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Title: Balancing Act: Schools, Neighborhoods and Racial Imbalance

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2017

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Abstract: 1. As outlined in our previous report on the subject, school segregation by race has declined since the 1960s, largely because of the increase in the Hispanic school population. That said, white segregation has been more or less flat since the 1990s. 2. The segregation of schools by race remains high, however. Noteworthy is the continued separation of white and black students. This could have various negative consequences, from social isolation to academic outcomes. 3. In this paper, and accompanying online interactive, we investigate the racial composition of schools, compared to the neighborhoods in which they are located. School segregation inevitably reflects, to a greater or lesser extent, neighborhood segregation - especially when enrollment criteria are based on geography. We construct a “racial imbalance measure” for every non-private (including traditional public schools, charter schools and magnet schools) school in the U.S., comparing the racial composition of each school to that of its surrounding neighborhood. (We use a 2-mile radius to match schools to nearby Census blocks within the school’s district; but the findings are largely the same for other distances and approaches).

Url: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/es_20171120_schoolsegregation.pdf

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Authors: Whitehust, Grover, J; Joo, Nathan; Reeves, Richard, V; Rodrigue, Edward

Publisher: The Brookings Institution

Data Collections: IPUMS NHGIS

Topics: Education, Land Use/Urban Organization, Race and Ethnicity

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