Segregation

Economic Segregation In New York City Schools

Although student segregation by race and ethnicity is well documented in U.S. public schools, the body of evidence on the related outcome of economic school segregation (e.g., by income) is considerably smaller (Reardon and Owens 2014).

In general, economic segregation of students is increasing nationally over the past few decades, both between districts and between schools (Owens et al. 2014). It is inevitable that these aggregate trends vary widely by state, metropolitan area, and district. We were curious as to the situation in New York City, the nation’s largest district, but were unable to find any NYC-specific results, particularly results that included different types of segregation measures.

We therefore decided to take a quick look ourselves, using data from the NYC Department of Education. The very brief analysis below uses eligibility for subsidized lunch (free and reduced-price lunch, or FRL) as a (very) rough income proxy, and segregation is measured between district schools only (charters are not included) from 2002 to 2015. In the graph below, we characterize within-district, between-school segregation using two different and very common approaches, exposure and dissimilarity.

Are U.S. Schools Resegregating?

Last week, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report, part of which presented an analysis of access to educational opportunities among the nation’s increasingly low income and minority public school student population. The results, most generally, suggest that the proportion of the nation's schools with high percentages of lower income (i.e., subsidized lunch eligible) and Black and Hispanic students increased between 2000 and 2013.

The GAO also reports that these schools, compared to those serving fewer lower income and minority students, tend to offer fewer math, science, and college prep courses, and also to suspend, expel, and hold back ninth graders at higher rates.

These are, of course, important and useful findings. Yet the vast majority of the news coverage of the report focused on the interpretation of these results as showing that U.S. schools are “resegregating.” That is, the news stories portrayed the finding that a larger proportion of schools serve more than 75 percent Black and Hispanic students as evidence that schools became increasingly segregated between the 2000-01 and 2013-14 school years. This is an incomplete, somewhat misleading interpretation of the GAO findings. In order to understand why, it is helpful to discuss briefly how segregation is measured.

New Research Brief: Teacher Segregation In Los Angeles And New York City

The current attention being given to the state of teacher diversity, including ASI’s recent report on the subject, is based on the idea that teacher diversity is a resource that profits everyone, and that policymakers and administrators should try to increase this resource. We agree.

There is already a fair amount of research to indicate the significance and potential implications of teacher diversity (e.g., Dee 2004; Gershenson et al., 2015; Mueller et al. 1999). It’s important to bear in mind, however, that the benefits of diversity, like those of any resource, are dependent not just on how much is available, but also how it is distributed across schools and districts.

Unfortunately, research on the distribution of teacher diversity or teacher segregation has, thus far, been virtually non-existent. A new ASI research brief begins to help fill this void. The brief, written with my colleagues Matt Di Carlo and Esther Quintero, presents a descriptive analysis of teacher segregation within the two largest school districts in the nation – Los Angeles and New York City. We find that teachers in these two districts, while quite diverse overall, relative to the U.S. teacher workforce as a whole, are rather segregated across schools by race and ethnicity, according to multiple different measures of segregation. In other words, teachers tend to work in schools with disproportionate numbers of colleagues of their own race and/or ethnicity.

Changing The Narrative: Leveraging Education Policy To Address Segregation

Our guest authors today are Jennifer Jellison Holme, Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and Kara S. Finnigan, Associate Professor at the University of Rochester. Holme and Finnigan have published several articles and briefs on the issue of school integration, focusing on regional policy solutions to address segregation and inequality, and the link between segregation and low-performing schools. Recent publications include articles in Teachers College Record and Educational Law and Policy Review as well as a research brief for the National Coalition on School Diversity. This is the second in a series on this topic.

In our first post on this topic, we likened the education policy approach to low-performing schools to what happens when you ignore a decaying tooth: when you treat the symptoms (e.g., low achievement, high dropout rates) without addressing the root causes (e.g., racial and economic segregation), the underlying problem not only will persist, but is likely to worsen. In that post, we used demographic maps to show what this looked like in Milwaukee, illustrating how the approaches pursued by policymakers over several decades do not seem to have significantly improved achievement for students across the system, while patterns economic and racial segregation have worsened.

In this blog post, we outline a set of strategies based on our research that seek to address these issues through specific education policy leverage points: the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) and two federal grants programs (Stronger Together and the Magnet School Assistance Program).

The Narrative Of School Failure And Why We Must Pay Attention To Segregation In Educational Policy

Our guest authors today are Kara S. Finnigan, Associate Professor at the Warner School of Education of the University of Rochester, and Jennifer Jellison Holme, Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.  Finnigan and Holme have published several articles and briefs on the issue of school integration including articles in press in Teachers College Record and Educational Law and Policy Review as well as a research brief for the National Coalition on School Diversity. This is the first of a two-part blog series on this topic.

Imagine that you wake up one morning with a dull pain in your tooth. You take ibuprofen, apply an ice pack, and try to continue as if things are normal.  But as the pain continues to grow over the next few days, you realize that deep down there is a problem – and you are reminded of this every so often when you bite down and feel a shooting pain.  Eventually, you can’t take it any longer and get an x-ray at the dentist’s office, only to find out that what was originally a small problem has spread throughout the whole tooth and you need a root canal.  Now you wish you hadn’t waited so long.

Why are we talking about a root canal in a blog post about education? As we thought about how to convey the way we see the situation with low-performing schools, this analogy seemed to capture our point. Most of us can relate to what happens when we overlook a problem with our teeth, and yet we don’t pay attention to what can happen when we overlook the underlying problems that affect educational systems.

In this blog post, we argue that school segregation by race and poverty is one of the underlying causes of school failure, and that it has been largely overlooked in federal and state educational policy in recent decades.

The Persistence Of School And Residential Segregation

School segregation is a frequent topic of discussion in U.S. education policy debates, and rightfully so (Orfield et al. 2014). The segregation of schools by race, ethnicity and income both reflects and perpetuates inequitable opportunities in the U.S. (e.g., Reardon and Bischoff 2011a; Kaufman and Rosenbaum 1992).

Needless to say, school segregation, within and between districts, is primarily a function of residential segregation – the spatial isolation of individuals and families by characteristics such as race, ethnicity, income, language, education, etc. There are several different ways to measure segregation, since it can be gauged by different traits (e.g., income, ethnicity), and at different levels – e.g., state, county, city, neighborhood, etc. The choices of variables can have a substantial impact on the conclusions one draws about segregation's levels and trends (Reardon and Owens 2014). One generalization, though, is in order: In the U.S., we have tended to gravitate toward “our own kind,” whether in terms of income or race and ethnicity. This disquieting reality is neither accidental nor mostly the result of individual preferences. In addition to the obvious historical causes (e.g., Jim Crow), segregation arises and is perpetuated by a complex mix of (often institutionalized) factors, such as the spatial patterning of housing costs, density zoning, “steering,” “redlining,” overt discrimination, etc. (e.g., Ondrich et al. 2002). And, finally, there is the stark fact that the nation's poor have very few choices in terms of housing and neighborhood, and many of those choices they do have are bad ones.

That said, it bears keeping in mind that the majority of families and individuals in America do indeed have the means to make meaningful choices about where and how they live, and even those who desire to live in an integrated neighborhood also weigh many other, meaningful factors – such as housing costs, convenience to stores and transportation, crime rates, schooling options, and so on. There is some evidence of progress in residential (e.g., Ellen et al. 2012) and school integration (e.g., Stroub and Richards 2013) by race and ethnicity, but increasing segregation by income (e.g., Reardon and Bischoff 2011b) Nevertheless, on the whole, integration tends to be unstable, while segregation tends to be more persistent.