Tyler posted an email by Ken Hirsch on school desegregation that raises interesting questions. Two things I’d like to add:

(1) As Gary Orfield acknowledges, there has been a marked decline in the share of non-Hispanic white children as a percentage of all children in U.S. K-12 schools. The number drifts from around 60 percent for the 15 to 19 cohort to a bit over half for 0 to 5.

(2) Among African Americans, the birthrate in middle-income and affluent families has sharply declined while the birthrate among poor families has remained stable. This means that a higher proportion of African American children are poor than would have been the case had birthrates remained stable across the board. This might sound a bit silly, but it’s a useful reminder that the segregation we’re seeing in K-12 is actually not mirrored among adults. As William Frey observes, black-white segregation has decreased in 61 of the 100 biggest metropolitan areas over the last ten years.

(3) And then there is the fact that many college-educated middle-class African Americans are choosing to settle in majority-black neighborhoods. This presumably exacerbates segregation, yet it’s not clear that it’s necessarily a bad thing. There is value in extending your social network to include people from other groups, but there are other considerations, including culturally-specific amenities, that factor into our decisions about where to live and where to learn.

I don’t want to sound glib. Concentrated poverty and cultural isolation are bad things. But they are bad things regardless of dissimilarity index values across a metropolitan area or across the country, which don’t necessarily tell us what we want to know.