Segregation by Choice: Private School Attendance and Public School Inequality

Salvatore Saporito, College of William and Mary

Surprisingly little is known about the influence of private school attendance patterns on racial and economic segregation in public schools. To study this, I use the 1990 PUMS census data to identify children who attend private school and who live in census areas (PUMAs) that vary in their racial and economic composition. Results indicate that the gap in private school attendance between poorer and wealthier students becomes larger as the poverty rate across census areas increases. Similar patterns are found by race. White children are more likely to attend private school as the percent of non-white students in their census area increases. By contrast, the probability that an African American child attends private school does not fluctuate with the racial composition of the census area. Thus, public schools in neighborhoods with higher poverty rates and greater percentages of non-white children lose the highest proportion of advantaged students to private schools.