The public school choice system in Oakland, which enables families to look at the nearly 120 schools across the city and choose the one they think is best for their kids, is meant to even the playing field. Instead of being restricted to the closest school, which may have fewer resources or not fit their child's needs, families in lower-income neighborhoods can have access to the same public schools as wealthier families. But new research from UC Berkeley computer scientists examining the Oakland Unified School District system questions whether that's really happening. And it asks hard questions about how the current approach might be entrenching inequalities instead of fighting them. The researchers interviewed 10 low-income parents and parents of color in Oakland and asked them what they wanted in a school, how they found information about schools, and about their experiences going through the application and enrollment process. They also interviewed four "parent advocates"?staff of OUSD or local community organizations who help families evaluate schools?about their work, the challenges they face, and how the enrollment process could be improved for the families they work with.

California has one of the highest levels of income inequality in the nation, and nearly six out of 10 California adults polled said they believe the government should do more to reduce the gaps between rich and poor.?But when presented with proposed policies to boost resources for disadvantaged groups, even liberals show reluctance to reduce inequality after all, according to a new study co-authored by researchers from UC Berkeley. The researchers found that people who have social or economic advantages tend to believe they'll be harmed by policies that reduce inequality ? even when those policies don't reduce their own access to resources.?Derek Brown, a Berkeley doctoral student and co-author of the study,?said contributing taxes can be seen as an individual act. But when it comes to the overall distribution of resources, privileged or advantaged groups view how they're doing in comparison to other groups, he said. "People are really cued into relative advantages," he said, "so much so that they might even misconstrue changes to their relative position to another person or another group as a loss in an absolute sense."

Majority Black and Latino communities that received the worst grades under a racially discriminatory federal housing program known as redlining have nearly twice as many oil drilling wells as mostly White communities, a new study says. The study by scientists at the University of California at Berkeley and Columbia University in New York joined a large body of research showing how communities of color are disproportionately exposed to pollution and the resulting poor health outcomes. It comes on the heels of a report last month that said 45 million Americans are breathing dirtier air because of racial redlining. Throughout redlining's history, local zoning officials worked with businesses to place polluting operations such as industrial plants, major roadways and shipping ports in and around neighborhoods that the federal government marginalized. "I think one important thing to know is how public policy can affect health for many many decades to come," David J.X. Gonzalez, a postdoctoral fellow at Cal Berkeley and a co-author of the study, added. "It makes us aware that we need to focus on disparate exposures and health outcomes when we consider new policy. Studies like this can put equity into the equation." This story appeared in several media outlets around the country. For more, see our press release at Berkeley News.

Urban neighborhoods that were redlined by federal officials in the 1930s tended to have higher levels of harmful air pollution eight decades later, a new study has found, adding to a body of evidence that reveals how racist policies in the past have contributed to inequalities across the United States today. In the wake of the Great Depression, when the federal government graded neighborhoods in hundreds of cities for real estate investment, Black and immigrant areas were typically outlined in red on maps to denote risky places to lend. Racial discrimination in housing was outlawed in 1968. But the redlining maps entrenched discriminatory practices whose effects reverberate nearly a century later. To this day, historically redlined neighborhoods are more likely to have high populations of Black, Latino and Asian residents than areas that were favorably assessed at the time. The new study's lead author, Haley M. Lane, said she was surprised to find that the differences in air pollution exposure between redlined and better-rated districts were even larger than the well-documented disparities in exposure between people of color and white Americans. "At the same time, there are so many other effects that are creating these disparities, and these delineations by redlining are just one," said Ms. Lane, a graduate student in civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

Decades of federal housing discrimination did not only depress home values, lower job opportunities and spur poverty in communities deemed undesirable because of race. It's why 45 million Americans are breathing dirtier air today, according to a landmark study released Wednesday. The analysis, published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters, found that, compared with White people, Black and Latino Americans live with more smog and fine particulate matter from cars, trucks, buses, coal plants and other nearby industrial sources in areas that were redlined. Those pollutants inflame human airways, reduce lung function, trigger asthma attacks and can damage the heart and cause strokes. "Of course, we've known about redlining and its other unequal impacts, but air pollution is one of the most important environmental health issues in the U.S.," said Joshua Apte, a co-author of the study and an assistant professor in the School of Public Health at the University of California at Berkeley. "If you just look at the number of people that get killed by air pollution, it's arguably the most important environmental health issue in the country," Apte said.

Savala Nolan is admittedly "in-between." She's been an insider and an outsider at the same time. It's understandable that Nolan wanted to explore her multiple sides, which she does in the essays included in her first book, "Don't Let It Get You Down: Essays on Race, Gender and the Body," which was published this summer. Nolan's writing, which has appeared in Bust, Time and Vogue, is closely related to the work she does as the executive director of the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice at UC Berkeley School of Law, addressing issues related to belonging, subordination, privilege, power, resources and safety. Her book has earned praise for its honesty and willingness to explore the contradictions in her life, offering a model for others to do the same.

