Young couples in the Atlanta area once bought homes in Cobb County to join what was perceived to be one of the state’s strongest school systems. Twenty years ago, elementary schools spanning the county—from I-20 up to the Chattahoochee River—were filled with children of the middle class.

Construction boomed. Families moved into new four-bedroom homes in communities designed by John Weiland. New strip malls opened to meet the needs of a growing and relatively wealthy county.

Today, children raised in that era are bringing up their own families and most are choosing to do so far away from their childhood homes. The youngest generation of middle class Metro Atlantans have abandoned large swaths of Cobb County, leaving behind their aging parents and the poorer families most recent to arrive. Rather than staying close to their childhood homes, they have gone one of two ways. Some have moved further out to join new exurban developments while others have moved intown. This transition has left much of Cobb County and many of its schools in a drastically different state than most might have imagined in the early 1990’s.

Cobb County is not alone.

Across the Metro Atlanta region, vast geographies once popular with the middle class have become pockets of isolated poverty. Early last year, Maria Saporta published an article highlighting work by the Brookings Institution which showed a significant increase in Atlanta’s suburban poverty. Months later, The New York Times used data published by Harvard Economist a Raj Chetty to argue that geography plays an important role in limiting income mobility for Atlantans.

A new dimension to this conversation—education—makes the extent of poverty’s spread to the suburbs even clearer. Children in communities across growing portions of the Atlanta region attend schools of virtually uniform poverty. In some places, families would need to drive 15 miles to reach a middle-class public school.

The interactive map below show the geographic evolution of poverty (as represented by the percent of students qualifying for Free and Reduced Lunch) from 1994 to 2013. Readers can use the bar on the left to scroll through time and watch the spread of poverty from small portions of Fulton and Dekalb Counties outward.

As is often the case in Atlanta, a discussion of poverty overlaps with a discussion of race. Undoubtedly, a variety of factors contribute to a neighborhood or school district’s fall from favor with a certain group. However, race appears to remain one important factor in the Atlanta region. Over the past 20 years, school after school in Cobb County and elsewhere in the region that saw a significant population of black & Hispanic students arrive quickly saw a decline in the number of white students enrolling. This trend is most evident when focusing on single-grade cohorts.

From 1994 to 2013 the share of white Kindergarteners enrolling in Cobb County schools fell from 77% to 38%. Those white students who remain in the Cobb schools are primarily concentrated near the east and west borders of the county.

This transition is partially driven by the attraction of other regions, but it is also informed by changing perceptions of school quality. As explained in an April post, these perceptions are often driven by misinformation because data released by the state is biased toward showing schools with higher poverty as less successful. However, some schools which may appear to be faltering in this data are actually succeeding once one considers the students served. Gwinnett County is an example of a district which has seen an increase in poverty, and is succeeding with its students.

The graphs below show the evolution of Kindergarten race/ethnicity in the Metro’s schools from 1994 to 2013.

Viewing what has developed over the past 20 years, raises several important questions. First, what can be done to ensure that children raised in poverty have a fair shot at success? Second, can a region truly prosper if such a large share of its youngest are growing up in economic and racial isolation? Third, what can be done to encourage more integrated learning environments?