To a very large extent, school segregation is a mechanical result of residential segregation. America’s public schools, by and large, look like America’s neighborhoods. That’s the broad conclusion of our new report “Balancing Act: Schools, Neighborhoods, and Racial Imbalance.”

When we compare Long Island schools to neighborhoods within districts, they look racially balanced. The schools in Floral Park-Bellrose Union Free School District, NY, for example, have an overall racial imbalance score of around -1 percent for whites and just under 1 percent for blacks.

But if we ignore the district boundaries and define our neighborhoods purely on the basis of the two-mile radius, the results are dramatically different: a racial imbalance score of +42 percent for whites and -23 percent for blacks.

The bottom line here is that while school integration has to be seen in the context of neighborhood integration, educational policy matters too – not least in the size, shape, and composition of our school districts.

Read the full article on segregated schools by Richard V. Reeves, Nathan Joo, and Grover J. Whitehurst at Brookings