Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

As public school districts across the country are released from their mandatory school desegregation orders, there has been increasing examination of the resegregation of public schools (Reardon, Grewal, Kalogrides and Greenberg, 2013) and increasing attention paid to the higher rates of racial segregation experienced by children (Owens, 2016). In contrast little attention has been paid to which schools are becoming more integrated and whether stable racial integration exists in public schools. It is possible that some level of stable racial integration has been achieved through these court orders or perhaps as a byproduct of American communities becoming less racially segregated (Glaeser and Vigdor, 2012).

One primary challenge faced by researchers studying ‘integration’ is that no single definition is widely accepted as an integrated school. Thus, relying on both previous literature and current demographic trends, we begin by creating a set of definitions of ‘integrated’ schools. We use constant thresholds across the United States, rather than relative thresholds within a metropolitan area as we are trying to capture the experience of attending an integrated school. Even though a school that is 2 percent black in a predominantly white metropolitan area may be ‘relatively’ integrated, it will not provide students with a meaningful experience of integration. We build on the definitions created in Ellen, Horn and O’Regan (2012) for a racially integrated neighborhood. We define an integrated school as one shared by a significant number of white students and a significant number of students in at least one minority group. We require the presence of white students, as this group remains the majority group in our society, and historically it is white households that have excluded minority groups. Given that a school shared by black, Hispanic and Asian residents is highly diverse, we classify these schools as mixed minority schools. For ease of calculation, we divide the minority population into three mutually exclusive groups: black, Hispanic and Asian/other.

We rely on the Common Core of Data (CCD) collected by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics. The common core includes information on the poverty status and racial composition of students at the school level for the school years 1994-1995, 2004-2005 and 2014-2015.

We find that a declining share of schools are non-integrated, which is driven by the decline in majority white schools, from over 50 percent of schools in 1995 to 30 percent in 2015. We find that an increasing share of schools are integrated, with 44 percent of schools meeting one of our definitions of integrated in 2015. Additionally, we find that when examining trends in integration over time, over one quarter of the schools we can follow for these twenty years remain integrated. We hope to shed light on the where these integrated schools are located and which local policies currently support stable school integration.