Statewide Improvements Conceal Increasing Inequalities in Pennsylvania’s Metro Areas: Socioeconomic Segregation in Pennsylvania’s Public Schools

• In Event: Roundtable Session 23
  In Roundtable Session: Inequality and the Racialization of Education

Abstract

This paper is about the concentration of poverty and students’ exposure to low-income peers. Using Pennsylvania’s 2000 and 2010 public schools data from the Common Core of Data, we investigate the degree to which students from each racial/ethnic group are exposed to low-income students, and to what extent socio-economic segregation is a result of the distribution of low-income students within districts, across districts, and across metro areas. Using exposure and decomposition methods, we find the exposure to free/reduced lunch (our measure of poverty) students increased for each racial group, poor and minority students are overexposed to poor students, and that the majority of poverty segregation occurs between districts. We discuss the viability of cross-district solutions to combat rising segregation.

Authors

• Stephen Kotok, The Pennsylvania State University

• Katherine Reed, Texas A & M University