State of Integration in Public and Private Schools

A University of Arkansas study comparing racial diversity in public and private schools finds that public schools are slightly more integrated than their private counterparts. The researchers' findings do not support a 1998 study that found private schools to be more racially integrated than public ones and provide the most current backdrop from which to analyze the impact of school choice on concerns such as racial integration.Gary Ritter, assistant professor of education and public policy and graduate students Alison Rush and Joel Rush report their findings in the spring issue of the Georgetown Public Policy Review. They used data on kindergarten students from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study--Kindergarten, an extensive database containing information on 21,000 children in public and private kindergarten programs at 900 schools across the nation in 1998.

Although many people have debated issues surrounding the racial integration of public and private schools, very little empirical research has emerged from the debate. The researchers followed up on one of the few previous studies, released in 1998, that used information on a nationally representative sample of high school seniors to show that private schools were m ore likely than public schools to be racially integrated.

Jay Greene's 1998 study, which appeared in "Learning from School Choice," published by the Brookings Institute, looked at data from 12th grade students from the 1992 National Educational Longitudinal Study. Greene calculated a national average of minority students in the classroom to be 25.6 percent. Classrooms whose racial compositions were within 10 percentage points of the national average were defined as integrated. Greene found that37 of private school students were in integrated classrooms while only 18 percent of public school students were in racially integrated schools.

School choice proponents have cited the Greene study to bolster their arguments.

Ritter and his colleagues argue that the number of minorities has increased in recent years, so these students from the 1992 database don't reflect the demographics of today's minority population. Further, since the few school choice programs in operation affect elementary schools more than high schools, it is important to examine racial integration for younger students. The researchers found that the average kindergarten student sits in a classroom from 1998 in which more than one-third of its students are minorities--up to 37.4 percent from 25.6 percent in secondary schools in the early 90s.

The University of Arkansas study examined the percentage of public and private schools with "integrated" classrooms--classes where the racial composition reflects the demographics of the wider community. Using the same "10 percentage point" rule used by Greene, Ritter and his colleagues defined an integrated classroom as one in which the percentage of minority students was between 27 and 47 percent.They also looked at "highly segregated" classrooms, where the students were 85-95 percent white or minority.

The researchers found an advantage for public school students in terms of racial integration. Public school students were more likely to be in integrated classrooms (13.5 percent) than were private school students (9.4 percent). Further, public school students were less likely to be in highly segregated classrooms (55.7 percent) than were private school students (69.2 percent).

However, the researchers note that neither public nor private schools had more than 20 percent of kindergarten students in racially integrated classrooms.

"We found that there's not a great advantage for public or private schools" in terms of racial diversity, Ritter said. "Very few young students in U.S. schools, public or private, are attending class each day in racially integrated classrooms."

The researchers also analyzed subgroups within the study. They found, for instance, that Hispanic students and students in the western region of the United States tend to be in more racially integrated classrooms in private schools. They also found that Catholic schools are nearly equal to public schools in terms of racial integration. This distinction is important because many school choice proposals have involved Catholic schools. These findings may help clarify some of the issues brought up by people on both sides of the school choice issue.

"If nothing else, the marked difference between these results and the earlier findings of other researchers indicates that we ought to keep a close eye on the impact of choice and private schooling on racial composition, because it is likely to continue to change," the researchers wrote in their conclusion.