Measuring School Segregation

Using only ordinal axioms, we characterize several multigroup school segregationindices: the Atkinson Indices for the class of school districts with a given fixed numberof ethnic groups and the Mutual Information Index for the class of all districts.Properties of other school segregation indices are also discussed. In an empirical application,we document a weakening of the effect of ethnicity on school assignmentfrom 1987/8 to 2007/8. We also show that segregation between districts within citiescurrently accounts for 33% of total segregation. Segregation between states, drivenmainly by the distinct residental patterns of Hispanics, contributes another 32%.[...]