The Contributions of School Desegregation to Housing Integration: Case Studies in Two Large Urban Areas

This article examines a half century of housing and school segregation data in two large California school districts. Based on a review of both the methods and the substantive data available tracking the relationship between school and housing integration, the study reported here shows that very substantial school-level integration in these two districts was followed by equally substantial housing desegregation. The study relies on Theil’s H as the most appropriate measure of social segregation because this measure can be used to study the integration of multiple groups and can be decomposed to document where the most severe isolation of particular subgroups is occurring.