School Segregation Index
This indicator reports the extent to which students within different race and ethnicity groups are unevenly distributed across schools when compared with the racial and ethnic composition of the local population. The index ranges from 0 to 1 with lower values representing a school composition that approximates race and ethnicity distributions in the student populations within the county, and higher values representing more segregation. Data are acquired from the 2023-2024 National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) data and are used in the 2025 County Health Rankings.
Source
Accessed via County Health Rankings.
Source Description
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) is the primary federal entity for collecting, analyzing, and reporting data related to education in the United States and other nations. It fulfills a congressional mandate to collect, collate, analyze, and report full and complete statistics on the condition of education in the United States; conduct and publish reports and specialized analyses of the meaning and significance of such statistics; assist state and local education agencies in improving their statistical systems; and review and report on education activities in foreign countries.
Citation: Documentation to the NCES Common Core of Data Public Elementary/Secondary School Universe Survey (2017).
The National Center for Education Statistics releases a dataset containing detailed information about every public school in the United States in their annual Common Core of Data (CCD) files. The information from which this data is compiled is supplied by state education agency officials. The CCD reports information about both schools and school districts, including name, address, and phone number; descriptive information about students and staff demographics; and fiscal data, including revenues and current expenditures.
For more information, please visit the Common Core of Data web page.
Methodology
School segregation data are acquired from the University of Wisconsin’s County Health Rankings (CHR). It measures how evenly representation of racial and ethnic groups in the student population are spread out across schools using Theil’s index, a segregation index. The index ranges from 0 to 1 with lower values representing a school composition that approximates race and ethnicity distributions in the student populations within the county, and higher values representing more segregation. CHR uses 2023-2024 data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) as the basis for their estimate. For more information, please review the County Health Rankings School Segregation indicator information.
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