School Inequality: What Do We Know?

We begin, in Section 1, by describing trends in academic performance among students from different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. Section 2 briefly examines the extent of ethnic and socioeconomic segregation across schools. Section 3, the focus of this chapter, describes ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in public school quality and, when possible, whether these disparities widened or narrowed over the 1990s.