Public School Segregation in Metropolitan Areas

Abstract

Empirical studies of racial patterns of enrollment in public schools in the United States have shown that the elimination of the last vestiges of de jure segregation in the late 1960s brought about a dramatic reduction in measured segregation in that South, making the schools in that region the least segregated in the nation. 1 After 1970 the principal cause of racial segregation in the nation's public schools no longer appeared to be the official policies that school districts followed to separate students by race, but rather disparities in racial composition between school districts.These disparities seemed to be most pronounced in the largest metropolitan areas, where the proportions of minority students in many central city districts exceeded 50 percent.Combined with the Supreme Court's ruling in Milliken v. Bradley (1974) preventing most desegregation plans from moving students across district boundaries, these disparities appeared to lock segregation in place in most metropolitan areas.As Orfield and Monfort (1994, p. 29) state, "The real problem of segregation was not among the students and schools within the big city district but between the city and suburban districts."Despite the acknowledged importance of racial disparities between districts in urban areas, and the focus in some studies on large urban school districts, there actually has been very little empirical analysis of school segregation using metropolitan areas as the unit of observation.2 Clotfelter--p.4Instead, previous empirical work has examined racial patterns for regions, states, or large central city districts.Because such studies relied on data sets consisting only of samples of districts, it was impossible to put together all of the districts contained in most metropolitan areas, thus making the study of metropolitan areas simply infeasible.However, the present paper utilizes a data set that includes virtually all districts, making it possible to calculate measures of racial composition and segregation for entire metropolitan areas.These calculations provide an

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