Segregation in Pittsburgh’s schools:
How inequities persist

Segregation has been illegal in Pennsylvania’s schools since 1881. However, segregated schools have been part of life for Pittsburgh’s children since the inception of public education. In 1968 the district was ordered to desegregate by the Pennsylvania Human Rights Commission. Since then, a variety of attempts to ameliorate segregation—bussing, open enrollment, magnet schools, building larger integrated high schools—have not adequately addressed the issue. In 2020-21, approximately 22% of Black students attended public schools (district and charter) with student populations that were 90% Black or Brown.

The link between race and poverty in our region, coupled with school segregation, means that Black students are more likely than White students to attend PPS schools with high concentrations of children in poverty. The graph below groups schools by levels of family poverty, from the lowest range (20-29%) to the highest range (90-100%). Each bar represents the students, by their race/ ethnicity, who attend the schools that fall into each of those ranges.

Looking more closely at the data we find:

• The 3 schools where the percentage of economically disadvantaged students fell between 20-29% were Montessori PreK-5, Colfax K-8, and CAPA 6-12. Overall those schools served 1,127 White students, 433 Black students, 179 Multi-ethnic students, 144 Asian students, and 45 Hispanic students.

• The 5 schools in the 90-99% range were Faison K-5, Lincoln PreK-5, Miller PreK-5, Weil PreK-5, and King PreK-8. Overall, there were 21 White students, 1,236 Black students, 85 Multi-ethnic students, and a few Hispanic and Asian students.

Why does this matter?

Research on segregation and its impacts, funded by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, has demonstrated a variety of ways in which persistent segregation harms students and communities. “In the decades following the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown, economic and other social scientific research substantiated the decision’s key finding that separate schools are inherently unequal—in terms of school resources, learning opportunities, curricular quality, stereotypes, access to social networks, and academic performance.”

Another recent study found that “the association between racial segregation and achievement gaps appears to operate entirely through racial economic segregation.” (Reardon, Weathers, Fahle, Jang, & Kalogrides, 2021) Said another way, segregation matters because it concentrates Black and Hispanic students in high-poverty schools, not because of the racial composition of their schools. This implies that segregation continues to create unequal educational opportunities, including access to rigorous courses and curricula, higher concentrations of novice or chronically absent teachers, and insufficient resources to meet the needs of students who come from neighborhoods with lower access to high quality early childhood education. (Reardon, Weathers, Fahle, Jang, & Kalogrides, 2021)

Conversely, desegregation produces large improvements in academic outcomes for economically and racially marginalized students. One study finds that Black students who attended desegregated schools from K-12 stayed in high school for one additional year and were 30% more likely to graduate than their peers in segregated schools. (Johnson, Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works, 2019)

What’s causing our schools to be segregated?

A recent study by the Urban Institute found school segregation is driven by school choice, residential housing sorting, and school policies that perpetuate racial and ethnic segregation through attendance boundary lines. Said another way, if your neighborhoods are segregated and the school board draws lines that match the neighborhoods, then schools will be more segregated.

By the time students get to high school, we see stark differences in who’s enrolling in what type of school. In Pittsburgh, the vast majority of Black and Brown PPS students attend neighborhood high schools (many of which have partial magnet programs). A majority of White students attend selective magnet schools (CAPA, Obama 6-12, and Sci-Tech 6-12) and private schools. Approximately 70% of charter 6-12 and 9-12 school enrollment is made up of Black and Brown students.

As the school board looks at how it can address critical issues of equity in the coming months, it will be important to have a conversation, grounded in the numbers, about how the current system of segregation is impacting student achievement. You can take action by sharing this information with your neighbors, community organizations, and school board members, and demand that we create more racially and economically integrated schools.