Choosing Segregation:
Racial Imbalance in American Public Schools, 1990-2000

John R. Logan, Director
Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research
University at Albany

Research team: Jacob Stowell and Deirdre Oakley
Revised March 29, 2002

After a period in which desegregation efforts were widespread in American public schools, the average level of segregation has hardly changed in the last ten years, and in some places there is clearly a rollback of progress made before 1990. In many metropolitan regions, desegregation evident in the 1989-90 school year has given way to substantial increases of black-white segregation. In most of these, Supreme Court action in 1991 that relaxed the criteria for rescinding desegregation orders has freed school officials to pull back their previous steps to achieve racial balance. Consciously or not, Americans in these regions are increasingly making a choice for segregation.

New national data for 1999-2000 show that segregation from whites has edged upwards not only for black children, but also for Hispanic, and Asian children. At the same time, they reveal that segregation places black and Hispanic children, on average, in schools where two-thirds of students are at or near the poverty line.

Background of this study

The Mumford Center previously issued a report on the residential segregation of children based on Census 2000 (http://brownS4.dyndns.org/cen2000_s4/report.html). We found that black children are by far the most segregated minority group, though they are modestly less segregated from white children in 2000 than they were in 1990. There was no change in neighborhood segregation of Hispanic and Asian children during this time, but their increasing numbers has meant that they are now a larger share of the population in neighborhoods where they are clustered.

In the current study we analyze segregation among public elementary school children using data collected by the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) through the 1999-2000 school year. Schools in many cases are less segregated than neighborhoods, partly because they often draw from larger areas and partly because school assignments sometimes cross neighborhood lines. But there is also potential for schools to be more segregated than neighborhoods, as some families opt out of the public school system or take school attendance lines into account in deciding where to live. We ask how these factors have combined to affect disparities in the racial and ethnic composition of schools.