K–12 Schools in Ohio Are Separate and Unequal

Racial inequality remains stubbornly persistent in the United States. Many basic measures of the economic progress of Black Americans have not improved since the 1960s, such as the racial wealth and earnings gaps (Aliprantis et al., 2023; Bayer and Charles, 2018).¹Various initiatives have arisen in response to the persistence of racial inequality, including efforts to improve school quality, with the goal of improving educational outcomes. Schooling and the development of human capital are important contributors to individuals' labor market outcomes, which in turn influence the concept of maximum employment that forms part of the Federal Reserve's statutory mandate.

Access to high-quality K-12 schooling has long been a focus of those working for equal opportunity in the United States. Ideally, Black and white students would attend the same schools or, barring that, at least schools of comparable quality. In regard to attending separate schools, a longstanding concern has been that Black and white students would be attending schools providing unequal educational environments, and, therefore, the schools would be preparing their students unequally for higher education and the labor market. One landmark legal ruling addressed this concern: The Supreme Court ruled in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education that one could not legally separate schools by race because doing so would create inherently unequal schools.

However, despite this ruling, students at K-12 schools could, in effect, still be separated by race in the United States today because many of the country's neighborhoods are segregated by race (Rothstein, 2017). This fact is the reason that many Black leaders and civil rights groups such as the NAACP considered residential segregation to be "the crux of the whole question of segregation" in 1953 (Meyer, 2000).²As the economist Robert C. Weaver, the first secretary of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), stated in 1955, the concern was that "[r]acially defined neighborhoods" would nullify "the Supreme Court decisions outlawing segregation in schools" (Meyer, 2000).³The reason Martin Luther King Jr. spent the summer of 1966 in Chicago campaigning for open housing is that in 1965 he had received "invitations from Negro leaders in the city of Chicago to join with them in their fight for quality integrated education" (King, 1998).

Are these concerns from the 1950s and 1960s still relevant today? The answer, unfortunately, is yes. Most Black and white students continue to attend separate K-12 schools, and these separate schools provide highly unequal opportunities. Because of the scarcity of relevant data for the nation as a whole, we focus on education in the state of Ohio, conducting an analysis using data from the Ohio Department of Education's School Report Cards.⁴

We first investigate whether Black and white students are exposed to one another in their schools.⁵Figure 1 shows that Black and white students in the state of Ohio attend different schools. The y axis shows the total percent of students in Ohio who attend a school that has a given percentage of Black students. The maximum percentage of Black students per school is shown on the x axis. The solid red line shows the racial composition of schools attended by white students, and the dashed blue line shows the racial composition of schools attended by Black students.