-poverty schools.

In many cases, these same states have the highest proportions of students living in poverty of any race. Surprisingly, it is in states in the northern U.S. and across the Rust Belt where students of color are most disproportionately likely to attend high-poverty schools, relative to their white peers.

The most powerful predictor of the racial achievement gap is whether a student attends a high-poverty school, according to a recent Stanford study. In every state in the nation, students of color are at least twice as likely to attend a high-poverty school as white students.

The color of a student’s skin shouldn’t affect the type of school she attends, but it does. All students — across race or ethnicity — deserve access to a high-quality, well-resourced school. Their futures depend on it.