The Condition of Education: Economic and Racial Segregation

The National Center for Education Statistics holds an annual Condition of Education event that's sort of like a State of the Union speech, only without politics, fanfare, or clapping, and with graphs and a sole focus on education. Other than the annual "special analysis" section (this year's is on International Assessments and will come out in the summer), all the information is culled from other surveys and products that are available elsewhere. This might sound boring, but it's a nice time to think about larger trends in education nationwide and get a physical copy of the compendium of data.

Over the next few days I'll highlight some of the charts and tables I found most interesting. The one at left looks at the percentage of students, by race, who attend a high-poverty school, defined as a school where 75 percent of the students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. Nationwide, about a third of black and Hispanic children attend a high-poverty school, while only four percent of white children and 13 percent of Asian/ Pacific Islanders do. By contrast, only four percent of black and six percent of Hispanic children attend low-poverty schools, defined as schools with ten percent or less of students eligible for free and reduced-price lunch.

These numbers are in part a reflection of growing segregation in our nation's schools. Since 1990, the percentage of students attending a school with a minority population comprising at least 75 percent of the student body has risen from 16 to 24. A third of all black and Hispanic students attend such schools. 62 percent of whites attend a school where the student body is more than 75 percent white.

These conditions will not likely be addressed through school assignment policies. The Supreme Court has ruled that even non-binding race windows are unconstitutional in school assignment plans. Efforts to integrate by economic factors face their own complications, not least of which is the flight of effective teachers out of low-income, high-minority schools.

Solutions must do one of two things. Either they must attempt to address large-scale housing and location decisions that are the basis for school segregation in the first place, or they must ignore the problem entirely and address the symptoms, rather than the problem itself, head on. The former would require localities to emphasize mixed-use neighborhoods and other zoning tools to address de facto segregation. The latter would suggest focusing more resources and attention on these schools, such as providing incentives for effective teachers to work in them. Without such efforts, schools will be powerless to counter prevailing societal living patterns.