From Resegregation to Reintegration: Trends in the Racial/Ethnic Segregation of Metropolitan Public Schools, 1993-2009

Considerable attention has been devoted to the resegregation of public schools over the 1990s. No research to date, however, has examined change in school segregation since 2000. Using the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Common Core of Data (CCD), we examine longitudinal trends in racial/ethnic segregation in 350 U. S. metropolitan areas from 1993 to 2009. We find that worsening segregation over the 1990s has given way to a period of modest integration among all racial/ethnic groups since 1998. However, decreases in segregation were smaller in the formerly de jure segregated South and in metropolitan areas with large increases in racial/ethnic diversity. In addition, since 1998, the relative importance of segregation among non-Whites has increased, while the proportion of segregation that lies across district boundaries has stabilized.