Despite public schools being open to students across income levels, a new University of California, Irvine-led study finds that economic integration is limited, particularly for students at the top of the income distribution. The research, published in PNAS, provides the most comprehensive picture of income segregation within schools that exists for students at the top of the income distribution, says lead author Michelle Spiegel, ’23 UC Irvine Ph.D. and current postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University.

“Although public schools have the potential to expose students to a diverse set of peers, our study documents the substantial income segregation that exists in schools,” says Spiegel. “Scholars are often concerned with the concentration of economic disadvantage, but our results draw attention to the isolation of students from high income families, which is much more pronounced.”

UC Irvine coauthors include Andrew Penner, professor of sociology, Paul Hanselman, associate professor of sociology, and Emily Penner, associate professor of education. Additional coauthors include Leah Clark, economist at the U.S. Census Bureau; Thurston Domina, Robert Wendell Eaves Sr. Distinguished Professor in Educational Leadership at UNC Chapel Hill; and Paul Yoo, ’24 UC Irvine Ph.D. and current postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University.

Collaborative work for this study was conducted through the Center for Administrative Data Analysis in the UCI School of Social Sciences which has a longstanding partnership with the Oregon Department of Education. Researchers studied the population of students enrolled in the state’s public schools in 2016-17 using four key pieces of information about each student: school enrollment, classroom enrollment, grade, and family income percentile.

“By looking at the peers that students encounter in their classes – and not just all of the other students at the same school – we are able to get novel insights in to how income-based segregation works,” notes Hanselman. “One of the surprising findings is that the majority of income-based segregation happens at the school level. To be sure, we see evidence of sorting into different classrooms within schools, especially in middle and high school, but this was less pronounced than we expected.”

Using statistical analysis, they found students from families with incomes in the top 1% have the same proportion of peers - 32 percent - in the top 10 income percentiles as they do in the bottom 58 percentiles. Although students from low-income families were more likely to be enrolled in schools with other students from low-income families, the concentration of low-income students was much less pronounced than the concentration of top-income students. Students from middle-income families (those in the 40th through 80th percentiles) had the most even distribution of peers.

“As a society we celebrate schools as a place where children learn to become part of society,” says Andrew Penner. “But when students from the top one percentile of family income have as many peers from the top decile as they do from the bottom six deciles, high-income students are deprived of opportunities to learning with, and from, students who are not similarly high-income.”

While data for this research was limited to a single state, Oregon's income, racial and school enrollment distribution can provide insights into peer income exposure for public school students nationwide, says Emily Penner.

"Our partnership with Oregon sheds light on patterns that are playing out across the country,” she says. “We are very excited to work with our partners in Oregon to better understand how to measure poverty in schools, and how these patterns shape students’ understandings of the world. We look forward to continuing to work with them on future work to understand how students’ peer exposures are affected by those who opt out of public schools altogether."

Funding for this work was provided by the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development under grant R01HH094007.

-Heather Ashbach, UCI Social Sciences
-photo courtesy of iStock/Pornpak Khunatorn