Is school segregation good or bad?

Abstract

It has been well documented that segregation across schools — denying access to resources, inferior educational production functions, and so on — exacerbates racial differences in achievement. Using an individual measure of social connections within schools, we have shown that this form of segregation — Asian kids sitting together in the cafeteria — has a substantively unimportant relationship with academic achievement or social behavior in school or later in life. There are important caveats to our analysis: (a) our estimates of the relationship between within - school segregation and outcomes are not causal; and (b) friendships may not be the only relevant cross-race social interaction that occurs within a school.