Story at a glance
- A more diverse population should mean younger individuals have more exposure to people of a different race or ethnicity than their own.
- However, this is not the case for some school-age children in the United States, a third of whom attend a majority single-race school.
- A new report from the Government Accountability Office highlights the lack of diversity in K-12 schools throughout the United States.
Since 2010, the U.S. population has grown increasingly diverse thanks to demographic changes and improvements in collection and processing of race and ethnicity data.
However, despite these trends, a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found K-12 schools remain divided along racial, ethnic and economic lines.
Between 2020 and 2021, around 18.5 million children — more than one-third of the country’s student population — attended a school where 75 percent or more of the student body were of a single race or ethnicity, researchers found. Of these, 14 percent attended schools where 90 percent or more of the student body was of one race or ethnicity.
Less diverse schools were more common in the Midwest and Northeast United States, compared with Southern and Western regions.
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The current report is a follow-up to a similar analysis conducted by the GAO in 2016, while the newer findings do show some progress made in this area.
District boundaries are often used to determine which schools children attend and thus can contribute to division based on race and ethnicity.
In their analysis, researchers also found “new school districts that seceded from existing districts usually had higher percentages of white and Asian students than districts they left.” These offshoots tended to be wealthier than remaining districts too.
Around 13,500 majority same-race/ethnicity schools are located within 10 miles of a predominately same-race/ethnicity school of a different race/ethnicity, authors added. “Of these schools, 90 percent have a different same-race/ethnicity pair in a different school district.”
Public schools are also partially funded by taxpayer dollars, meaning lower-income schools often have less resources than their wealthier counterparts. These factors, along with wealth disparities and differences in income and housing, all contribute to education inequities. Historic practices like redlining have also led to decadeslong disparities in community wealth and investment.
Findings in the current report are consistent across public, charter and magnet schools.
Researchers used data from the Department of Education’s Common Core of Data to assess school diversity between 2014 and 2021.
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