Separate and Unequal Under One Roof: How the Legacy of Racialized Tracking Perpetuates Within-School Segregation

Abstract

In this article, we use administrative data from three cohorts of North Carolina public high school students to examine the effects of within-school segregation on the propensity of academically eligible black high school students to take advanced math courses. Our identification strategy takes advantage of cohort-to-cohort variation in the share of eleventh and twelfth grade black students enrolled in advanced math courses when a cohort first enters a school in the ninth grade. We find that a 1 point increase in the percentage of black eleventh and twelfth graders in advanced math courses increases the likelihood that an academically eligible black student will take an advanced math course before they graduate by 22 percentage points in racially diverse schools. Effects are larger for black males.

Keywords

• racial segregation
• education
• inequality
• achievement gaps