Giving Compass' Take:

• Linda Jacobson explains how new "splinter districts" generally serve white communities, increasing school segregation in the South. 

• How segregated are the schools in your area? How can funders work to decrease school segregation?

• Learn how local governments reinforce segregation in America. 

Communities that break away from countywide districts to form their own school systems typically serve more white students than the “left-behind” districts, according to a new study examining the trend of district secession in Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee.

Focusing on East Baton Rouge in Louisiana, Shelby County in Tennessee and five counties in Alabama, the researchers write that secession is “eroding what has historically been one of the cornerstones of school desegregation in the South: the one-county, one-school-system jurisdiction.”

Appearing in AERA Open, a journal from the American Educational Research Association, the study reports that between 2000 and 2015, the percentage of school segregation for black and white students that can be attributed to district boundaries in those counties has increased from 59.9% to 70.3%. For Hispanic and white students, it has increased from 37.1% to 65.1%, they write.

In a video released along with the study, researcher Erica Frankenberg of Pennsylvania State University describes the theory of “social closure.”

“In places in which white and black groups, for example, feel like they are getting to be rather similar,” she said, “white families that have more resources may use the opportunity to draw boundaries to try to protect the relative advantage.”

In Mobile County, Alabama, for example — where the Chickasaw, Saraland and Satsuma school districts have formed since 2007 — between-district segregation has increased from 2.2% to 8.7%.

Read the full article about school segregation in the South by Linda Jacobson at Education Dive.