As Minority Population Increases In Suburbs, So Does Public School Segregation

May 14, 2001

University Park, Pa. -- As suburban schools nationwide are experiencing increasing enrollments of Blacks, Hispanics and Asian students, reflecting national population trends, there has been a concurrent rise in the levels of school segregation between White and minority students among suburban schools, a Penn State researcher says.

"Racial school segregation, long an urban phenomenon, has in recent decades appeared in the suburbs, primarily as a result of increasing residential segregation between suburban school districts," says Dr. Sean F. Reardon, assistant professor of education and sociology. "Over a quarter of suburban students are non-White, and these students are increasingly concentrated in schools and school districts with disproportionately few White students, as compared to the overall suburban student population."

Reardon and John T. Yun, doctoral student at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education, analyzed data on the racial enrollments of all public schools in U.S. suburban areas from 1987 to 1995. They measured segregation by determining the degree of unevenness in the racial compositions of suburban schools. They investigated the relationship between rates of minority population growth and rates of change in segregation between 1987 and 1995.

Their research is published in the paper, "Suburban Racial Change and Suburban School Segregation, 1987-1995," scheduled to appear in the just-released April issue of the journal, "Sociology of Education.

"Although racial school segregation is still lower among suburban schools than among urban schools, we found that suburban areas with the most rapidly growing minority student populations are, on average, experiencing relatively rapid increases in segregation levels," they note. "This is primarily due to the fact that the most rapid growth of minority student enrollments has been in suburban school districts with low or declining White student enrollments."

Reardon, also a research associate with Penn State’s Population Research Institute, and Yun investigated suburbanization and segregation patterns separately for Black, Hispanic and Asian students. Suburban segregation from Whites is highest for Black students, and lowest for Asian students. For all three groups, however, growing suburban populations are linked to increasing segregation from Whites. Roughly two-thirds of segregation from White students is due to differences in residential locations of White and minority students in suburban areas.

Because school segregation between Whites and non-Whites takes place largely between districts today, individual suburban school districts, particularly in the Midwest and Northeast where suburban school districts tend to be rather small, can do relatively little to remedy overall levels of suburban school segregation, according to Reardon. Rather, suburban school integration could be best achieved through consolidation of suburban school districts and through local, state and federal housing policies aimed at increasing racial and socioeconomic residential integration.

Another method of reducing suburban school segregation, court-mandated inter-district busing programs, has been largely prohibited since the 1974 U.S. Supreme Court's "Milliken v. Bradley" decision.

"Since the bulk of suburban school segregation is due to between-district residential differences rather than within-district differences in racial composition of schools, we don't need a rash of lawsuits to desegregate suburban schools," says the Penn State researcher. "Any court-ordered within-district desegregation remedies would be largely ineffective in the suburbs. Instead, we need to think seriously about the economic and social forces, including housing discrimination, that create and sustain the growing patterns of residential segregation in suburbia."

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Contacts:

Paul Blaum (814) 865-9481 (o) pab15@psu.edu

Vicki Fong (814) 865-9481 (o) vfong@psu.edu

EDITORS: Dr. Reardon is at (814) 865-2584 or at sfr3@psu.edu by e-mail.