To the unaware, Port St. Lucie might look like a rather nondescript Florida town, sprawling and sedate – a suburb in search of a city with nothing that resembled a downtown until developers built one about two decades ago. But that might be its genius. According to a recent study, only two of 113 of the largest cities in the United States qualify as integrated. And one is Port St. Lucie. (The other is Colorado Springs, Colorado.) Even as America's major metropolitan regions become more diverse, the country has begun to resegregate into more racially homogeneous neighborhoods. More than 80 percent of the nation's major metropolitan areas are more racially segregated today than they were in 1990, the study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley found. The trend is of momentous importance. Throughout American history, racially segregated neighborhoods have been a fundamental driver of profound racial disparities in education, policing, health care, and income.

More than 80% of large metropolitan regions in the United States,  including the Bay Area,  have become more racially segregated in recent decades, with detrimental economic, health and educational outcomes for many communities of color. That's according to findings from a UC Berkeley Othering & Belonging Institute housing study and map released Monday that uses a new methodology to determine the degree of racial segregation in local and regional areas throughout the country. The report goes on to identify vast disparities in income and poverty levels, home values, rent prices and life expectancy between highly segregated communities of color and white communities. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News. Another story on this topic appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Women and underrepresented minorities are more likely to succeed professionally in STEM fields when their institutional cultures are welcoming and set clear, unbiased expectations, a Berkeley-led study has found. The indicators of success for the study included students' rates of publishing and securing postdoctoral and faculty positions. According to assistant psychology professor Aaron Fisher, the study's lead author: "Our study strongly indicates that the onus should not fall on minority students to make changes to succeed in STEM settings. ... Institutional changes that make students feel welcome and provide clear guidelines and standards for performance are optimal ways to ensure the success of all students." The study was conducted by researchers at Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford, and Caltech -- institutions which together educate an estimated 10 percent of the nation's underrepresented minority doctoral students in science and engineering. This story originated at Berkeley News.

Women and underrepresented minorities are more likely to succeed professionally in STEM fields when their institutional cultures are welcoming and set clear, unbiased expectations, a Berkeley-led study has found. The indicators of success for the study included students' rates of publishing and securing postdoctoral and faculty positions. According to assistant psychology professor Aaron Fisher, the study's lead author: "Our study strongly indicates that the onus should not fall on minority students to make changes to succeed in STEM settings. ... Institutional changes that make students feel welcome and provide clear guidelines and standards for performance are optimal ways to ensure the success of all students." The study was conducted by researchers at Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford, and Caltech -- institutions which together educate an estimated 10 percent of the nation's underrepresented minority doctoral students in science and engineering. This story originated at Berkeley News.

Rises in state-level hate crimes can drive Black students to enroll at historically Black colleges and universities, according to a new study of hate crime and enrollment data. Experts say the findings illustrate the extensive work left to be done at predominantly white colleges to ensure students of color feel safe and welcomed. Dominique Baker, a professor of education policy at Southern Methodist University and co-author Tolani Britton, a professor of education policy at the University of California, Berkeley's Graduate School of Education, believe their study offers further evidence that when Black students are determining where to go to college, if there is racial turmoil in their community, they are selecting institutions "where they can thrive and be mentally and physically safe," Baker said.

A growing number of families in Greater Cincinnati's suburbs find themselves in need of help with rent and mortgages. Suburbs in the nation's largest metropolitan areas saw the number of residents living below the poverty line grow by 57% between 2000 and 2015, according to research that UC Berkeley Terner Center for Housing Innovation research director Elizabeth Kneebone conducted for the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program. Suburbs accounted for nearly half of the nation's total increase in the poor population during that time, she found. Between 2000 and 2019, the population of people living below the federal poverty line decreased by 3% within the city of Cincinnati, according to Kneebone.

Charles D. Brown II, a physics postdoc at UC Berkeley, and Jessica Esquivel, a physics postdoc at the Fermi National Accelerator Lab, take a look at Black physicists and their contributions to the scientific community, and the risks of ignoring a significant portion of the American population. "The lack of representation of Black individuals in artificial intelligence (AI) has major consequences. AI systems are designed to mimic human intelligence, and they have taken hold of our lives, from the targeted ads we see when we are shopping online to the "recommended" section on a Netflix home page. Although these systems offer significant societal benefits, too many of them have detrimental effects on the Black community."

Two UC Berkeley economists, Ellora Derenoncourt and Claire Montialoux discuss a flurry of promises to combat systemic racism after a summer of protests over the killing of George Floyd, and argue that recent American history shows that raising and expanding the minimum wage could reduce the persistent earnings divide between white workers and Black, Hispanic and Native American workers. Though legislation to raise the wage floor would be a universal program in name and application, in practice it would be a remarkably effective tool for racial justice.

A UC Berkeley economist, Zachary Bleemer, has conducted the first comprehensive study of what happened 24 year ago after California passed Prop. 209, banning affirmative action. The study found that Black and Hispanic enrollment declined across the University of California system after Proposition 209 fully took effect in 1998. Students who would have enrolled at the flagship campuses before the ban attended less selective universities in the system. This in turn pushed out other Black and Hispanic students, who moved down the ladder of selectivity. Those at the bottom lost their grip entirely, exiting the system altogether.