Since its very beginnings, America has struggled to live up to the ideal of equal opportunity for all. We’ve made progress on many fronts, but our children still grow up in very different circumstances depending on race, family income, and zip code.

The gap between rich and poor has been widening since the early 1980s, with families at the top spending more and more on educational experiences like after-school enrichment, private tutoring, music lessons or study abroad, while low-income families struggle even with the costs of housing, food and other basics.

At one in five, the U.S. child poverty rate is higher than in most other developed countries, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. And those rates vary considerably by race, with Black, Latinx, or American Indian children experiencing poverty at two or three times the rates of White or Asian children, according to the latest KIDS COUNT Data Book from the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

Unfortunately, our education system often compounds these inequities by giving poor children and children of color less of the resources we know can make a difference. In many parts of the country, we spend less per student in schools serving high concentrations of low-income students and students of color. On top of that, we often assign those students our least experienced and well-trained teachers. Regardless of prior achievement, they are less likely to be enrolled in the most rigorous high school courses. And when students of color act out in school, they typically get harsher penalties than white students with the exact same infractions. Many respond by dropping out entirely; others keep coming, but gradually disengage.

There’s no doubt that talent and intelligence are evenly distributed. But when we add up the inequities inside and outside schools, it’s no wonder we see very different results among groups of students. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, for example, almost half of Black and more than a third of American Indian and Latinx 12th graders do not score at even basic levels of reading proficiency, compared with only a fifth of White students. We must do better. And around the country, schools are showing us that, by tackling these problems head on, we really can.