Racial Segregation and the Private/Public School Choice

ethnic and racial patterns of private school attendance. I find that a high level of racial sorting occurs between the private and public school systems. At both the 8th and 10th grade levels, blacks and Hispanics are substantially less likely to attend private schools than are whites. I also find evidence that racial sorting between the private and public school systems is partly due to preferences over the racial composition of schools. In particular, I find that white and Hispanic students enroll in private schools in response to large concentrations of black students, although the underlying causes are unknown. I also examine whether ethnic and racial income disparities contribute to the large differences in private school attendance rates. I find that lower levels of income among black and Hispanic families contribute substantially to the underrepresentation of these two groups in the private school system. My estimates indicate that racial disparities in income levels explain 34.9 to 56.7 percent of the white/black gap in the private school attendance rate and 49.7 to 57.5 percent of the white/Hispanic gap in the private school rate. Finally, I find that whites attend private schools that are less integrated than public schools, and blacks and Hispanics attend private schools that are slightly more integrated than public schools. These findings can be interpreted as providing both evidence suggesting that vouchers will lead t