When Is a School Segregated? Making Sense of Segregation 65 Years after Brown v. Board of Education

R E S E A R C H R E P O R T When Is a School Segregated? Making Sense of Segregation 65 Years after Brown v. Board of Education Tomas Monarrez Brian Kisida Matthew Chingos U R B A N IN S TI TU TE U N IV E R S I TY OF M I S S OURI U R B A N IN S TI TU TE September 2019 C E N T E R O N E D U C A T I O N D A T A A N D P O L I C Y A B O U T T H E U R B A N I N S T I T U T E The nonprofit Urban Institute is a leading research organization dedicated to developing evidence-based insights that improve people’s lives and strengthen communities. For 50 years, Urban has been the trusted source for rigorous analysis of complex social and economic issues; strategic advice to policymakers, philanthropists, and practitioners; and new, promising ideas that expand opportunities for all. Our work inspires effective decisions that advance fairness and enhance the well-being of people and places. Copyright © September 2019. Urban Institute. Permission is granted for reproduction of this file, with attribution to the Urban Institute. Cover image by Tim Meko. Contents Acknowledgments iv Executive Summary v When Is a School Segregated? 1 Data and Methods 2 National Segregation Trends 6 Decomposing School Contributions to Segregation 9 Conclusion 23 Appendix 25 Defining the Segregation Contribution Index 25 Empirical Framework 26 Notes 32 References 34 About the Authors 36 Statement of Independence 37 IV A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S Acknowledgments This report was funded by the Walton Family Foundation. We are grateful to them and to all our funders, who make it possible for Urban to advance its mission. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders. Funders do not determine research findings or the insights and recommendations of Urban experts. Further information on the Urban Institute’s funding principles is available at urban.org/fundingprinciples. We thank Sean Corcoran for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this report. We also thank Olivia Piontek for her assistance on this project. E X E C U T I V E S U M M A R Y V Executive Summary Sixty-five years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision ended legal segregation in US public schools, many students are still enrolled in segregated school systems with unequal access to educational resources. Segregation has proven resilient—difficult to change and complicated to understand. Policymakers and researchers often seek to identify individual schools that are “segregated” based on their racial composition, but as schools have grown more diverse, thinking of individual schools as segregated based on their racial composition can be misleading without information about the pool of students they could potentially enroll. More broadly, segregation can be considered a measure of how students are distributed across schools within school systems (e.g., districts or cities) that draw from the same students. Considering segregation as a characteristic of school systems, however, offers little guidance to policymakers interested in reducing segregation by focusing on the schools that exacerbate school system segregation. To fill this gap, we have developed a method for measuring an individual school’s contribution to system-level racial segregation. Our Segregation Contribution Index is based on a simple thought experiment that measures what would happen to school system segregation if a school’s actual racial composition were replaced with a hypothetical “perfectly integrated” composition corresponding to the entire school system. This index divides the total school segregation of each school system in the country into portions attributable to each school in the system. Individual schools typically contribute only a small percentage to systemwide segregation, but the index shows policymakers which schools make especially large contributions. Additionally, residential segregation is one of the key constraints on school integration, as transporting students over long distances can be costly and unappealing. We modify our index to account for these constraints by measuring whether systemwide integration would be improved if schools more closely resembled their local neighborhoods. This measure of individual schools’ contributions to segregation thus accounts for the composition of the school, system, and neighborhood. Through this analysis, we find the following:  Most schools resemble their neighborhood in terms of racial composition, but about one-third of schools deviate by more than 10 percentage points.  In neighborhoods where black and Hispanic students are overrepresented, a school where black and Hispanic students are overrepresented relative to the neighborhood exacerbates VI E X E C U T I V E S U M M A R Y segregation. A school where black and Hispanic students are underrepresented compared with the neighborhood increases integration.  In n