ANNALS, AAPSS, 674, November 2017 199
DOI: 10.1177/0002716217733936
School
Segregation and
Disparities in
Urban,
Suburban, and
Rural Areas
By
JOHN R. LOGAN
and
JULIA BURDICK-WILL
733936ANN The Annals of The American AcademySchool Segregation and Disparities
research-article2017
Much of the literature on racial and ethnic educational
inequality focuses on the contrast between black and
Hispanic students in urban areas and white suburban
students. This study extends the research on school seg-
regation and racial/ethnic disparities by highlighting the
importance of rural areas and regional variation.
Although schools in rural America are disproportionately
white, they nevertheless are like urban schools, and dis-
advantaged relative to suburban schools, in terms of
poverty and test performance. Native Americans are
most affected by rural school disadvantage. While they
are a small share of students nationally, Native Americans
are prominent and highly disadvantaged in rural areas,
particularly in certain parts of the country. These figures
suggest a strong case for including rural schools in the
continuing conversations about how to deal with unfair-
ness in public education.
Keywords: schools; segregation; urban-rural; disparities
Schools vary widely in characteristics that are
widely believed to be consequential for the
students who attend them, including racial/
ethnic composition, poverty concentration, and
average performance of classmates. It is well
known that these differences are patterned by
John R. Logan is a professor of sociology at Brown
University. He is coauthor, along with Harvey Molotch,
of Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place
(University of California Press 1987). His most recent
edited book, Diversity and Disparities, was published
by Russell Sage Foundation in 2015.
Julia Burdick-Will is an assistant professor in the
Department of Sociology and in the School of Education
at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of “School
Violent Crime and Academic Achievement in Chicago,”
published in Sociology of Education (2013).
NOTE: This research was partially supported by the
Population Studies and Training Center, Brown University
(R24 HD041020), and by the US2010 Project with fund-
ing from the Russell Sage Foundation.
Correspondence: john_logan@brown.edu
200 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
space (e.g., the disparities between many central city school districts and those in
the surrounding suburbs) and by the race and ethnicity of enrolled students (e.g.,
the disadvantages of schools attended by blacks and Hispanics in comparison to
whites and Asians). In this study, we describe the nature and extent of these dif-
ferences for public elementary schools across the United States in 2010–2011.
We extend existing research in two ways. First, most studies of school segregation
and educational inequality are limited to schools in metropolitan regions (note,
for example, that a recent review of school segregation [Reardon and Owens
2014] cited no study including rural schools). We pay particular attention to rural
schools, showing that rural schools have much in common with (as well as some
large differences from) schools in central cities. Second, in addition to comparing
average characteristics among urban, suburban, and rural zones, we also look
within each of them, gauging racial and ethnic segregation across schools and
disparities in the schools attended by students of different racial/ethnic back-
grounds. We find substantial inequalities in all three zones.
This is a national study. We are aware that different patterns in different parts
of the country could be obscured in the national averages. For this reason, we
repeat our analyses separately by geographic region and again in those specific
urban or rural areas where each racial/ethnic group is highly concentrated.
Despite some variations, the area-specific analyses mainly replicate the national-
level results.
Our emphasis on rural America is especially useful for highlighting disadvan-
tages that receive little attention for two racial groups that are disproportionately
found outside metropolitan areas—white and Native American children. Because
whites are mostly found in relatively advantaged urban and suburban schools and
are typically used as a point of comparison to black and Hispanic children in
those contexts, their situation in rural schools is usually overlooked. Native
Americans are rarely included in studies of metropolitan schools due to their
small numbers. They are a tiny share of students at the national level (about 1
percent as shown below) and only 3 percent of students even in rural schools. But
we find that in rural America these children are highly segregated from other
groups in the same area, and consequently they attend schools that are dispro-
portionately Native American (40 percent or more in some regions). The poverty
level of their classmates is as high as in central city schools (more than 60 per-
cent), and test score performance in schools that they attend is unusually low.
Segregation and School Disparities
American public schools remain highly segregated despite major changes in the
1970s, when court orders and new expectations eliminated de jure segregation
(Clotfelter 2004; Logan, Zhang, and Oakley 2017). A primary consequence of
segregation is the high level of inequality in educational opportunity between
white or Asian children, and black or Hispanic children (Orfield and Yun 1999;
Logan, Minca, and Adar 2012). Disparities appear as large differences in
