Charts of the week: Racial imbalance in schools, patent applications, and the child tax credit

Click on the links or on the charts to go to the full research.

THE RACIAL IMBALANCE OF WASHINGTON D.C. SCHOOLS IS MUCH HIGHER THAN THE NATIONAL AVERAGE

More than 60 years after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, experts from Brookings Economic Studies program analyzed what racial imbalance endures in U.S. public schools today. According to their study, the average U.S. public school is about 3 percent less white, 2 percent more black, and 1 percent more Hispanic than its surrounding neighborhood. In Washington D.C. however, schools are about 6 percent less white and over 6 percent more black than their neighborhoods.

THE UNITED STATES HAS EXCEEDED JAPAN AND EUROPE IN PATENT APPLICATIONS SINCE 2006

In a new report from Hamilton Project, co-authors Jay Shambaugh, Ryan Nunn, and Becca Portman use data from the Trilateral Patent Offices to illustrate patent application trends and compare the volume of applications from Japan, Europe, and the United States. They find that the U.S. Patent Office receives six times as many applications as it did in 1980, in part due to the increase of foreign patenting activity in the United States.

REPUBLICAN PROPOSALS WOULD RAISE TAXES ON POOR FAMILIES WITH CHILDREN

In their analysis of GOP tax proposals, Senior Fellow Bill Galston and Clara Hendrickson from the Governance Studies program find that under both the House and Senate plans families in the poorest two quintiles (the bottom 40 percent) would face a tax increase due to sunset provisions on portions of the child tax credit.