School Segregation in the Era of Color-Blind Jurisprudence and School Choice

Abstract

The decades-long resistance to federally imposed school desegregation entered a new phase at the turn of the new century. At that time, federal courts stopped pushing racial balance as a remedy for past segregation and adopted in its place a color-blind approach to evaluating school district assignment plans. Using data that span 1998 to 2016 from North Carolina, one of the first states to come under this color-blind dictum, we examine the ways in which households and policymakers took actions that had the effect of reducing the amount of interracial contact in K-12 schools within counties. We divide these reductions in interracial contact into portions due to the private school and charter school sectors, the existence of multiple school districts, and racial disparities between schools within districts and sectors. For most counties, the last of these proves to be the biggest, though in some counties private schools, charter schools, or multiple districts played a deciding role. In addition, we decompose segregation in the state's 13 metropolitan areas, finding that more than half can be attributed to racial disparities inside school districts. We also measure segregation by economic status, finding that it, like racial segregation, increased in the largest urban counties, but elsewhere changed little over the period.

The Past, Present, and Future of Brown’s Mandate: A View from North Carolina

“…In the 1997/98 school year, approximately 1.3 million youth attended school in North Carolina. By the 2015/16 school year, the size of the student population grew to over 1.6 million youth (Clotfelter et al, 2019). Table 1 captures this growth and shifts in the distribution of NC K-12 students by race, ethnicity, and SES between 1997 (the end of the period we call the past) through 2016 (during the present era).…”

“… Source. National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core Data; calculations by Clotfelter et al (2019). Note. Percentages for the county groups are weighted averages of county statistics where weights are county enrollments.…”

“… Source. National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core Data; calculations by Clotfelter et al (2019).…”

“…The first measure, the White/non-White segregation index (a) (Coleman et al, 1975), and the second measure, the dissimilarity index (b), indicate the imbalance between White and non-White students. The third measure (c) indicates economic segregation between students qualified for free lunch with those who are not qualified for it in North Carolina’s public and private schools (see Clotfelter et al, 2019 for calculations). All measures range from 0, indicating no segregation, to 1.0 signifying complete segregation.…”

“…Segregation indices for the state and county groups are weighted averages of county statistics where weights are county enrollments.*Smaller numbers indicate less segregation.**Comparable data on free lunch eligibility in 2015/16 not available. Calculations by Clotfelter et al (2019).…”