Kebede et al.: Diversity and Segregation in Rural Schools

Maraki Kebede, Annie Maselli (Education Policy Studies, Penn State), Kendra Taylor, and Erica Frankenberg (Education Policy Studies, Penn State) examine school segregation trends from 2000 to 2019 in Ethnoracial Diversity and Segregation in U.S. Rural School Districts, published in Rural Sociology. The authors conclude, essentially, that segregation is persisting in rural school districts despite increasing ethnoracial diversity in rural America.

The authors start with two frameworks for thinking about the issue. First, the so-called convergence hypothesis posits that different communities will begin looking more alike as ethnoracial groups become distributed more evenly across geographies. Second, social closure theory suggests that exclusionary practices can be a way for groups to both attain and maintain power. The authors combine these frameworks to hypothesize that, at the district level, rural school districts would converge as they move toward more diversity but that, at the school level, within-district segregation would persist.

The authors then relied on data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to classify more than 5,000 school districts utilizing a majority rule typology. The authors found all rural district types are becoming more diverse and therefore becoming more structurally alike, primarily due to declines in White enrollment and increasing Hispanic enrollment. Ethnoracial Diversity and Segregation found that district types with higher shares of minoritized students lost twice the amount of White enrollment, which the authors assert suggests that White families are hoarding opportunity and concentrating their relative wealth in districts away from minoritized groups. However, the authors also found divergent demographics and trends among different districts, highlighting the need for policy and research to consider the variation in rural districts rather than assuming uniformity across rural districts.

The article illustrates how school segregation and opportunity hoarding can persist despite growth in districts’ ethnoracial diversity and emphasizes the importance of addressing segregation as diversity grows in order to prevent further harm to rural communities and to ensure educational opportunities for the growing numbers of minority rural students.

For further information, the authors have also posted a research brief summarizing this research here.