In the interactive map, you can visualize school segregation between racial/ethnic and economic groups in states, counties, metropolitan areas, and school districts from 1991 to 2022 (years represent the fall of the school year; e.g., 1991 refers to the 1991-1992 school year).
Segregation estimates on The Segregation Explorer map, represent the two-group normalized exposure index, which measures the difference between two groups’ exposure to one of the groups. For example, the White-Hispanic normalized exposure index compares the proportions of White (or Hispanic, equivalently) students in the average White and Hispanic students’ schools. A White-Hispanic normalized exposure value of 0.5 would indicate that the proportion of White students in the average White student’s school is 50 percentage points higher than in the average Hispanic student’s school. (The two-group normalized exposure measure ignores the presence of other groups aside from the racial dyad of interest.) The normalized exposure index ranges from 0 to 1. A value of 0 implies no segregation — the two groups have equal exposure to one group (all schools have identical proportions of the two groups). A value of 1 implies complete segregation— the two groups have no exposure to one another (no Hispanic student attends a school with any White students, and vice versa).
On the map, US states are marked with a shade of green, depending on the scale of segregation. This tool is filled with various types of data, and their display can be freely modified, depending on the groups we want to compare. For example, according to data for 2022, the states with the highest segregation rates between black and white population were New York and Michigan, while the lowest segregation occurred in Wyoming and Montana.
The map can also include data on the percentage of a given group in the state’s total population, or the percentage of e.g. Latinos in a given school. For example, the highest percentages of black students in schools are found in Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia. Students of Asian descent have an interesting distribution and are not clustered in a specific state or county, but live primarily in large urban centers such as New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and the Los Angeles metropolitan area.
The presented visualization confirms that the issue of racial segregation and the fight against it should receive special attention in the United States, because the presented data clearly show that this problem is still alive and in some states is taking on disturbing levels.
