School District Lines Stratify Educational Opportunity by Race and Poverty

School segregation has serious consequences for educational opportunity and success. Across the nation, school segregation by race and poverty is deepening and varies by state. Using data from the National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core of Data, this study explores the relationship between fragmentation-the degree to which metropolitan areas are split into many separate school districts-and segregation. Three measures of segregation-exposure, concentration, and evenness-are employed to analyze state-and metropolitan-level data between 1989 and 2010 in four states with different school district structures. Findings in this exploratory study indicate that states and metropolitan areas with more fragmented district structures are associated with higher levels of segregation. In comparison with the less fragmented states of North Carolina and Virginia, in the highly fragmented states of New York and New Jersey, the typical black and Latino student are exposed to smaller shares of white students, the typical white student is more isolated with other white peers, there are greater disparities in exposure to low-income students by race, the share of non-white segregated schools is substantially larger, and levels of multiracial unevenness are higher. (These states were selected from a set of in-depth state studies by the Civil Rights Project of the states from Maine to North Carolina; comparable data are not available for many other states.) Highly fragmented states and metropolitan areas with numerous small school districts cannot confront segregation by exclusively focusing their efforts within districts; in these areas, segregation is fundamentally occurring among districts rather than within districts. Instead, highly fragmented areas could use regional strategies, such as interdistrict transfer programs, regional magnet schools, and district consolidation, to make progress in desegregating their schools across school district lines.