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The gap in percent minority students in schools is a measure of school racial segregation. We calculate the Black-White, Hispanic-White, Native American-White, and Asian-White gaps in percent minority students in schools as (1) the percent of minority students in the average Black, Hispanic, Native American, or Asian students' school minus (2) the percent of minority students in the average White student’s school within a given district, county, or state. When this gap is zero, students in both the racial/ethnic groups attend the same schools or have equal proportions of minority students on average (no racial segregation). A positive gap indicates that there are more minority students in the average Black, Hispanic, Native American, or Asian student’s school compared with the average White student’s school. A negative gap indicates the opposite.

For these calculations, we define the percent of minority students as the percent of students in a school who are Black, Hispanic, or Native American. On average, these racial/ethnic groups have had limited educational opportunities due to low socioeconomic resources, historical societal discrimination, and the structure of American schooling; these limited educational opportunities have led to low average achievement on standardized tests. We do not include Asian students in the definition of this measure because Asian students tend to have higher socioeconomic status than White and other racial/ethnic groups; that is, Asian families are not, on average, socioeconomically disadvantaged relative to White families in the U.S.

There are multiple limitations to this definition of minority. First, we recognize that by grouping Black, Hispanic, and Native American students, we are not able to observe differences in average educational experiences of students belonging to the different racial/ethnic groups. Second, the exclusion of Asian students from this measure based on their average performance does not account for the diversity of the Asian subpopulations. Moreover, it is important to acknowledge that Asian families have been discriminated against socially and economically within the U.S., and this discrimination likely affects their educational experiences.

For SEDA, we report measures of differences in minority composition because this has long been the conventional way of thinking about segregation. However, our data shows that this measure is not predictive of unequal opportunity once we take into account differential school poverty composition.