U.S. schools highly segregated, despite more diversity

Schools remain highly segregated by race, ethnicity and socioeconomics, a new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office finds.

According to the report, more than a third of students attended a school with a population that was predominantly of the same race or ethnicity, during the 2020-21 school year.

“You have large portions of minority children not only attending essentially segregated schools, but schools that have less resources available to them,” Jackie Nowicki, the director of K-12 education at the GAO and lead author of the report, told NPR.

In addition to neighborhood segregation, the report cites “district secession,” where some schools break away from an existing district to form a new district, as one cause of school segregation.